Last month Citrix announced its commitment to adhere the almost ready new standard for virtual machines: the Open Virtual Machine Format or OVF.
Citrix is working on a set of tools (project Kensho) to grant the OVF interoperability and said that a technical preview of its toolbox will be available in Q3 2008 (probably September).
Last week at the LinuxWorld conference the company CTO Simon Crosby added another key information: the core of those tools will be available free of charge as open source technology.
This implies that other Xen-based products (like the ones from Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle) will be able to implement the OVF support much faster.
Crosby also said that the project Kensho will support a number of virtual disk formats including the one that Amazon is using in its Xen-based cloud computing infrastructure EC2: the AMI (Amazon Machine Image).
Maybe, by the end of next year customers will not have to worry about virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations anymore (with much disappointment from companies like PlateSpin).