Industry players working on standard for VMs

Major players in the virtualization industry including Microsoft, Xen, and VMware, are working on a new format that will ensure compatibility between VMs.

This is an important development - if it comes about, it will herald even further mainstream acceptance of Virtualization as ‘the norm’ in enterprise computing.

(Via Ars Technica.)

The issue of incompatible virtual machine formats has the attention of the major players in the virtualization industry, so three of the biggest are teaming up with some hardware makers in hopes of developing a single format for virtual machines. Under the aegis of the Distributed Management Task Force, Microsoft, VMware, XenSource, Dell, HP, and IBM have come up with a draft specification.

Currently, applications such as Virtual PC, VMware Workstation, and XenExpress all use different file formats to maintain and save the state of their respective VMs. That can cause problems for companies that find themselves needing to migrate VMs from one application to another.

The format proposed by the six companies is called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). According to the DMTF, OVF combines a standards-based XML wrapper with existing packaging tools. The result is a portable package that contains everything a VM application will need to run it.

Original Article… by Eric Bangeman.