Virtualisation specialist VMware has announced that the specification of its virtual disk format is now openly available for free download and royalty-free use. The move should make it much easier for software vendors to integrate their own products with those of VMware.

Richard Garsthagen, VMware technical marketing manager, said, “Some of our partners that make software for physical-to-virtual-machine migration will be very pleased with this announcement. It also paves the way for patch management products and new types of integration from independent software producers.”

The disk format information along with other VMware source code had previously been available to licensees via VMware’s Community Source Programme.