Innovative Technology Weblog

Hi,

I’m at Vmworld 2008 Europe (Cannes) right now. Virtualisation is hot and you can tell by the enormous amount of people that came to Cannes. A lot of interesting new product and enhancements have been release here today but there is one thing I want to mention here.

The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). At this point it is still in beta (0.9) but a 1.0 version is coming out very shortly. It’s a new way you on how to offer your virtual appliances and supported by Vmware, Citrix (Xenserver) and Microsoft Hyper-V. You can create your virtual appliance in any of these environments and package it as an OVF package. The virtual appliance can even exist out of multiple virtual machine.

This OVF package can be imported on to any of these hypervisors (that’s the open part of it) and it automatically build the right virtual machine(s) with the correct virtual components (Nic’s, CPU, memory etc). It also builds the correct virtual disk format, VMDK, VHD or even RDM or NTFS.

Read more about this new portable virtual machine format here: http://www.vmware.com/go/ovf

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.