Citrix and Microsoft to embrace the OVF standard

July 15, 2008

Almost one year ago several virtualization vendors and key OEMs agreed to work the Distributed Management Task force (DMTF on a standard format to define virtual machines. the list of companies involved at the time included Dll, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XaeSource.

In September 2007, the DMTF was already announcing the first draft of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) and in the following months a lot happened:

• VMware included support for the OVF its VI 3.5
• Vmware hired the DMFT President, Winston Bumpus, as Dircetor of Standards Architecture (and note that Bumpus both roles at the same time)
• The list of vendors working to support OVF grew and incuded companies like Enomalism and ManageIQ

At the Burton Group's Catalyst 08 conference, Bumpus revealed that OVF may be ready by the end of this month and linked to the current draft.

Xensource was acquired by Citrix but never formalized the commitment to adopt the standard unil today: the company just announced the project codename Kensho to include OVF support into XenServer.

The press announcement also unveil the upcoming support of Microsoft Hyper-V for thenew standard. So far Microsoft never released any specific statement about its new hypervisor and OVF.

A technical preview of the Citrix implementation of OVF is expected by the Q3 2008.