An OVF toolkit supporting Inter-Cloud application splitting

The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a software packaging standard designed to support the portability and deployment of applications in different virtualization platforms. Ease interoperability and portability among cloud providers is of paramount importance to mitigate vendor lock-in and fostering cooperation among different cloud technologies. To this end, the researcher community is spending a lot of effort in investigating cloud broker and cloud federation solutions. However, we feel that the community still misses an open-source reference tool for the management of these operations when it comes to the OVF standard. With the aim to fill this gap, we propose the OVF Toolkit, an open tool to parse, render, and split OVF files. This paper describes the principal design decisions, the implementation, and the capabilities of the toolkit, as well as its experimental evaluation.