Citrix's "Kensho" Open Virtual Format tools will drive hypervisor interoperability, Microsoft Hyper-V

Citrix will ship in the third quarter a technical preview of Open Virtual Machine format tools that will allow developers and IT pros to create virtual, portable application workloads that run on XenServer and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Oh, and yes, add VMWare ESX to that list

The hypervisor independent tools, being developed as part of a project code named "Kensho," will enable interoperability across multiple virtualization platforms as well as automated provisioning and management of these workloads, also known as virtual appliances. Unlike simple virtual machines, appliances incorporate the application workload itself and significant information about CPU and memory requirements.   Citix and VMware originally co-sponsored the Open Virtual Format with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft.

The announcement today is painted as a hypervisor-agnostic one yet at the same time illustrates the expanding virtualization pact between Citrix and Microsoft.  Citrix, for example, noted in its official press release that its XenServer has CIM-based management APIs that will allow any DMTF compliant maagement tool, including Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, to manage XenServer. 

Additionally, the press release states that due to the OVF and special licensing" features customers can seamlessly move their VMware workloads to either XenServer or Hyper-V.  So much for the platform agnostic angle.

VMware launched its own set of OVF tools in 2007 and at that time warned customers to consider licensing issues of its competitors before building and deploying OVF virtual appliances. 

Although Microsoft and Citrix expand their pact, widespread adoption of OVF -- unlike the virtualization disk format wars that pitted Microsoft against VMware -- is a major  step forward and benefits developers and IT pros in two significant ways.

"The impact of OVF will extend far beyond the participating server virtualization vendors to include the entire ISV community. With OVF, an ISV can potentially ship its solutions as a single virtual deployment package that is capable of running on any hypervisor," said Chris Wolf, senior analyst with Burton Group, in a statement issued last September. "OVF marks a new era in virtualization one which includes never-seen-before interoperability in the enterprise. The whole IT community collectively stands to benefit from this landmark standard."