Citrix announces 'œvirtual machines on any hypervisor' project

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 17 July 2008 19:05

Business IT - Technology

Citrix, the newest player to enter the hypervisor space when it acquired XenSource in October 2007, has unveiled “Project Kensho”, designed to make virtual machines portable across the major hypervisor platforms, including XenServer from Citrix, VMware's ESX and Microsoft's recently released Hyper-V.

Want to move your virtual applications between the hypervisor platforms offered by the world’s three big virtualisation vendors, Citrix, VMware and Microsoft?

Then you’ll need to ensure that you build your virtual application workloads inside “Project Kensho”, an environment from Citrix that will ensure your virtual app is loaded within an Open Virtual Machine Format, or OVF, which can then be run under Citrix’s XenServer, Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMWare’s ESX.

OVF tells whichever hypervisor it is running under what hardware the virtual application within is expecting to have available, and can be easily transferred between hypervisors as desired, giving system administrators the flexibility to run virtual apps on whichever hardware is best suited in the data centre at the time, or to move it at will.

The OVF format was originally co-authored by VMware and Citrix, and has received contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft, and was then jointly submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft.  The companies then jointly submitted the draft to the DMTF standardization process.

Citrix notes that as virtualisation has become “a mainstream component of enterprise IT infrastructure, users need ways to automate and secure the lifecycle of their application workloads without being tied to a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format.”

OVF and Project Kensho will “will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance.”

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