Citrix project Kensho to enlighten datacentre managers

Enterprise application delivery vendor Citrix has announced a project designed to allow IT managers to run virtualised applications, wrapped up as a so-called virtual machine (VM), on Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware's ESX and Citrix's own XenServer virtualisation platform.

Called Kensho the project implements the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF) Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), which Citrix has used to create tools to manage cross platform application virtualisation technology.

Firms having a variety of datacentre hardware could find Kensho useful if OVF is ratified, with the holy grail of virtualisation being the ability to move a VM over a layer 3 network link - very useful for firms implementing global disaster recovery scenarios.

OVF was co-authored by XenSource and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. After this it was jointly submitted to DMTF's standardisation process.

Citrix said that a technical preview of Project Kensho tools would be available for download in September.