In a post about a month ago I commented on a Microsoft engineer who was describing the decreasing importance of the hypervisor in the role of virtualization. Yes, the hypervisor is still a critical component of virtualization, but it also has stopped being a differentiator between the various platforms.
Citrix made a move in this direction last week with their announcement of “Kensho,” a management and provisioning infrastructure that allows for workloads to be deployed and migrated across a variety of virtualization platforms. Interestingly, the original development of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) platform on which Kensho is based was performed with VMware, though the announcement focused on interoperability with the Microsoft Hyper-V platform.
This development won’t make all your virtual servers instantly portable between platforms. But it does mean that as application vendors develop virtual appliances they can do so to the OVF specification, meaning that the single appliance can be deployed anywhere the customer wants to. This is great for consumers as it means the appliance is more likely to work consistently, regardless of the platform. And since vendors continue to develop appliance solutions it looks like this benefit will continue to grow.
This release from Citrix is a pre-announcement of a product suite expected to be available later in Q3, so nothing is really final yet, but it seems to be coming pretty quickly. Also, check the licensing specs on both your virtualization platform and the appliance to make sure you’re running a legit implementation.
The commoditization of the hypervisor continues…
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