Citrix has today previewed the technology in its Project Kensho toolkit for the development and deployment of virtual machine appliances.

The toolkit, which was first announced earlier this summer, offers a multi-hypervisor set of tools designed to let IT managers and vendors create portable enterprise application workloads.

Once completed these can then be imported into, and run on, Citrix's own XenServer product, but also on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments.

Although the firm calls the announcement a 'preview' it has released Kensho today as open source software under a Lesser General Public Licence.

Citrix explained that it hoped that the release would accelerate the adoption of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) as a standard.

"Today we can use Project Kensho to easily deploy portable OVF format virtual appliances on XenServer and Hyper-V," said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of the Virtualisation and Management Division at Citrix.

"And we have also decided to release the core components of Project Kensho and our implementation of the DMTF System Virtualisation, Partitioning and Clustering profiles for XenServer as open source software.

"Combined, we hope these actions will accelerate the adoption of OVF as an industry standard portable virtual machine format."

Citrix also announced that it was partnering with rPath to support the deployment of OVF appliances to the cloud. It will begin by supporting Amazon's EC2.

A J Jennings, vice president for business development at Citrix Systems, added: "Project Kensho will allow us to begin to bridge enterprise and cloud-based resources, enabling our enterprise customers to leverage cloud-based services."