Major virtualization companies are cooperating to bring some simplicity to the world of their mutual interest, the format used to save virtual machine images to disk.
Cooperating in the effort are VMware, XenSource and Microsoft, which today have separate software for the task of running multiple virtual machines on one computer and separate formats for storing those virtual machines. That storage is an important part of tasks such as backing up data, installing fresh virtual machines from a template, or moving one quiescent virtual machine from one physical computer to another.
Major server companies Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM also are participating in the effort, which is taking place within a group called the Distributed Management Task Force that's standardized other server technologies as well.
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