Citrix CTO Simon Crosby posts more details about Project Kensho OVF tools
August 8th, 2008 | 
Author: Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO, just posted some details about the Project Kensho Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools on his blog. The post titled Kensho – Portability, Ubiquity… Now with Extra Freedom! is apparently a follow up from his Keynote speech at LinuxWorld this morning. Crosby confirms Citrix is on target for a technical preview release in September as well as offering some specifics on what virtual formats the tools can convert.
“This morning in my keynote at LinuxWorld I announced that the tools will not only be easy to use… but the core Kensho components will also be free, not only distributed at no cost (“free beer”) but licensed under an open source license (“free speech”) as well, to encourage open development and wider adoption.
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For maximum flexibility and portability, Kensho will support
all major virtual disk file formats — including the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) format used in the Xen-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In addition to OVF support, the Kensho code will include a complete DMTF SVPC (System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering) CIM provider for Xen. This will extend the management options for implementations of Xen, including but not restricted to XenServer.We are on track to make the first tech preview available in September.”
Read the entire post at Simon’s blog from the link above.
As Mike D points out, and I could not agree with more, in the only comment to Simon’s post (as of this writing):
“This is really great for the industry at large. 2 down (VMware and Citrix) for support – a lot more to go. Hopefully the rest of the vendors will get this support into their products soon.”
I was glad to see there wasn’t any “Citrix is the first to provide OVF tools” verbiage from Simon.
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