The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the release of version 2.0 of its Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. The new version applies to emerging cloud use cases and provides important enhancements from OVF 1.0, including improved network configuration support and package encryption capabilities to ensure safe delivery. The updated version of the standard demonstrates DMTF’s continued mission to enable management interoperability in virtual and cloud environments.

“The OVF standard is the foundation of DMTF’s virtualization management and cloud standards development efforts,” said Jeff Hilland, President, DMTF. “Version 2.0 builds upon the success of the standard and brings an enhanced set of capabilities to the packaging of virtual machines – broadening the use of the standard for emerging cloud use cases.”

The standard, originally released in 2009, has provided the industry with a standard packaging format for virtual machines – solving a critical business need for software vendors and cloud service providers. It achieved international recognition as an international standard by ISO/IEC in 2011.

OVF has also been one of the most popular and widely adopted standards in the IaaS space. As cloud computing continues to gain traction in the industry, the updated standard will provide improved capabilities for virtualization, physical computers and cloud use cases – benefitting both end users and cloud service providers.

New improvements to OVF version 2.0 include:

• Improved support for network configuration
• Package encryption for safe delivery
• Scaling and deployment options
• Support for basic placement policies, including affinity and availability placement
• Shared disks
• Advanced device boot order
• Advanced mechanisms for passing data to guest
• Updated CIM schemas

For more information on OVF including downloads and tutorials, visit http://dmtf.org/standards/ovf.

About DMTF

DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. The group spans the industry with 160 member companies and organizations, and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. The DMTF board of directors is led by 17 innovative, industry-leading technology companies. They include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); Broadcom Corporation; CA Technologies.; Cisco; Citrix Systems, Inc.; EMC; Fujitsu; HP; Huawei; IBM; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; NetApp; Oracle; Red Hat; SunGard Availability Services and VMware, Inc. With this deep and broad reach, DMTF creates standards that enable interoperable IT management. DMTF management standards 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.