Introduction

Citrix Project Kensho provides Citrix Partners and administrators with highly usable tools that facilitate the creation and consumption of virtual appliances.  Kensho enables the export and import of virtual machines and virtual machine based workloads (virtual appliances) using the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and Common Information Model (CIM) industry standards developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).  This allows the virtual appliances to be used by multiple hypervisor platforms including Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Project Kensho consists of two primary tools:

• Project Kensho OVF Tool - this tool is the primary tool that Citrix partners will use to create Citrix Ready virtual appliances, and customers to import the OVF into their environment to use the Virtual appliance.  The OVF Tool utilizes the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) standard.  OVF is an XML document that describes the metadata of virtual machine(s) that are stand alone or part of a virtual appliance along with pointers to the location of the virtual disks.  Thus allowing single virtural machine or multiple virtual machine virtual appliances to be packaged in a single OVF package.
  

• Citrix Project Kensho also provides a CIM interface to the XenServer™ API. As well as introducing a WSMAN interface to XenServer™. The Xen-CIM component is required by the Project Kensho OVF Tool and installs directly on the XenServer™. 

Project Kensho v1.3 adds support for OVF compression, encryption, signing, direct import of VMware OVF appliances, new CIM classes and deeper support for XenServer 5.5.

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