OVF Format Released, VMAN Initiative Launched
Published on 17 Sep 2008 · Filed in News · 251 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)Yesterday, September 16, 2008, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced the release of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, along with a new management initiative called the Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN). The full details are found here in the official press release.
<aside>Now, personally, I think they should have called it the vMan initiative so that we could continue the lowercase “v” thing that’s going on here at VMworld this year.</aside>
Anyway, a number of vendors have announced support for the VMAN initiative, including AMD, Broadcom, Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, and VMware.
The DMTF site doesn’t really provide much detail about VMAN, other than to throw up some decidedly marketing-like terms:
The Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) from DMTF unleashes the power of virtualization by delivering broadly supported interoperability and portability standards to virtual computing environments. VMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. Management software vendors will offer a broad selection of tools that support the industry standard specifications that are a part of VMAN, thus lowering support and training costs for IT managers.
OK, but can you provide any real technical details? Exactly how is VMAN going to do this? Perhaps the PDF-based VMAN and OVF technical notes will contain more details, but until I see those this continues to look more like a marketing exercise than anything else. Sorry, I have to call it like I see it.