Within the IT industry, virtualization is all the rage, but this hardware-sharing option comes with its own poison: becoming locked in to proprietary vendor solutions. In response, one supplier has cooked up an antidote.
Virtualization has become one of the industry's hottest trends because it allows companies to more effectively use their computing resources. Corporations have been virtualizing their computing environments to reach goals, such as decreasing the overall cost of their infrastructure, easing their system management chores, and making their systems more resilient.
VMware has been the virtualization kingpin, growing from a startup company to a billion dollar enterprise. Its hyperbolic growth caught Microsoft's attention. At the end of 2007, the company unveiled its Hyper-V virtualization system and is trying to gain some traction with a virtual machine snapshot feature, where customers can examine a picture of a virtual machine's performance and fine-tune it, if necessary. Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun also are promoting their own special takes on virtualization.
So, how can a vendor gain some attention in this increasingly crowded marketplace? Citrix Systems tried to answer that question with the unveiling of Project Kensho, which is designed to allow virtual environments to be more independent of their hypervisors. The set of tools allows portable application workloads to be created and then run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware ESX-based virtual environments.
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Project Kensho is based on the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), which was originally co-authored by XenSource (which Citrix acquired) and VMware. After some help from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft, the standard was handed over to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and in September 2007 the standards organization completed a draft specification of OVF.
OVF creates a standard way to define a virtual machine so that it supports several vendors' virtual machine files. This approach also defines the rest of a virtual machine's characteristics, including specific hardware, such as CPU, disk, and memory. OVF relies on packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform the ability to support all the required installation and configuration parameters.
A second OVF benefit is it will work with another DMTV standard, the Common Information Model. This specification, which has been followed for more than a decade, enables different products to exchange management information, so it becomes simpler for businesses to control heterogeneous devices.
Citrix's approach is to reach for a higher ground -- support for a standards-based approach -- rather than fight other vendors by developing a more sophisticated virtualization technique. The company is betting that virtualization will become a mainstream component of enterprise IT infrastructures, so eventually users will desire ways to deploy the technology without being locked into a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format. Theoretically, Citrix's work will solve interoperability problems among different platforms and support automated provisioning of applications, rather than just virtual machines.
Citrix is obviously taking these steps for competitive rather than altruistic reasons. The company's thin client approach resembles virtualization in some ways, so it seems to have a lot more to lose than most suppliers as virtualization gains moment. The supplier is betting that its technique will slow VMware's momentum and help to limit Hyper-V's appeal.
But Citrix faces some challenges in convincing customers to adopt Project Kensho. The first one is market clout. VMware has clearly garnered the leading position in the virtualization space and even its slightest move commands a great deal of attention. Microsoft is the king of high-tech marketing. Citrix always has been a second-tier player, a company that many small and medium-sized businesses are familiar with but not someone whom most rely on.
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Market timing is one issue. The first sampling of the Project Kensho tools will be ready in September, but it may take the company some time before it delivers all of the necessary components. Citrix also will be charged with keeping pace with updates to the different virtualization products so its customers don't fall behind. That is a significant technical challenge. Also, while Citrix has outlined its plans for supporting VMware and Hyper-V, what it intends to do about other virtualization options is unclear.
One can certainly understand why Citrix would feel compelled to try and slow the virtualization movement. While the company has some interesting ideas, it could have difficulty drumming up significant interest in Project Kensho.
See more columns by Paul Korzeniowski.
Paul Korzeniowski is a Sudbury, Mass.-based freelance writer who has been writing about networking issues for two decades. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, Investor's Business Daily, Newsweek, and InformationWeek.
