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VMware Introduces Open Virtual Machine Disk Format Specification

Tuesday, 04 April 2006 by Michel Roth

VMware today announced that its virtual machine disk format specification for defining and formatting virtual machine environments is now openly available, downloadable and free of charge. This will enable use by all developers, software vendors and projects and includes open licensing compatible with those operating under open source licenses such as the GPL. In addition, VMware is committed to supporting any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by customers and working toward converging on open standards in this area.

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. Patch, provisioning, security, management, backup and other infrastructure solutions for virtual machine environments all heavily depend on the virtual machine disk format. Based on this dependency, having an open and unrestricted virtual machine disk format is critical to the broad-based development of new solutions and value-add for virtual environments.

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