System Center 2012 VMM OVF Export / Import Tool is available now.

Greetings folks!

Microsoft is committed to interoperability and openness in the products and services we provide, as evidenced by our multi-hypervisor and standard-based storage management features in System Center 2012. Today, we have taken this even further with the release of the System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) OVF Export/Import Tool, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.

The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distribution of virtual appliances to run in virtual machines developed in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Inc. Microsoft and other industry partners are focused on the development of OVF. As a company we have been involved in OVF development from the outset.

OVF 1.1 is an international standard important to customers and partners, who are looking for strategies to effectively enable and speed their on-ramp of virtualization technologies in an interoperable way.

Adding OVF and the OVF Import/Export tool to the cache of advanced infrastructure, configuration and service management capabilities to SC 2012 is another milestone in Microsoft’s plans to deliver ongoing value to our customers and partners.

With the release of this tool, System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) users can now import and export a virtual machine in an OVF 1.1 format packaged from other virtualization platforms – for example, VMware vCenter and Citrix Xen Server.

The OVF Import/Export tool is a set of cmdlets for use with VMM. Use of OVF promotes portability and interoperability of a virtual machine across Microsoft, VMware and Citrix hypervisors. We’ve gained valuable implementation experience with Citrix and VMware using OVF and successfully tested with vCenter and Xen Server.

For more information about this tool and other System Center products and solutions, visit System Center website for more details.

Cheers!

Cheng