Open Virtualization Format (OVF) – What it is, What are the Types

Open Virtualization Format was developed by the Distributed Management Task Force is a packaging standard deployment of virtual appliances.

There are many Standard Reference Articles on Open Virtualization Format (OVF) are Written and Distributed by various research scholars and can be searched from Google Scholar. This is just a summary about Open Virtualization Format (OVF) based on the definition and Features mentioned by Distributed Management Task Force Inc. and other Standard references. Obviously, it is beyond the capacity of this website to go in to the technical details of Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

What is Open Virtualization Format (OVF) ?

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is an organization who has various standards for IT Management SMBIOS, WBEM, DMI, and OVF others. DMTF has released Open Virtualization Format (OVF) in September 2008, V1.0.0 as a Preliminary Standard. The current is V1.1.0. ANSI has declared the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.1.0 as ANSI standard (August 31, 2010).

Both Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) are the two presentations of the standard. The Open Virtualization Format consists of multiple files, while the OVA format is a tar version of OVF format (single file) for easy downloading from the network.

How Open Virtualization Format (OVF) works and What is its future

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) brings a certificate based system that integrates the templates. Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is template that can consist of one or more virtual machines. A file descriptor (xml) that provides visibility of information in the OS, license and hardware virtual machines shipped in the template.

As VMWare says, “With the rapid adoption of virtualization, there is a great need for a standard way to package and distribute virtual machines. VMware and other leaders in the virtualization field have created the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a platform independent, efficient, extensible, and open packaging and distribution format for virtual machines.”

For example, we can deploy a LAMP application stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) from a single Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Who Uses  Open Virtualization Format (OVF) ?

There are many companies who provide products in Open Virtualization Format (OVF), such as VMware, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, HP to name a few.