One fo the reasons I love virtual machines is because they are mobile.\u00a0 Most of them (except RDM and passthrough disks) are just files, making them easy to migrate, copy, export, and import.\u00a0 But this is lmiited to the same virtualisation platform.\u00a0 Changing virtualisation platforms requires a tricky V2V process that vendors have made one-way.<\/p>\n
Citrix has unveiled a solution with the codename of Project Kensho<\/a>.\u00a0 It leverages the Open Virtualisation Format <\/a>(OVF) standard\u00a0 (developed by\u00a0 Citrix, VMware, Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft) to allow the movement of virtual machines from on virtualisation platform to another.\u00a0 You can think of OVF as playing the same role as XML in business integration solutions: it’s a stepping stone.<\/p>\n The solution is expected to ship by Citrix in September.<\/p>\n What does this mean to you?\u00a0 OVF gives us a standard way to V2V virtual machines between many virtualisation platforms, depending on the support offered by those platforms for OVF.<\/p>\n According to wikipedia:<\/p>\n “VirtualBox supports OVF since version 2.2.0 (April 2009).\u00a0 AbiCloud Cloud Computing Platform Appliance Manager component now supports OVF since version 0.7.0 (June 2009).\u00a0 Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization supports OVF since version 2.2.\u00a0 VMware supports OVF in ESX 3.5, vSphere 4, Workstation 6.5, and other products using their OVF tool.\u00a0 OVF version 1.1 is supported in Workstation 7.1 and VMware Player 3.1 (May 2010).\u00a0 IBM supports OVF format VM images on the POWER server platform for the AIX operating system and Linux, and for Linux on z\/VM on the mainframe using IBM Systems Director (via VMControl Enterprise Edition plug-in, a cross-platform VM manager”.<\/em><\/p>\n MS executives have confirmed in the past that VMM v.Next will include added support for XenServer management.\u00a0 We know MS and Citrix are veery tight.\u00a0 MS staff recommened XenDesktop as a VDI solution and Citrix are currently recommending Hyper-V for virtualisation.\u00a0 It won’t surprise me to see OVF turning up in Hyper-V v.Next and VMM v.Next.\u00a0 This would offer huge fleixibility:<\/p>\n It sounds like Nirvana!\u00a0 I’m sure that there will be niggling things that will cause problems:<\/p>\n It’s going to take a while, and it might even be impossible for business reasons, to get to an automated, seamless solution.\u00a0 But OVF will give us something where, with a tiny amount of admin work (product key and addition removal), we will have a format to make virtual machines even more mobile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One fo the reasons I love virtual machines is because they are mobile.\u00a0 Most of them (except RDM and passthrough disks) are just files, making them easy to migrate, copy, export, and import.\u00a0 But this is lmiited to the same virtualisation platform.\u00a0 Changing virtualisation platforms requires a tricky V2V process that vendors have made one-way. … Continue reading “Project Kensho OVF”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[181,195,196,103],"class_list":["post-10799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtualisation","tag-hyper-v","tag-virtualisation","tag-vmm","tag-vmware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
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