The Console Blog

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

With the launch of VMware vSphere™ 4 and the free VMware OVF Tool 1.0 this month, we have implemented support for the DMTF OVF 1.0 specification across a broad range of VMware products. The VMware vSphere 4 products, VMware vCenter™ 4 and VMware ESX 4, have built-in OVF support at both the API level and directly in the VMware vSphere Client. The stand-alone VMware OVF Tool 1.0 brings OVF 1.0 support to VMware Workstation, VMware Server 2.0, and earlier versions of VMware vCenter and ESX.

As part of the VMware vSphere launch, we are also making many of our products available as OVF packages, so they are readily available to deploy onto your data center infrastructure or your desktop. These products include the VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), VMware Studio 1.0, the technology previews of VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA), VMware vCenter Server 2.5 on Linux, and VMware vCenter Admin Portal.

VMware has been actively involved in the development of the OVF specification since the beginning (the initial draft specification was submitted by VMware, Dell, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource to DMTF in September 2007), and our first product to ship with OVF support was VMware vCenter 2.5 and VMware ESX 3.5 (February 2008). The OVF support in those products was based on the preliminary 0.9 specification and did not cover all aspects of the specification. Essentially, it was limited to import/export for single VM packages. With the release of VMware vSphere 4.0, we support the DMTF OVF 1.0 standard in full, which adds a significant set of new features:

• Support for importing and exporting multi-VM OVF packages (vApps)
• Support for the OVF environment and OVF properties (deployment time software customization)
• Support for the OVA format (distribute your packages as a single file)
• Support for advanced disk compression using delta-disk hierarchies (smaller packages)
• Support for automatic IP allocation and customizable URL links in the VMware vSphere client. (never need to go to the VM console anymore when installing a virtual appliance)
• Backwards compatible with OVF packages generated by earlier products (ready to use)

On the VMware vApp Developer blog, the engineering team behind OVF will start to dig into the details about all these new features and how they can be put to practical use - both by IT administrators and virtual appliance authors. So if you are wondering about the technical details and how to apply OVF in practice, that is a good place to go to learn more.

VMware is pleased to be a part of the newly announced DMTF Virtualization Management (VMAN) Forum. The group will promote interoperability between products that support the VMAN standards. The forum will develop and conduct programs to determine specification conformance in the areas of system virtualization management, virtual system management, and the open virtualization format.

We believe that OVF is an important standard to enable interoperability as well as increasing capabilities while greatly reducing the time for customers to deploy new applications and services.

[Update 2: Updated the blog link to point to the new VMware vApp Developer blog.]

[Update 1: Clarified first sentence: a technology preview of the VMware OVF Tool was released last year, but version 1.0 of the tool was released this month on May 21.]