VMware vApp Developer Blog

The vSphere 4.0 release provides full support for the OVF 1.0 specification. This is a major upgrade compared to the OVF features that existed in VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX 3.5, which were based on the preliminary OVF 0.9 specification and only included import and export of single VMs. The new features include:

• vApps – managing multi-tiered applications as a first-class entities in vCenter
• A data-driven OVF Deployment Wizard to greatly simplify installation and configuration of complex software.
• Customizable URL links in the VMware vSphere client and automatic IP allocation.
• Optimized packaging– you can distribute your packages as a single file and use delta-disk hierarchies to reduce download size.

This is quite a lot of stuff to cover in a single blog entry, so I am not even going to try. Instead, I have included a video showing the data-driven OVF deployment wizard in action. It shows how a vSphere user deploys, customizes and gets a complex multi-tiered CRM system up and running in a few simple clicks and without ever have to interact with a VM console at all. The CRM system OVF package has been optimized to take advantage of the new OVF features in vSphere 4.0, including application-level customization, automatic IP assignments, delta-disk compression, deployment-time configurations, and vSphere Client URL integration. In this blog, we will follow up with a series of articles that describes these features in details and how they can be used in practice. Fortunately, it turns out that most of them are really straight-forward to use (and require none to very little guest modification :).