The standard describes an "open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines".
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".
[1] The DMTF subsequently released the OVF Specification V1.0.0 as a preliminary standard in September, 2008, and V1.1.0 in January, 2010.
[2] In January 2013, DMTF released the second version of the standard, OVF 2.0 which applies to emerging cloud use cases and provides important developments from OVF 1.0 including improved network configuration support and package encryption capabilities for safe delivery.
The most significant improvements include support for network configuration along with the ability to encrypt the package to ensure safe delivery.