The Console Blog

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

After last week’s exciting VMware announcements around the first cloud OS VMware vSphere 4, this week we have additional important news around the announcement of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Cloud Incubator. As President of the DMTF I see this as an important activity at this point in the evolution of this technology as it has begun to revolutionize IT infrastructure. This group plans to tackle several key issues as it relates to the interoperability of cloud management. 

It is probably a good idea at this point to describe what an incubator is and why it is different from a regular work group. I think the best way to describe this is to say that the incubator is really a place for ideas to be developed or incubate before specifications are created. A while back, the DMTF wanted to encourage groups who were in the early stages of developing technology to come to the DMTF and use the existing tools and policies for the rapid development. So to that end, the DMTF borrowed a model used by several member companies and many industry standards organization and created a new DMTF initiative called an incubator. The intent of an incubator is to develop recommendations and draft specifications which will then be taken through the traditional standardization process. The hope was to encourage organizations and members to bring their ideas, even in an early stage, to the DMTF.

The other difference between an incubator and a traditional work group is that it has a leadership board that is comprised of the key stakeholders in the creation of the work. This organization at launch has 13 leadership board companies including VMware, in addition to many other participating companies. We hope others will join the activity and other companies may be added to the leadership board over time. 

From the charter posted on the DMTF site, this incubator plans to:

• Enable the use of cloud computing within enterprises and improve the interoperability between cloud platforms via open cloud resource management standards.
• Increase awareness and support by management systems vendors that develop products to manage cloud resources.
• Enable cloud service portability.
• Provide management consistency cross cloud and enterprise platforms.

One of the important activities of this incubator will be to develop recommendations for enhancements and extensions to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) that may be needed for cloud computing. There has been quite a bit of discussion from me and others on how this may be an important building block for cloud interoperability. The incubator will be a good place for the industry to have those discussions and make agreed upon recommendations. The other two important aspects of this incubator will be around cloud APIs, particularly as they relate to management as well as looking at security models and methods to support this level of cloud interoperability.

VMware is pleased to be a part of this activity and hopes to help enable new levels of interoperability and choice for our customers.