Standards wars, such as the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle, can keep many potential users on the sidelines until a winner is declared. Virtualization software vendors are trying to avoid just such a battle over the adoption of virtual appliances. Such appliances are software bundles containing an operating system and application that have been pre-configured and tuned to run in a virtualized environment. The idea is to ease and speed up deployment of new virtualized applications, but that's contingent on the virtual appliances being able to work with various virtualization technologies, such as VMware 's ESX Server, Citrix Systems ' XenServer and Microsoft 's new Hyper-V software. [ Stay up to date on the lastest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter . ] Those three vendors, along with IBM, HP, and Dell, have been working since last year with Distributed Management Task Force Inc., a Portland, Ore.-based standards group, to create an interoperability specification for virtual machines. And they're now far enough along on the specification, called the Open Virtual Machine Format -- or OVF, for short -- to build tools that conform to it. Citrix, which bought its way into the server virtualization market by acquiring XenSource last year, announced Tuesday that it plans to offer tools for creating virtual appliances that can run on multiple virtualization hypervisors, whether they're from C ...
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