Usually I`m all in favour of Open Standards that are supported by different parties, and the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) pretty much matches these requirements.
The last Virtualbox has support for it, Simon is telling about it being part of the new XenConvert v2 Tech Preview .
However, Reuven wonders why it hasn’t gained widespread adoption yet.
Here’s my take, .. I`m not in favour of a standard as OVF that provides an easy way to transfer packaged virtual machine instance between different platforms.
Why ? Because I don’t think transferring full images of Virtual machines around is a good idea, not on 1 platform, not on different platforms.
And I`m not the only one with that opinion.
A Virtual Machine image is the perfect vehicle for malware in your network … some prepares an image for you , you run it on your network, and you set loose the devil, who knows it does a networkscan in the background and sends the info
OVF is a good breeding area for VM Image Sprawl,the effect you get when the number of images you have grows beyond what you can easily maintain, and this time it can grow beyond the people only using proprietary software , where as Image Sprawl used to be a disease mostly diagnosed within the VMWare usergroups and sysdamins with no clue on large scale deployments OVF
Sure OVF will assist smooth migration between different platforms so vendors want to keep it as far away from their users as possible, but people that already have a platform agnostic deployment framework in place don’t really need to worry about deploying on different platforms.