Citrix Unveils Hypervisor-Free Tools

By Michelle Savage

July 15, 2008 —  Citrix Systems today announced "Project Kensho," a set of tools that will help virtual environments to break free of hypervisors.

In the fall, Citrix will ship a technical preview of Open Virtual Machine (OVM) format tools that will allow IT professionals and independent software vendors to create virtual, portable application workloads that run on Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Citrix said that this will solve interoperability issues between different platforms and allow automated provisioning of these workloads.

These hypervisor-independent tools are being developed as part of Project Kensho, which will enable interoperability across multiple virtualization platforms. It will also allow automated provisioning and management of these workloads, also known as virtual appliances.

Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, said this format allows people get to a point where they can create and manage their software independent of the underlying platform that it will run on. “The basic challenge that we were faced with prior to beginning work on OVM was that there are different virtual market formats and numerous procedures around installing and running a virtual machine on different vendors’ products,” he said. “That leaves customers with the challenge that they are stuck with a particular vendor’s products. We created a portable packaging format that allows people to install and run virtual appliances. We create one or more virtual machines, which you can then package as an appliance and install and run on any virtualization platform. The key is having a vendor-neutral format that allows customers to create their packages exactly once, no matter which virtualization platform they’re going to run it on.”

Citrix said that its XenServer has CIM-based management APIs that will allow any DMTF-compliant management tool, including Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, to manage XenServer. Also, with the OVF and special licensing features, customers can move their VMware workloads to either Hyper-V or XenServer.

OVM also supports cloud systems, such as Amazon's EC2. “An OVM package would be suitable for installing on EC2,” said Crosby. “If you created a virtualized infrastructure, you could take those same virtual appliances and package them up and drop them into the Amazon EC2 cloud, where they would run as virtual machines. It’s essentially about finding a common, industry-standard virtual machine format that all vendors, including the cloud vendors, can adopt with confidence.”

Project Kensho will also allow Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage XenServer, according to Crosby, who noted that Citrix has not priced the new tools yet.



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