Standards wars, such as the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle, can keep many potential users on the sidelines until a winner is declared. Virtualization software vendors are trying to avoid just such a battle over the adoption of virtual appliances.
Such appliances are software bundles containing an operating system and application that have been pre-configured and tuned to run in a virtualized environment. The idea is to ease and speed up deployment of new virtualized applications, but that's contingent on the virtual appliances being able to work with various virtualization technologies, such as VMware's ESX Server, Citrix Systems' XenServer and Microsoft's new Hyper-V software.
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Those three vendors, along with IBM, HP, and Dell, have been working since last year with Distributed Management Task Force Inc., a Portland, Ore.-based standards group, to create an interoperability specification for virtual machines. And they're now far enough along on the specification, called the Open Virtual Machine Format -- or OVF, for short -- to build tools that conform to it.
Citrix, which bought its way into the server virtualization market by acquiring XenSource last year, announced Tuesday that it plans to offer tools for creating virtual appliances that can run on multiple virtualization hypervisors, whether they're from Citrix itself or VMware, Microsoft, and other vendors.
The new tools, which are being developed under an initiative called Project Kensho, are aimed at users as well as ISVs and are scheduled for release in a technical preview during the current quarter.
Simon Crosby, CTO for Citrix's virtualization and management division, said the OVF specification is critical to the adoption of virtual appliances. If the virtualization market were to bifurcate around different formats, "it really ruins a lot of the benefits of virtualization," Crosby said. He added that in addition to the obvious benefits for ISVs, enterprises could use OVF to make their internally developed applications platform-independent.
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