I finally took a look at OVF, the virtual machine distribution specification that was recently submitted to DMTF. The document is authored by VMware and XenSource, but they are joined in the submission to DMTF by some other biggies, namely Microsoft, HP, IBM and Dell.
Overall, the specification does a good job of going after the low-hanging fruits of VM distribution/portability. And the white paper is very good. I wish I could say that all the specifications I have been associated with came accompanied by such a clear description of what they are about.
I am not a virtualization, operating system or hardware expert. I am mostly looking at this specification from the systems management perspective. More specifically I see virtualization and standardization as two of the many threads that create a great opportunity for increased automation of IT management and more focus on the application rather than the infrastructure (which is part of why I am now at Oracle). Since OVF falls in both the “virtualization” and “standardization” buckets, it got my attention. And the stated goal of the specification (“facilitate the automated, secure management not only of virtual machines but the appliance as a functional unit”, see section 3.1) seems to fit very well with this perspective.
On the other hand, the authors explicitly state that in the first version of the specification they are addressing the package/distribution stage and the deployment stage, not the earlier stage (development) or the later ones (management and retirement). This sidesteps many of the harder issues, which is part of why I write that the specification goes after the low-hanging fruits (nothing wrong with starting that way BTW).
The other reason for the “low hanging fruit” statement is that OVF is just a wrapper around proprietary virtual disk formats. It is not a common virtual disk format. I’ve read in several news reports that this specification provides portability across VM platforms. It’s sad but almost expected that the IT press would get this important nuance wrong, it’s more disappointing when analysts (who should know better) do, as for example the Burton Group which writes in its analysis “so when OVF is supported on Xen and VMware virtualization platforms for example, a VM packaged on a VMware hypervisor can run on a Xen hypervisor, and vice-versa”. That’s only if someone at some point in the chain translates from the Xen virtual disk format to the VMware one. OVF will provide deployment metadata and will allow you to package both virtual disks in a TAR if you so desire, but it will not do the translation for you. And the OVF authors are pretty up front about this (for example, the white paper states that “the act of packaging a virtual machine into an OVF package does not guarantee universal portability or install-ability across all hypervisors”). On a side note, this reminds me a bit of how the Sun/Microsoft Web SSO MEX and Web SSO Interop Profile specifications were supposed to bridge Passport with WS-Federation which was a huge overstatement. Except that in that case, the vendors were encouraging the misconception (which the IT press happily picked up) while in the OVF case it seems like the vendors are upfront about the limitations.
There is nothing rocket-science about OVF and even as a non-virtualization expert it makes sense to me. I was very intrigued by the promise that the specification “directly supports the configuration of multi-tier applications and the composition of virtual machines to deliver composed services” but this turns out to be a bit of an overstatement. Basically, you can distribute the VMs across networks by specifying a network name for each VM. I can easily understand the simple case, where all the VMs are on the same network and talking to one another. But there is no way (that I can see) to specify the network topology that joins different networks together, e.g. saying that there is a firewall between networks “blue” and “red” that only allows traffic on port 80). So why would I create an OVF file that composes several virtual machines if they are going to be deployed on networks that have no relationships to one another? I guess the one use case I can think of would be if one of the virtual machines was assigned to two networks and acted as a gateway/firewall between them. But that’s not a very common and scalable way to run your networks. There is a reason why Cisco sells $30 billions of networking gear every year. So what’s the point of this lightweight distributed deployment? Is it just for that use case where the network gear is also virtualized, in the expectation of future progress in that domain? Is this just a common anchor point to be later extended with more advanced network topology descriptions? This looks to me like an attempt to pick a low-hanging fruit that wasn’t there.
Departing from usual practice, this submission doesn’t seem to come with any license grant, which must have greatly facilitated its release and the recruitment of supporters for the submission. But it should be a red flag for adopters. It’s worth keeping track of its IP status as the work progresses. Unless things have changed recently, DMTF’s IP policy is pretty weak so the fact that works happens there doesn’t guarantee much protection per se to the adopters. Interestingly, there are two sections (6.2 about the virtual disk format and 11.3 about the communication between the guest software and the deployment platform) where the choice of words suggests the intervention of patent lawyers: phrases like “unencumbered specification” (presumably unencumbered with licensing requirements) and “someone skilled in the art”. Which is not surprising since this is the part where the VMWare-specific, Xen-specific or Microsoft-specific specifications would plug in.
Speaking of lawyers, the section that allows the EULA to be shipped with the virtual appliance is very simplistic. It’s just a human-readable piece of text in the OVF file. The specification somewhat naively mentions that “if unattended installs are allowed, all embedded license sections are implicitly accepted”. Great, thanks, enterprises love to implicitly accept licensing terms. I would hope that the next version will provide, at least, a way to have a URI to identify the EULA so that I can maintain a list of pre-approved EULAs for which unattended deployment is possible. Automation of IT management is supposed to makes things faster and cheaper. Having a busy and expensive lawyer read a EULA as part of my deployment process goes against both objectives.
It’s nice of the authors to do the work of formatting the specification using the DMTF-approved DSPxxxx format before submitting to the organization. But using a targetnamespace in the dmtf.org domain when the specification is just a submission seems pretty tacky to me, unless they got a green light from the DMTF ahead of time. Also, it looks a little crass on the part of VMware to wrap the specification inside their corporate white paper template (cover page and back page) if this is a joint publication. See the links at http://www.vmware.com/appliances/learn/ovf.html. Even though for all I know VMware might have done most of the actual work. That’s why the links that I used to the white paper and the specification are those at XenSource, which offers the plain version. But then again, this specification is pretty much a wrapper around a virtual disk file, so graphically wrapping it may have seemed appropriate…
OK, now for some XML nitpicking.
I am not a fan of leaving elementformdefault set to “unqualified” but it’s their right to do so. But then they qualify all the attributes in the specification examples. That looks a little awkward to me (I tend to do the opposite and qualify the elements but not the attributes) and, more importantly, it violates the schema in appendix since the schema leaves attributeFormDefault to its default value (unqualified). I would rather run a validation before makings this accusation, but where are the stand-alone XSD files? The white paper states that “it is the intention of the authors to ensure that the first version of the specification is implemented in their products, and so the vendors of virtual appliances and other ISV enablement, can develop to this version of the specification” but do you really expect us to copy/paste from PDF and then manually remove the line numbers and header/footer content that comes along? Sorry, I have better things to do (like whine about it on this blog) so I haven’t run the validation to verify that the examples are indeed in violation. But that’s at least how they look to me.
I also have a problem with the Section and Content elements that are just shells defined by the value of their xsi:type attribute. The authors claim it’s for extensibility (“the use of xsi:type is a core part of making the OVF extensible, since additional type definitions for sections can be added”) but there are better ways to do extensibility in XML (remember, that’s what the X stands for). It would be better to define an element per type (disk, network…). They could possibly be based on the same generic type in XSD. And this way you get more syntactic flexibility and you get the option to have sub-types of sub-types rather than a flat list. Interestingly, there is a comment inside the XSD that defines the Section type that reads “the base class for a section. Subclassing this is the most common form of extensibility”. That’s the right approach, but somehow it got dropped at some point.
Finally, the specification seems to have been formated based on WS-Management (which is the first specification that mixed the traditional WS-spec conventions with the DMTF DSPxxxx format), which may explain why WS-Management is listed as a reference at the end even though it is not used anywhere in the specification. That’s fine but it shows in a few places where more editing is needed. For example requirement R1.5-1 states that “conformant services of this specification MUST use this XML namespace Universal Resource Identifier (URI): http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf”. I know what a conformant service is for WS-Management but I don’t know what it is for this specification. Also, the namespace that this requirement uses is actually not defined or used by this specification, so this requirement is pretty meaningless. The table of namespaces that follows just after is missing some namespaces. For example, the prefix “xsi” is used on line 457 (xsi:any and xsi:AnyAttribute) and I want to say it’s the wrong one as xsi is usually assigned to “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” and not “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” but since the prefix is not in the table I guess it’s anyone’s guess (and BTW, it’s “anyAttribute”, not “AnyAttribute”).
By this point I may sound like I don’t like the specification. Not at all. I still stand with what I wrote in the second paragraph. It’s a good specification and the subset of problems that it addresses is a useful subset. There are a few things to fix in the current content and several more specifications to write to complement it, but it’s a very good first step and I am glad to see VMware and XenSource collaborating on this. Microsoft is nominally in support at this point, but it remains to be seen to what extent. I haven’t seen them in the past very interested in standards effort that they are not driving and so far this doesn’t appear to be something they are driving.