Leading industry group continues innovation by standardizing the management of virtualized environments

PORTLAND, Ore.-- Nov. 27, 2007-- The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTFÆ), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments. Five preliminary profiles, all based on DMTF's Common Information Model, are now publicly available and are ready for implementation. Driven by the efforts of DMTF's System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) work group, the organization is turning standardized virtualization management into reality.

Virtualization has changed the industry landscape since its introduction. Even with the efficiencies virtualization offers, this new approach has added system management complexity and hence IT cost. With this new standard, DMTF reduces the complexity and cost. Also, because DMTF builds on standards already in place for server hardware, the method for managing virtual machines is complementary. This lowers the IT learning curve, and also lowers complexity for vendors implementing this support in their management solutions.

With the first set of virtualization management profiles now available, a number of DMTF member companies and Alliance Partners have already begun implementation. The next step for the SVPC work group is to begin efforts to foster interoperability. Next week, on Dec. 3, 2007, the work group will host its first-ever members-only plugfest in Santa Clara, Calif., to test interoperability of products based on the SVPC specifications.

"With the ever-increasing adoption of virtualization, DMTF aims to simplify and provide ease-of-use for the virtual environment by creating an industry standard for system virtualization management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "Our role also extends to ensure the success of this standard, so we are thrilled to host the first-ever SVPC plugfest to test early implementations for interoperability."

The new standard also recognizes supported virtualization management capabilities, including the ability to:

• discover inventory virtual computer systems
• manage lifecycle of virtual computer systems
• create/modify/delete virtual resources
• monitor virtual systems for health and performance

Five preliminary profiles are publicly available here:

• DSP1042, System Virtualization Profile
• DSP1057, Virtual System Profile
• DSP1059, Generic Device Resource Virtualization Profile
• DSP1041, Resource Allocation Profile
• DSP1043, Allocation Capabilities Profile

To view the SVPC white paper on the CIM system virtualization model, click here.

Industry support for the DMTF System Virtualization Management Standard

"Our IT customers recognize the value virtualization brings to their datacenter deployments, but they also look to AMD and other technology companies to provide tools to help simplify the management of their virtualized environments so they can deploy with minimum IT disruption," said Lars Ewe, director, Systems Manageability, AMD. "The DMTF's release of new specifications designed to standardize the management of a virtualized environment is a critical step and will make it easier for companies to implement management solutions that reduce the costs while helping to realize the benefits of virtualization."

"The standardization of the DMTF's SVPC CIM profiles coincides with the rising popularity of virtualization technology, both of which affect the server's networking and storage-networking capabilities," said Uri Elzur, Sr. Director of advanced technology and system engineering for Broadcom's high speed controller line of business. "Broadcom's Ethernet controller products support the DMTF's CIM and management protocols today and we plan to support the new SVPC CIM profiles in the future. The virtualization support provided by the SVPC CIM profiles, is yet another example of the benefits of standards-based management and demonstrates the flexibility and extensibility of the DMTF's CIM model."

"Citrix is a strong supporter of open standards, especially in critical areas like virtualization. The more interoperable virtualization is across every processor, server, operating system and application, the easier it will be for customers to begin applying it to bigger, more strategic business problems like application delivery," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. "The DMTF is leading the industry in interoperable formats for managing virtual infrastructure. Whereas most standards bodies lag behind the pace of innovation, the DMTF is leading the industry in this important arena. Its work is key to the success of a vibrant virtualization ecosystem."

"Managing virtualized infrastructures is a major new challenge for IT staff and management software providers. We congratulate the DMTF for their completion of these new virtualization management profiles in such a timely way," said Masaya Watanabe, Division President, Enterprise Server Division, Hitachi, Ltd. "These profiles provide a standards-based, platform-independent way to manage virtual environments, delivering much-needed interoperability to IT customers while allowing easier development by vendors. Hitachi plans to support these profiles in Virtage, the new virtualization technology in our BladeSymphony servers."

"The DMTF virtualization model brings a critical level of standardization to the data center, simplifying and extending the management of physical and virtual resources in heterogeneous environments. IBM is pleased to be an active leader and contributor in the DMTF work group on virtualization, driving the development of the standard and virtualization profiles. IBM is actively implementing these draft standards in IBM's Systems Director Virtualization Manager. As more vendors adopt these standards, clients can expect improved interoperability among various implementations of the virtualization model, which can in turn reduce the complexity of managing disparate resources across the data center," said Rebecca Austen, director, IBM System Software.

"Novell strongly believes that open standards are essential for promoting, as well as easing the adoption of virtualization," said Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering for Systems and Resource Management at Novell. "We are committed to building these open standards into our virtualization management products and our contribution to the SVPC working group has resulted in a model that supports a centralized definition of virtual machines and remote deployment for lifecycle management. In a virtualized environment, the DMTF system virtualization standard delivers a complete view of the resources that need to be managed and is a crucial foundation of the service-oriented, next generation data center."

"The complexity of managing virtual and physical assets from multiple tools increases cost and complexity for our customers. By combining physical and virtual management into one open and interoperable tool, customers can avoid the headaches associated with piecing together a management stack from separate monitoring, datacenter automation and virtualization management products. Sun supports and participates in standards development with organizations, including DMTF, that follow an open and community driven process, as this ultimately results in more innovation and choice for our customers," said Steve Wilson, Vice President, Sun xVM, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

"At Symantec we are focused on helping our customers protect and optimize their virtualized environments by offering comprehensive management support across a broad range of virtualization platforms," said Gary Phillips senior director of development for Symantec. "We are working with the DMTF and support this newly proposed specification for virtualization management since it helps to solve the management problem while fostering customer choice and product innovation."

"End users and software vendors have been clear that they need to be able to leverage standards and avoid proprietary formats and licensing that lock them to a single vendor or platform. VMware's participation in and contribution to the DMTF SVPC work group reinforces our commitment to open, industry standards. The DMTF specifications and its key principles of interoperability and portability are intended to be an enabler to the evolution of the virtualization market," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, vice president of technology development at VMware.

About DMTF
With more than 4,000 active participants representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. During the last 15 years of its history, DMTF management technologies have become critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools, and solutions within the enterprise. By deploying solutions that support DMTF standards, IT managers can choose to deploy a mix of systems and solutions that best meet their users' needs, while reducing management complexity and total cost of ownership. Information about the DMTF technologies and activities can be found at www.dmtf.org.