Kensho may be a bit over-reaching to describe Citrix's recently announced toolset allowing the creation and migration of hypervisor-independent virtual application workloads, but that's the name they've given the project. Set to deliver a technical preview in Q3 of this year, the company promises Transcendence over the mundane limitations of competing hypervisor platforms by delivering a toolset which will allow any Open Virtual Machine (OVF) format VM to be exported or imported from the original VM environment to other hypervisor platforms.

Initially, the product is set to support VMWare's ESX, Microsoft's Hyper-V, and Citrix's own XenServer (although, of course, ESX and Hyper-V will not immediately be able to import workloads... only XenServer will have the capability to both create and import workloads). However, any vendor adopting the OVF standard should be able to make use of the tool, which is aimed more directly at software vendors than enterprise customers.

Citrix's Roger Klorese asserts that there is nothing on the market currently which matches the capabilities that Kensho aims to deliver, but the whole thing reminded me initially of Enomalism's Elastic Computing feature (previously discussed here), which similarly allows application workloads to be split up and distributed among multiple, platform-agnostic VMs. The philosophies are indeed different; Enomalism is a much broader effort oriented more at VM management in heterogeneous environments, and indeed cloud rather than internal environments, but the capabilities sound similar to me. Of course, it's nice to have discrete toolsets available, but one-stop shopping, in which you get your over-arching VM management platform and built-in VM portability, is nice too.

In any event, the existence of both platforms is a promising step for CIOs, since they will go some way toward preventing platform lock-in and expanding options and portability in virtual environments (which themselves already help us avoid becoming glued to a single platform for application services).