Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today released a technology preview of Project Kensho, its toolkit for the development and deployment of portable virtual machine appliances in enterprises and clouds. First announced in July, Project Kensho provides a powerful, multi-hypervisor toolkit that leverages the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. As a result, virtualized application workloads can be packaged as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance and be imported and run on Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ and VMware™ ESX virtual environments. Project Kensho is being released today as open source software under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) to accelerate adoption of the industry standard for portable packaging of applications and virtual machines (VMs), as well as management of virtual infrastructure. In addition, Citrix is working with virtual appliance packaging vendor rPath to extend Project Kensho so that users can seamlessly install and deploy DMTF OVF packages on popular IT Infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2.

“The response from customers, partners and our community to the announcement of Project Kensho has been tremendous,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “We are excited about the opportunities that a portable virtual machine and virtual appliance infrastructure offer our customers, ISV partners, and the market at large. Today we can use Project Kensho to easily deploy portable OVF format virtual appliances on XenServer and Hyper-V. And we have also decided to release the core components of Project Kensho and our implementation of the DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) profiles for XenServer as open source software. Combined, we hope these actions will accelerate the adoption of OVF as an industry standard portable VM format.”

Support for IT Infrastructure Clouds

Citrix is partnering with rPath to extend Kensho to support the deployment of OVF appliances in infrastructure clouds, starting with Amazon EC2. This collaboration will allow Linux and Windows based OVF appliances created on XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 to be installed and run in the cloud and managed through their entire lifecycle.

“rPath is a strong supporter of Project Kensho, which we see as a perfect complement to rPath's role as the VM creation and lifecycle management platform for multiple disparate hypervisor and cloud computing environments,” said Erik Troan, CTO of rPath. “Broad adoption of the OVF portable VM format is important as enterprises begin to deploy virtual infrastructure solutions from multiple vendors, and we’re very supportive of Citrix and its leadership with this important initiative.”

“Citrix Cloud Center (C3) offers our cloud customers the ability to offer a rich set of enterprise-class IT infrastructure services that go far beyond basic Linux and Windows VM hosting,” said AJ Jennings, VP Business Development, Citrix Systems. “Project Kensho will allow us to begin to bridge enterprise and cloud based resources, enabling our enterprise customers to leverage cloud based services. Our commitment to a vendor-neutral portability package for enterprise workloads, is strategically important to the success of the cloud model. Customers want assurances that they won’t be locked into a proprietary cloud architecture, just as they do not want to be locked into a proprietary hypervisor and virtualization stack.”

“For ISVs who want to enable customers to quickly and easily deploy solutions in a heterogeneous environment, the DMTF OVF standard provides an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of virtual appliances,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. “To help facilitate this, we rely on contributions from member companies like Citrix during the standard development process – and we welcome the Citrix open source implementation to help speed adoption of the newest DMTF standard.”

Added Value with Microsoft

Project Kensho enables customers to leverage the interoperability benefits and compatibility between long-time partners Citrix and Microsoft. Because the tools are based on an industry standard schema, customers are ensured a rich ecosystem of options for virtualization. And because of the open-standard format and special licensing features in OVF, customers can seamlessly move their current virtualized workloads to either XenServer or Windows Server 2008, enabling them to distribute virtual workloads to the platform of choice while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.

“Project Kensho from Citrix will allow Microsoft customers to import and export virtual machines between different hypervisors in the OVF format,” said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy, Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp. “It's great to see partners like Citrix adopting the DMTF standard interface within Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to ensure interoperability for customers. This flexibility will help simplify the deployment of virtual appliances, easing software distribution, and enhancing portability between virtualization platforms.”

Availability

The Project Kensho technology preview is available as a free download on the Citrix Developer Network™ site: http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Kensho.

Project Kensho supports the vision of the Citrix Delivery Center™ and Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) product families, helping enterprise and service provider customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. The tools developed through Project Kensho will be easily integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio™ based orchestrations, for example, to provide an automated environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.