OVF Package Concepts

An OVF package at its core is a distribution package that consists of the following:

To support the adoption of the OVF distribution format, we have developed a tooling environment that assists with the composition and packaging of OVF based artifacts.  The tooling has a number of usage scenarios which will be explained in further detail, but its two focus points are:

 

To expand on the OVF descriptor (envelope) a bit, the envelope XML describes all metadata for the virtual machine(s) (including virtual hardware) that make up this OVF package.

The envelope consists of the following parts:

The following diagram illustrates the construct of an OVF envelope.