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The chief cat herder of systems management, the DMTF (Distributed Managed Task Force) added CA, Oracle and VMware to its board on June 3.
Adding VMware, an exciting, game-changing company to the board of the staid but utterly essential DMTF is a signal that x86 virtualization must be well-managed to solidify its position as a cost-saving king in the data center.
Of special interest to me is that Winston Bumpus, the president of the standards group, is now working for VMware. When I last caught up with Winston to talk about the newly released SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) a couple of years ago, he was working for Dell. Bringing his hardware know-how to the x86 virtualizaton world means that virtual management is going to get an experienced champion.
The DMTF has steadily worked to bring together a who’s who of IT vendors into an environment where cooperation (in the name of making heterogeneous system management workable for IT managers) is given a fighting chance against competition (adding “enhancements” to “extend” the functionality of proprietary management platforms, with the hope of locking in homogeneous system purchasing contracts).
Talking with Winston on June 5, I discovered that the DMTF will be attending the Burton Catalyst Conference (full disclosure: eWEEK is a media sponsor of the conference) and for the first time providing the first public multivendor demonstration of OVF (Open Virtual Machine Format). I’ll be covering Catalyst and providing special coverage of any interoperability results that I see.