Work ends on Open Virtualisation Format

Work has ended on the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF), the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF's) packaging format for virtual machines. Version 2.0 of the standard landed in early 2013 and back in June 2016 The Register's virtualisation desk spotted plans to develop version 3.0 with a target delivery date of late 2016 …

[Anonymous Coward]

OVF not used?

Not sure where you get the idea that OVF is hardly used. Every virtual appliance I have ever seen for VMWare comes as an OVF (Citrix Netscaler & Cloudbridge VPXs, PHD backup appliances, etc).

It is also useful if you have a standalone VMWare host and don't use vCenter. You can create a template and export it as an OVF, then import as necessary to spin up new VMs.

[djack]

OVF doesn't work

.. At least with vmware.

It's a great idea to allow interoperability between hypervisors. As the article says, the knowledge needed to convert between formats is well known and ovf was intended to be the standard to enable that. However, when the best known play only pays lip service then you have to ask what's the point...

Create a vm in virtual box and export as an ovf. Now try and import into esx or (shudder) vcloud. Even though all the required information is present in the ovf, vmware refuses to register the vm. You need to read the hardware details from the ovf, manually convert the virtual disk and manually create the vm. Btw, the import tool can clearly parse the ovf configuration and the disk conversion tool is part of esxi.

I hope that people have it better in the hyper v and xen space but from my experience ovf has failed.

[Oz]

Re: OVF doesn't work

That's not my experience. I have a number of OVF imported VMs running just fine in v5.5. Admittedly I can't say if these were created in Virtual Box or not (I'm guessing not) but I've not had any import issues at all.