Comments on: OVF 1.0 and beyond

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » Cloud API: what’s cooking between IBM and VMWare?

Tue, 05 May 2009 17:52:47 +0000

[...] has at numerous time announced (comments here and here) that they would submit a vCloud API to DMTF in the first half of [...]

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » DMTF calls the ball on Cloud standards

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:18:12 +0000

[...] no surprise to industry watchers (and especially the small subset of them who read this blog), the DMTF has announced today (warning, PDF) that they are creating their very first [...]

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:59:40 +0000

Good points Fermin. Most people who latch on to OVF don’t necessarily understand its capabilities and limitations, especially as applied to Cloud situations – which is not what it was designed for. They just want to make a statement of intention to support standards, and OVF is what is the most convenient to use for this. Of course that’s a great situation for those who understand and drive OVF.

By: fermin

fermin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:26:57 +0000

There is a lot of public references from major industrial players stating their interests in using OVF for clouds. Apart from the vCloud API reference you mention, the Citrix partnership with rPath to “extend Kensho [the flagship OVF-related public Citrix project] to support the deployment of OVF appliances in infrastructure clouds, starting with Amazon EC2” and the Oracle and Intel collaboration to “extend standards that enable portability of virtual machines images such as Open Virtual Format (OVF) and also create Web services standards for provisioning and management of cloud-based services” are other examples.

However, I feel that these are not more than “declaration of intencions” surrounding the current hype in cloud computing and OVF. We should take into account that OVF was not designed with cloud computing in mind and that there are some issues to solve when is applied to describe services to be deployed in clouds. For example, OVF is designed for static deployments, so how it could be adapted to elastic clouds (where the number of virtual machines grows/shrink following the service demand)? What about self-configuration (the standard OVF self-configuration is based on the fact that configuration parameters are known in pre-deployment time, which is not true for clouds, e.g. the user issuing the OVF won’t know the IP address assigned to VMs in the cloud)?

The bottom line is that I think it could be much more interesting to have technical work from the industrial player on these and other topics related with adapting OVF to cloud, instead of “press-ware” about alliances and intentions

By: Drue Reeves

Drue Reeves — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:35:49 +0000

William,

Sorry for the delay on part two. The Cisco announcement and IBM/Sun thing took over the blog for a while. Plus, Burton Group is launching our new cloud service in a few weeks…so we’ve been bee-like in prepping our cloud content.

But — I will have it out today.