VMware

What is VMware announcing regarding Open Interfaces and Formats?

VMware is collaborating with a group of leading technology vendors to define open virtualization standards. As an initial step, VMware will contribute its existing frameworks and APIs to facilitate the development of these standards in an industry neutral manner.

Why are open interfaces and formats important?

In every industry, open interfaces and formats has been a critical enabler to accelerating ubiquitous adoption. Virtualization is no different. As great as the momentum is today for virtualization, it is still in its early stages of adoption. VMware is taking this step to spur the growth of virtualization, accelerate solution delivery to customers and achieve wide spread adoption. VMware is also taking this step because partners and customers have asked for it.

Why is this significant for customers?

Open interfaces and formats will give customers access to a broader range of virtualization solutions that are also compatible across an increased number of industry products.

How will this benefit the industry?

Open interfaces and formats will facilitate greater collaboration and innovation across an ecosystem of virtualization vendors and expand the market opportunities for all.

Why is VMware proposing these open interfaces and formats?

The most successful interfaces and formats in the technology business have been based on defacto customer deployed standards. VMware's technology has been deployed widely for over seven years and incorporates a significant amount of real-world experience.

What is a Hypervisor?

A Hypervisor is a basic component of virtualization software and it provides the capabilities necessary to partition and multiplex the system. In VMware ESX terminology, this roughly corresponds to the ESX Virtual Machine Monitor.

Which open interfaces and formats is VMware making available?

VMware's open interfaces and formats include the following:

  • Virtual Machine Interface - APIs between hypervisors and guest operating systems.
  • Management Interface - Framework that governs the standardized operation and management of stand-alone virtual machine environments as well as highly dynamic, data center-scale deployment of virtualized systems.
  • Virtual Machine Disk Format - Virtual machine disk formats that enable virtual machine provision, migration and maintenance across platforms.
Who can use these open interfaces and formats?

VMware intends this to be an open, vendor neutral effort. Any vendor that shares in the common goal of open virtualization standards can participate.