Citrix has released a technology preview of Project Kensho, its toolkit for developing and deploying portable virtual machine appliances in enterprises and clouds.

First announced in July, the widgetry is described as a multi-hypervisor toolkit that leverages the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) XML-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for creating portable, hypervisor-independent, virtualized application workloads.

These workloads can be packaged as virtual appliances and run on Citrix’ XenServer, Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX virtual environments.

Project Kensho is being open sourced under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) to accelerate the adoption of the fledgling OVF portable VM format.

Citrix says it’s working with virtual appliance packaging vendor rPath so Kensho can be used to install and deploy OVF packages on clouds starting with Amazon EC2.

Citrix claims a vendor-neutral portability package for enterprise workloads is strategically important to the success of the cloud model. “Customers,” it says, “want assurances that they won’t be locked into a proprietary cloud architecture, just as they do not want to be locked into a proprietary hypervisor and virtualization stack.”

Citrix says users can move virtual workloads from platform to platform while ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.

The open source release includes Citrix’ implementation of the DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) profiles for XenServer.

And the tools developed through Project Kensho can be integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio-based orchestrations to provide an automated environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.

The preview can be downloaded at http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Kensho.