Create the Cloud Computing foundation for future virtualization of OVF standards

The value of server virtualization is now recognized. Many companies have now ported a large portion of their servers to virtual machines on large servers, benefiting from hardware usage, energy savings, and space on the data center. Companies that have not yet done so have secretly planned to consolidate servers in the future. After all, these require important or infrastructure costs. So what does server virtualization do to reduce human cost? This is a big problem with IT operations.

The basic level of server consolidation has already provided some benefits for IT operations. It makes it easier to maintain hardware because virtual machines can be moved to other physical servers, where the original server can be maintained or repaired. This provides great convenience for the maintenance of hardware from the previous weekends and late-night time into a part of a normal workday.

The next step for many companies is to balance the portability of virtual machines to gain the flexibility of IT operations. Because virtual machines can be obtained in a disk image, they are portable and not tied to a personal physical server. The simplicity of recreating an image of a virtual machine means that the ability of an application can be increased or decreased very simply, as additional virtual images are created or revoked. The server pool allows virtual machines to be ported automatically, depending on the application's load. More sophisticated virtualization uses include high availability, which means that virtualization management software virtual machines can be moved automatically when hardware failure occurs. When a virtual host is down, see another virtual machine is automatically started, without any human intervention, this can be very vivid to show the maturity of the use of virtual machines.

Of course, the use of virtualization demonstrates the ability to change IT operations, enabling IT companies to deliver the rapid response capabilities and creativity that were unthinkable a few years ago. This application can be ported, cropped, and cloned agility will change the way it works forever.

The wave of cloud computing is sweeping. By providing a flexible, self-service IT infrastructure, cloud computing has revolutionized the way information is processed. Virtualization technology has played a decisive role in this transformation. Its independence, high degree of integration and mobility, changing the current IT infrastructure, processes, and costs, and by eliminating the barriers that persist between the application and physical hosts, virtualization makes deployment easier and more mobile, with significantly increased mobility. It can be said that there is no virtualization of cloud computing is unimaginable.

However, there is an obstacle to the real transition from traditional computing to cloud computing. Currently launched a variety of cloud computing solutions, due to the technical standards of connecting a variety of computer systems, maintenance of the normal operation of cloud computing software technology standards, etc., so that users in the choice of specific programs unavoidably confused, which greatly limits the spread of cloud computing and promotion. Therefore, the development of industry interoperability standards has become the current cloud computing is the biggest challenge.

Create OVF Standard

To describe the maturity of the infrastructure, Gartner specializes in creating a model for implementing a dynamic IT infrastructure. The model is divided into five levels, the first layer is centralized and standardized, the third layer is virtualization and portability, the fifth layer is the IT infrastructure into a business automation platform, the ultimate implementation of "infrastructure as a service." Thus, in order to achieve the ultimate business flexibility, both the need for virtualization technology for portability and related standards for interoperability to more comprehensively manage the entire business infrastructure, so that users do not have to manage all the elements of the IT infrastructure as in the past, simply by leveraging a series of simple tools to manage, Control the computing infrastructure and automate the entire infrastructure, enabling it to deliver high levels of business agility.

Today, the industry has established a standard, portable metadata model that makes it possible to deploy virtual machines across virtualized platforms. Independent software Developers (ISVs), through testing and development, can encapsulate applications with the operating system and perform virtual machine authentication. The virtual machine quickly transforms into a product as a pre-configured, pre-packaged unit without any external dependencies, which is certainly attractive. This pre-deployment, ready to run, encapsulated virtual machine (VM) application is called a virtual device. To make this virtual device more widely available, virtual machines and metadata encapsulation must be done with vendor-independent standards, enabling any virtualization platform to automatically and securely install, configure, and run virtual devices.

This open virtualization Format (OVF) standard, released by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), offers many advantages: an effective user experience, simplified installation, an independent, flexible virtualization platform for users, and easy creation of complex, pre-configured, multi-level services; Efficient delivery of enterprise software through portable virtual machines, enhanced performance of specific platforms, and easier adoption of virtualization technologies through scalability.