DMTF’s Open Virtual Format graduates to become an ANSI standard, giving virtualization and cloud proponents hope for an international standard.
Talk of standards development can often inspire yawns, but for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), it’s relatively fast quick progress from a specification to a standard adopted by neutral industry organizations is “a big deal,” according to cloud experts.
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced at the end of August that its work on OVF standard version 1.1 had been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standard (INCITS) standard. According to a DMTF press statement, “This achievement marks a major milestone in DMTF’s efforts to enable interoperable, platform-independent cloud and virtual management solutions.”
Just a year and a half after work began on OVF, the results are emerging. The progress reflects the great interest among vendors and IT end users for virtualization and cloud computing, but it also shows that the vendors involved understand they must work together to create a non-proprietary method to manage virtual environments that could become a large part of internal cloud efforts. Started in March 2009, the speed at which development and adoption of OVF shows both the want and need for such a standard.
“ANSI adoption of OVF provides additional validation of the importance of this standard for virtualization management,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president, in a statement. “Since its introduction, OVF has achieved wide scale adoption.”
The adoption of OVF as a standard also makes cloud proponents hopeful. Marv Waschke, senior advisor of product management in the office of the CTO at CA Technologies, recently wrote about the OVF standard news for The CA Cloud Storm Chasers blog. Waschke pointed to the fact that many methods used today are proprietary, or work only with specific cloud environments, such as Amazon’s EC2.
“OVF is owned and controlled by the membership of the DMTF, not a single vendor. A single vendor, or small group of vendors, cannot change the standard without the agreement of the rest of the organization and the DMTF ensures that the standard is widely available and unambiguous. The DMTF also sees to it that the standard is periodically revised, but does not change capriciously,” Waschke wrote in the blog.
And with ANSI acceptance, OVF goes beyond the adoption of the vendors participating with the DMTF to incorporate the entire industry in the U.S. Next stop is international adoption, which at this rate, could be soon. With both the DMTF and ANSI seals of approval, vendors and IT end users can be certain technologies and services compliant with OVF will interoperate and enable management in broad virtual deployments and by extension cloud computing environments.
“Acceptance as an ANSI standard is a big deal. ANSI accreditation means that OVF standard was developed with the same rigor as the standards that make it possible for you to buy a bolt at Home Depot and a nut at Lowes and never doubt that the two will fit together perfectly,” Waschke said in his blog.
Does your organization work with OVF or OVF-supported products? Do you plan to expand your virtual deployment into an internal cloud environment? Please leave a comment here or let me know your thoughts directly via e-mail at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.
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