The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) was a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project committed to foster the adoption of

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

virtualization solutions including KVM, but also software to manage such, e.g.

oVirt oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking ...

. The consortium promoted examples of customer successes, encouraged interoperability and accelerated the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM. The OVA provided education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, st ...

options. The consortium complemented the existing open source communities managing the development of the KVM

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

and associated management capabilities, which are rapidly driving technology innovations for customers virtualizing both Linux and Windows® applications. The OVA was not a formal standards body and did not influence upstream development, but encouraged interoperability and the development of common interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) to ease the adoption of KVM for users. On 21 October 2013, it was announced that the Open Virtualization Alliance will become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Having achieved its original purpose, on 1 December 2016, the OVA was officially dissolved.

Software promoted by OVA

Kernel-based Virtual Machine Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20, which was released on February 5, 2007. KVM ...

(KVM) – software that turns the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

into a

libvirt libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer ...

– API and its implementation to manage KVM and other virtualization solutions *

OVirt oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking ...

– web application for managing KVM *

libguestfs libguestfs is a C library and a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual disk images used in platform virtualization. The tools can be used for viewing and editing virtual machines (VMs) managed by libvirt and files inside VMs, scriptin ...

– API and its implementation for modifying virtual disk images

Membership

Initially formed by Red Hat and IBM, the Alliance had over 200 members involved with enterprise virtualization. Participation was open and the OVA encouraged new participants to become members. Membership was tiered, with governing memberships requiring higher dues than general memberships. One of the criteria for joining the Alliance was to produce or use a product or service that is based on KVM.

References

{{Reflist Linux Foundation projects Virtualization