The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) recently announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments.

Who are they? The DMTF is an industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. The task force has approximately 4,000 active participants representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations.

Five new preliminary profiles have been announced, all based on DMTF's Common Information Model. They have now been made public and according to the DMTF, they are ready for implementation. According to a recent press release, a number of DMTF member companies and alliance partners have already begun implementation.

It will be interesting to see what current virtualization platform management and virtual machine lifecycle management companies think about these "standards". As the virtualization market continues to grow, the management area of this market is suddenly taking off. Will existing companies and new startups find these specifications a hindrance or will they embrace them?

"With the ever-increasing adoption of virtualization, DMTF aims to simplify and provide ease-of-use for the virtual environment by creating an industry standard for system virtualization management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "Our role also extends to ensure the success of this standard, so we are thrilled to host the first-ever SVPC plugfest to test early implementations for interoperability."

The new standard also recognizes supported virtualization management capabilities, including the ability to:

• discover inventory virtual computer systems
  
• manage lifecycle of virtual computer systems
  
• create/modify/delete virtual resources
  
• monitor virtual systems for health and performance

Five preliminary profiles are publicly available here:

• DSP1042, System Virtualization Profile
  
• DSP1057, Virtual System Profile
  
• DSP1059, Generic Device Resource Virtualization Profile
  
• DSP1041, Resource Allocation Profile
  
• DSP1043, Allocation Capabilities Profile

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2007 08:06 PM