The need for openness led major players in the virtualization market to jointly create a proposed standard, the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). Members of the team were XenSource, which is owned by Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, HP, IBM and Dell.
The OVF was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), which develops management standards and promotes interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments. The DMTF accepted the proposed standard in September.
The OVF will package all VMs with an XML wrapper that will let them run on any virtualization platform. It will also incorporate a security check to ensure that the VM has not been tampered with; metadata about what hardware or hypervisor the VM can run on; and a license check. The DMTF said the OVF will be rolled out this year.
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