 The OVF standard is not tied to any particular hypervisor or instruction set architecture.The unit of packaging and distribution is a so-called "OVF Package" which may contain one or more "virtual systems" each of which can be deployed to a virtual machine.In September 2007 VMware, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) a proposal for OVF, then named "Open Virtual Machine Format".