14 DAY TRIAL // Among server builders and data center users, there is a concept that makes a lot of waves these days at which may cut energy and hardware costs dramatically, while offering a high level of performance and ease of deployment and use. This 'wonder' concept is virtualization and while it can bring a lot of good things to the computer industry, it still has no definitive standard in order to make it simpler to implement or deploy. Because of that state of things, a group of six major server builders alongside virtualization vendors plans to develop and reveal a new virtualization standard in order to help clients automate the installation and deployment of virtual machines.
The proposed standard, called Open Virtual Machine Format, OVF for short, is going to provide all the necessary information and metadata required by different types of virtual machines, both from the software and from the hardware point of view like memory, storage, networking and operating systems requirements. A special chapter in the new standard will also include a list of "out of the ordinary" requirements for some virtual machines like extended hardware instruction sets or increased need of floating point or integer calculations. The OVF standard also includes a series of mandatory checks which should determine the state of the virtual machine, both in the software and the hardware departments, allowing customers and manufacturers to easily troubleshoot all deficiencies. Among the companies that developed this new virtual machine standard and now are promoting it there are major hardware and software players like Dell, Microsoft, HP, IBM, VMWare and XenSource.
The first draft of the Open Virtual Machine Format standard was already submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF for short) and the version 1.0 of the standard is expected to come in a few months. On the software side, the companies that develop virtual machines and specific applications for them may use the OVF standard in order to include licensing information, but the technology to reinforce the acceptance of such licenses is not yet implemented. In order to ease the deployment of multiple virtual machines on a single host computer system, the OVF standard defines a set of metadata which can be used for the creation of several application stacks and as the file is deployed, the virtual machine monitor takes care of the creation of the included virtual machines, without the users' supervision.
"Being able to encapsulate images to load or distribute virtual machines in a standard way is becoming really important," Winston Bumpus, president for the DMTF and director of standards architecture for Dell told vnunet.com. "This represents a paradigm shift in how virtual machines are deployed." The main idea behind this standard is to help the deployment of the virtual machine and to spare users from manually assigning storage, memory and a number of processor cores to each machine.