OVF Tooling Overview

The OVF Tooling package contains components for working with OVF artifacts directly in an interactive development environment and for developing applications that work with OVF artifacts. The editing and application features have been implemented such that they can be used independently.

The following sections introduce you to the OVF standard, along with the developed tooling, which supports the composition of OVF artifacts and packages.

Composition Scenarios

As a reference to how OVF envelope metadata files can be composed, the following scenarios are presented to introduce the base concepts of using the OVF editor within the eclipse IDE.

Packaging / Distribution scenarios

One of the primary goals of the OVF specification is to define a standard means of package distribution that is efficient, secure, and portable. To this extent, the specification defines two primary types of package formats:

The OVF composition tool supports both of these distribution formats thorough the services of "Export" processing. Exporting an OVF package as a file set or as an OVA tar archive is essentially the same process from within the OVF composition tool, with a dialog selection along the way controlling which package format is desired. As a reference to how OVF packages can be produced in support of distribution, the following scenario is presented.