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Project Kensho Released

  • By Tom Valovic
  • 10/16/08

Citrix took another step forward in itsquest to push the envelope for virtualization interoperability by releasinga technology preview of ProjectKensho, the company's multi-hypervisor toolkit that allows ISVs and ITmanagers to develop portable virtual machine (VM) appliances.

Thebasis for Project Kensho, first announced last July, is the DistributedManagement Task Force (DMTF's) Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), anemerging standard considered critical to the development of multi-vendorinteroperability in the virtualization market.

OVF has been jointlydeveloped by VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Novell; it defines a VM'smetadata as well as how VMs are configured. OVF-compliant VMs can moveseamlessly between hypervisors from different vendors, such as VMware's ESX,Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix' XenServer and the open source Xen hypervisor,used by multiple vendors like Virtual Iron, Novell, Sun, Oracle and others.

VMs are containers that normally house an operating system. Whenbundled with an application, they're usually referred to as virtualappliances. They aren't hooked into the base operating system, which meansmultiple virtual appliances can be loaded on a single physical server, andmove easily between servers.

Citrix is releasing Kensho under theopen source Lesser General Public License (LGPL), hoping to speed adoptionof OVF. The company is also working with a company called rPath to leverageProject Kensho for cloud computing environments such as Amazon's EC2. Cloudcomputing represents a new direction for virtualization suppliers; bothVMware and Citrix made major announcements about their future directionslast month.

In a company statement, Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO said"we have also decided to release the core components of Project Kensho andour implementation of the DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning andClustering (SVPC) profiles for XenServer as open source software. Combined,we hope these actions will accelerate the adoption of OVF as an industrystandard portable VM format."

The Project Kensho technology previewis available as a free download here.

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