File Formats for Virtual Machines Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

The OVF Specification provides a means of describing the properties of a virtual system. It is XML based and has generous allowances for extensibility (with corresponding tradeoffs in actual portability). Most commonly, an OVF file is used to describe a single virtual machine or virtual appliance. It can contain information about the format of a virtual disk image file as well as a description of the virtual hardware that should be emulated to run the OS or application contained on such a disk image.

Oracle VM VirtualBox can import and export virtual machines in the following formats:

Open Virtualization Format (OVF). This is the industry-standard format. See Section 1.14.1, “About the OVF Format”.

Cloud service formats. Export to and import from cloud services such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is supported. See Section 1.15, “Integrating with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure”. 

1.14.1. About the OVF Format

OVF is a cross-platform standard supported by many virtualization products which enables the creation of ready-made virtual machines that can then be imported into a hypervisor such as Oracle VM VirtualBox. Oracle VM VirtualBox makes OVF import and export easy to do, using the VirtualBox Manager window or the command-line interface.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#ovf

Using OVF enables packaging of virtual appliances. These are disk images, together with configuration settings that can be distributed easily. This way one can offer complete ready-to-use software packages, including OSes with applications, that need no configuration or installation except for importing into Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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