I had the chance to sit down with Citrix Virtualization and Management Division CTO Simon Crosby while at VMworld Europe last week, and Simon raised an interesting point regarding virtualization interoperability. While it has yet to receive much publicity, there is actually very good interoperability between Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor and the Citrix XenServer 4.1 hypervisor. With the two products, I can shut down a VM running on Hyper-V, copy it to a XenServer system, and start it up. That’s it. You just need to drop in the right drivers for the hypervisor and you’re all set.

Now let’s put that little piece of interoperability in the context of Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). OVF’s goal is twofold: 1) standardize virtual machine management metadata across all hypervisors, and 2) provide a framework for VM portability across hypervisors. So far, we’re well on track for goal #1. In fact, we already have a number of vendors signed up to demonstrate OVF support at our June Catalyst North America conference.

What’s holding up OVF goal #2? It’s the disparity in the virtual hardware presented by the different hypervisors in the virtualization ecosystem. Currently Xen-based hypervisors and Hyper-V are heading down one path, and VMware is heading down another. Simon compares this to the divide between x86 and SPARC-based systems. Why have different types of virtualized hardware when really only one type is necessary. VMware would probably counter that their implementation of virtualized hardware is enterprise worthy and adds value to their overall virtual infrastructure. Sound familiar?

Note: Originally posted to the Burton Group Data Center Strategies blog.