Page 132 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

machines into AMI workloads, and, for a fee, RightScale, Fast-
Scale, Elastra, and others will convert them or give you tools
to convert them into formats that are capable of being run
somewhere else. But this is not the frictionless back-and-forth
migration that the cloud will need if it is to bring its full bene-
fit to businesses. It’s potential glitches and a need for services

with fees attached.
There is also the previously mentioned neutral format, OVF.
So far, Amazon has been noncommittal on this format. The
Distributed Management Task Force standards body designed
OVF to be a neutral format in which virtual machines may be
moved around over the network. It is a mobility format, but
the virtual machine can’t actually be run in OVF. It’s a freeze-

dry pattern until the destination hypervisor is determined.
Then OVF must be converted into that hypervisor’s preferred
proprietary format. A virtual machine cast in OVF can be
moved under a VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix Systems hypervi-
sor; each understands OVF and takes the files and builds them
into the virtual machine of its choice. As it does so, it produces
a virtual machine that is ready to run on its new host machine,
unlike OVF. So the shared OVF format, which is used for im-
porting files to a virtual machine host, represents a modest de-

gree of cooperation among the competing vendors. As with
AMIs, however, once you’re in, it’s hard to get out.
Why is this important? These barriers are being erected ar-
tificially. Providing a tool to convert AMIs back into OVFs would
be relatively easy for Amazon, but it stays at arm’s length from
the prospect, just as technology pioneers before it have re-

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