Open Virtualization Format (OVF) Standard Released Today

LAS VEGAS, Nev., VMworld - September 16, 2008 - The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN). The VMAN Initiative unleashes the power of virtualization by delivering broadly supported interoperability and portability standards to virtual computing environments. VMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments.

Virtualization has radically enhanced the IT industry landscape by optimizing usage of existing physical resources and helping reduce the number of systems deployed and managed. This consolidation helps reduce hardware costs and mitigates power and cooling needs. However, even with the efficiencies virtualization offers, this new approach adds IT cost as a result of increased system management complexity.

The VMAN Initiative will help reduce the complexity and cost of virtualization management for IT managers. Also, because the DMTF builds on existing standards for server hardware, management tool vendors can more easily provide holistic management capabilities that allow IT managers to manage their virtual environments in the context of the underlying hardware. This lowers the IT learning curve, and also lowers complexity for vendors implementing this support in their management solutions reducing IT management costs.

"The DMTF VMAN Initiative helps the industry develop superior, interoperable solutions for managing virtualized environments," said DMTF President, Winston Bumpus. "Our leadership in the development of interoperable management standards allows DMTF's members to bring years of experience to the creation of the latest virtualization standards."

With the technologies available to IT managers through the VMAN Initiative, companies have a standardized approach to:

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

Within the VMAN Initiative, a new key standard also debuts today: the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. OVF simplifies interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management by describing an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of one or more virtual appliances. This enables software developers to ship pre-configured, ready-to-deploy standard solutions, allowing end-users to literally distribute applications into their environments with minimal effort.

"Standards-based management is a key building block of the dynamic data center," said Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group. "Rapid vendor uptake of DMTF's VMAN OVF standard since Fall 2007 provides clear evidence that the vendor community is serious about simplifying virtual machine deployment. The VMAN Initiative has the potential to remove many VM management pain points and fuel further innovation in emerging heterogeneous dynamic virtual infrastructures."

DMTF standards are free and open to the industry. Download the OVF standard now.

Industry Support for VMAN "The DMTF VMAN initiative helps enable IT customers to take advantage of the many benefits of virtualization," said Valerie Kane, division marketing manager, Platform Manageability, AMD. "Common interoperability and portability standards simplify management of heterogeneous virtualized environments, lowering costs and increasing flexibility. AMD is committed to standards that support choice in the marketplace and today's increasingly diverse IT environments, rather than locking businesses into expensive, proprietary technology."

"The ability to cost-effectively manage virtual machines helps keep the promise of affordable, migratable compute resources," said Robert Lusinsky, Director of Marketing for High-speed Controllers Line of Business, Broadcom Corporation. "We are committed to DMTF initiatives and continuously look for ways to help simplify systems management. Virtualization is a key technology for the enterprise and simplifying virtual resource management is expected to pay dividends for a long time to come."

"It is exciting to see the tremendous progress that DMTF has made in standardizing the OVF technology for portable virtual infrastructure from our initial draft less than a year ago," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. "Citrix Project Kensho implements the SVPC CIM profiles for Citrix XenServer and enables creation and deployment of OVF V1.0 packages on virtualization platforms that support the SVPC CIM profiles, such as XenServer and Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V. Project Kensho stands as a clear commitment on the part of Citrix to enabling an open, portable virtual infrastructure environment. To accelerate development of tools and products based on the VMAN Initiative, Citrix will open source the core components of Project Kensho in the near future."

"Dell is dedicated to simplifying IT and providing a smarter path to virtualization that is grounded in choice and defined by industry standards," said Sally Stevens, director of Dell's Enterprise Marketing Group. "As a member of DMTF, we support the VMAN Initiative as it gives our customers a standardized approach to managing their virtualized environments, helping them reduce complexity and cost."

"Customers are looking to drive down costs to their technology infrastructure, and HP's active participation in the DMTF Virtualization Management Initiative will help by bringing interoperability and portability standards to virtual computing environments," said Mark Linesch, vice president, Enterprise Storage and Servers Software, HP. "Customers will benefit from the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions, and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. HP is leveraging these standards in its next-generation management products, delivering real value to customers through faster time to deployment across physical and virtual resources."

"IBM has been a strong supporter of standards virtualization, beginning with the formation of the DMTF workgroup focused on virtualization that we currently co-chair today," said Rich Lechner, Vice President, IBM Enterprise Systems & Cloud Computing Strategy. "IBM is looking forward to taking virtualization standardization to the next level through the VMAN initiative, particularly as our clients continue moving to highly-virtualized environments and cloud computing."

"Intel supports the Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) from DMTF because it empowers IT professionals to choose from many excellent virtualization solutions that benefit from Intel's hardware technologies," said Doug Fisher, vice president, Software and Solutions Group (SSG), and general manager of SSG's Systems Software Division at Intel Corporation. "We expect the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) - the first standard within the VMAN Initiative - to drive increased interoperability and deployment of virtualization solutions. OVF will allow customers to easily deploy pre-installed and pre-configured virtualization solutions on Intel's multi-core platforms."

Editors note: The following statement of support was added on September 22, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. PDT. "Microsoft looks forward to the standards for Virtualization Management in this initiative," said Dai Vu, Director of Virtualization Marketing, Microsoft. "These efforts, starting with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, will provide customers key interoperability benefits and flexibility in the deployment and management of their virtualized environments."

"Interoperability across multiple vendor products is key to the successful deployment of virtualization solutions in heterogeneous environments. Today, interoperability with different virtualization solutions requires customization. Sun is committed to supporting the VMAN Initiative as it benefits customers, who will be able to fully reap the rewards of virtualization through the interoperability the OVF standard enables," said Vijay Sarathy, director of xVM, Sun Microsystems.

"Symantec's virtualization strategy spans endpoints to data centers, and uses virtualization as a key enabler to improve the protection, management and control of information," said Gary Phillips, senior director of standards and open source, Symantec. "The Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) from DMTF complements these efforts by delivering broadly supported interoperability and portability standards, which help our customers to reduce the complexity of managing virtual environments."

"The new DMTF Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) is key to promoting interoperability and portability which are important enablers to the evolution of the virtualization market," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware CTO. "We support OVF today in several VMware products such as Virtual Center and Virtual Infrastructure. As one of the original authors, we see the release of OVF 1.0 by the DMTF as vital to VMware, our partners and our customers."

"WBEM Solutions looks forward to the VMAN Initiative and in particular the OVF standard being adopted by the IT community," said Troy Biegger, VP Marketing and Sales, WBEM Solutions, Inc. "WBEM Solutions will be adding VMAN support to our WBEM Agent Validation Environment and Software Development product, which will allow vendors and IT professionals a validation tool for VMAN product implementations."

About DMTF
DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on everything from systems management specification development and validation to promotion and industry-wide adoption. The group spans the industry with more than 200 member companies and organizations, and 4,000 active participants crossing 44 countries. The DMTF board of directors is led by 16 innovative, industry-leading technology companies. They include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); Broadcom; CA, Inc.; Dell; EMC; Fujitsu; HP; Hitachi, Ltd.; IBM; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; Novell; Oracle; Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Symantec Corporation and VMWare, Inc. With this deep and broad reach, DMTF efforts help enable a global IT management ecosystem. DMTF management specifications are critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools and solutions within the enterprise. Information about DMTF technologies and activities can be found at http://www.dmtf.org.

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