An OVF toolkit supporting Inter-Cloud application splitting

Anastasi G F, Carlini E, Dazzi P, Distefano M

Cloud computing  Open systems  Software packages  Virtualisation  OVF toolkit  Intercloud application splitting  open virtualization format  software packaging standard  Conferences  Data structures  Home appliances  Software  Standards  Virtualization  XML  Cloud Computing  Open Virtualization Format  Software libraries  Utility programs 

The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a software packaging standard designed to support the portability and deployment of applications in different virtualization platforms. Ease interoperability and portability among cloud providers is of paramount importance to mitigate vendor lock-in and fostering cooperation among different cloud technologies. To this end, the researcher community is spending a lot of effort in investigating cloud broker and cloud federation solutions. However, we feel that the community still misses an open-source reference tool for the management of these operations when it comes to the OVF standard. With the aim to fill this gap, we propose the OVF Toolkit, an open tool to parse, render, and split OVF files. This paper describes the principal design decisions, the implementation, and the capabilities of the toolkit, as well as its experimental evaluation.