As is the way of most technological paradigm shifts, the phenomenon of virtualisation emerged in advance of any standards initiatives. One solution to the challenge of making the pieces fit together neatly is, of course, to rely on a single vendor, with the attendant risk of being locked into on approach, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of market advances and inevitable consolidation.
To remove the barriers to take-up, virtualisation vendors are working towards common standards – in particular, regarding virtual appliances. These are pre-configured software packs containing an operating system and application tuned to run in a virtualised environment. They are meant to speed up deployment of new virtualised applications by being able to work with the more significant virtualisation technologies, including Citrix Systems’ XenServer, Vmware’s ESX Service and Microsoft’s new Hyper-V software.
These vendors plus IBM, HP and Dell are working with the Distributed Management Task Force to produce an interoperability specification for virtual machines. Their specification is the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) – “a platform independent, efficient, extensible, and open packaging and distribution format for virtual machines.”
What OVF represents is an opportunity for efficient, flexible, and secure distribution of enterprise software, giving customers vendor and platform independence. You can deploy an OVF formatted virtual machine on the virtualisation platform of your choice.
Encouraging a level playing field
Another significant initiative – with the DMTF as its catalyst – is the Open Cloud Standards Incubator. It was formed in April 2009 with support of almost all the big vendors, but has yet to attract the largest enteprise cloud players, such as Amazon. The OCSI focuses on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public, or hybrid clouds. Its prime method is to improve the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. It also aims to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms.
The incubation process, in the OCSI’s words “is designed to foster and expedite open, collaborative, exploratory technical work that complements the DMTF mission to lead the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards.”
Virtualisation, by its very nature, promotes interoperability between disparate platforms. While the end-user community watches on, arguably the biggest problem facing virtualisation is the lack of willingness for those same vendors to support industry standards in practice to make virtualisation viable across the board.
What the industry surely needs is adherence by any particular vendor to a set of standards, ensuring interoperability with those standards rather than being dragged kicking and screaming to interoperate with other vendors’ equipment per se.
