Congratulations on the latest development for OVF!

Interoperability in server and cloud space has found even more evidence with the release announcement of Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 2.0 standard. We congratulate DMTF for this new milestone, a further proof that customers and industry partners care deeply about interoperability and we are proud of our participation to advance this initiative.

Browsing the OVF 2.0 standards specification, it is evident the industry is aligning around common scenarios and it comes as a pleasant surprise how some of those emerging scenarios have been driving our own thinking in the direction for System Center.

Microsoft has collaborated closely with Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and our industry partners to ensure OVF provides improved capabilities for virtualization and cloud interoperability scenarios to the benefit of customers.

OVF 2.0 and DMTF are making progress on key emerging patterns for portability of virtual machines and systems, and it’s nice to see OVF being driven by the very same emerging use cases we have been analyzing with our System Center VMM customers such as shared Hyper-V host clusters, encryption for credential management and virtual machine boot order management (not to mention network virtualization, placement groups and multi-hypervisor support).

Portability in the cloud and interoperability of virtualization technologies across platforms using Linux and Windows virtual machines continues to be important to Microsoft and to our customers and are increasingly becoming key industry trends. We continue to assess and improve interoperability for core scenarios using the SC 2012 VMM. We also believe moving in this direction will provide great benefit to our customer and partner eco-system, as well as bring real-world experience to our participation with OVF in DMTF.

See the overview for further details and other enhancements in System Center 2012 VMM.

Mark Gayler
Senior Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.