Licensing and API Issues

An open approach to licensing, APIs, and formats gives you the opportunity to choose the technologies that work best in your particular environment. Open APIs also contribute to better product interoperability, giving you more choices and more flexibility. By contrast, some vendors are developing proprietary APIs and restrictive licensing policies.

Transparent Paravirtualization

A hypervisor provides the virtualization abstraction of the underlying computer system. In full virtualization, a guest operating system runs unmodified on a hypervisor. However, improved performance and efficiency is achieved by having the guest operating system communicate with the hypervisor. By allowing the guest operating system to indicate its intent to the hypervisor, each can cooperate to obtain better performance when running in a virtual machine. This type of communication is referred to as paravirtualization. Transparent paravirtualization allows a single binary version of the operating system to run either on native hardware or on a hypervisor in paravirtualized mode.

Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK)

A virtual machine encapsulates an entire server or desktop environment in a file. The virtual machine disk format specification describes and documents the virtual machine environment and how it is stored. The virtual machine disk format specification is critical to how virtual environments are provisioned, manipulated, patched, updated, scanned and backed up.

Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification is a hypervisor-neutral, efficient, extensible, and open specification for the packaging and distribution of virtual appliances composed of one or more virtual machines. It aims to facilitate the automated, secure management not only of virtual machines but also the appliance as a functional unit. The OVF specification is intended to be an open, industry-standard format for virtual appliances and is secure, portable, efficient and extensible. OVF was created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource, has been accepted by the Distributed Management Task Force, DMTF, as a draft specification.

Management Interface

These interfaces enable management software (such as those provided by HP, IBM, VMware, CA, BMC, and others) to deploy, control, and monitor virtual machines running in different virtualization environments. These tools can automatically execute many of the daily tasks in the data center, decreasing costs and increasing reliability. VMware supports a rich set of additional interfaces that allow customers to realize the full potential of virtualization.

As a leader in the computer virtualization industry, VMware is actively involved in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), helping drive the virtualization model forward. This effort is taking place in the Virtualization, Partitioning, and Clustering Workgroup (active participants include VMware, IBM, HP, Microsoft and others).

VMware intends to provide a royalty-free license to the specifications for these interfaces and formats to collaborating partners.