During this roundtable discussion, assertions were made by various participants that there’s a central standard for virtualisation called OVF/OVA. Subsequent research unearthed an interesting blog post by Damian Karlson, a cloud solutions architect at ServiceMesh in the US. He writes: “Chances are good that you’ve run into an OVF/OVA from a variety of sources: as a packaged application or appliance from a vendor, as a download from the VMware community appliances site, or even while physically moving virtual machine files from one location to another.

“An OVF refers to the Open Virtualisation Format, which is a ‘packaging standard designed to address the portability and deployment of virtualisation appliances’. The OVF format standard was formed by the Distributed Management Task Force, or DMTF, which is an industry working group comprised of over 160 member companies and organisations.