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Citrix Announces Agreement to Acquire XenSource
An anonymous reader writes "'Citrix has signed a definitive agreement to acquire XenSource a leader in enterprise-grade virtual infrastructure solutions. The acquisition moves Citrix into adjacent and fast growing datacenter and desktop virtualization markets.'
For nearly $500 million, including about $100 million of unvested options, Citrix would be purchasing VMWare's closest competitor in the server virtualization market, with XenEnterprise v4 offering technology similar to VMWare's flagship product — and arguably overtake them as a combined solution, as VMWare offers little in the realm of application and desktop virtualization. Though subject to the customary closing conditions, both boards of directors have approved the transaction, and the deal is expected to close in Q4 of 2007."
Xen is, of course, not VMWare's "closest competitor". Microsoft has over 25% of the market with their Virtual Server product. After that, Virtuozzo has the next largest deployment.
C//
I suspect few can be bothered with it on desktops when we have qemu (including derivatives) and VMWare player. Those who use Xen for VPS hosting, how hard would it be to switch to ESX or hack up some scripts for qemu?
Can someone explain why the future of all virtualization isn't simply kvm?
kvm seems like the only free, general-purpose, straight forward sort of implementation.
Xen needs modified guests AFAIK, so Windows and others are out. VMware isn't free and has various issues because of that. kvm seems the obvious choice, although I understand it's still a work in progress.
... and I thought Citrix already did KVM ... and of course I'm referring to the keyb vid mouse kvm...
Why UNIX?
What do users of Xen's flagship product Xen Enterprise 4 think of the deal. Is this good news for the products future? Where do you see the business going WRT Citrix and integration over the next few years?
Nick.
Isn't Microsoft Virtual Server in a completely different market segment? VMware and Xen are for IT departments with flexibility and foresight, Microsoft Virtual Server is for IT departments without those things, and Virtuozzo is for web hosting, right?
VMware offers little in the realm of... desktop virtualization
Actually, no, not really. VMware has been doing quite a lot with VDI for a couple of years now. Really, they've pioneered it. It's Citrix that was trying to adapt and catch up in this field, as it threatened their traditional market. The purchase of XenSource goes a long way to help them compete in a market that VMware has been dominating.
In fact, I would go as far as saying that this purchase is primarily about Citrix keeping up with VMware in VDI.
There've been stories on this up for a few days in the Firehose, but this is the first one to make the front page.
Anybody want my mod points?
What's Citrix's track record like with the open source community? I don't think I've ever stumbled across their name outside of pre-OpenSolaris Sun systems and Windows-only environments.
this isn't slashdot, it's NewYorkCountryLawyers's blog.
Slashdot is dying.
Microsoft's VS is the old Connectix stuff. It's ok, and changes when a new hypervisor becomes part of Windows Server 2008. They tend to focus on servers, because their heads are up in their behinds about using mulitple desktop OSes-- anything else but theirs.
Virtuozzo isn't a server VM, it's an app VM.
VMWare and Xen are a bit different. VMWare has lots of depth and maturity. Xen has nearly similar compatibility but has fewer API sets to work with it. Xen's app hosting capabililities are more astute and highly competitive with Microsoft's SoftGrid and Citrix's remote apps. That's why Citrix bought them.
Virtuozzo has roots in site hosting, and it's maturity with Apache also extends to OpenVZ.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"Creating the Xen Foundation allows for even greater transparency and leadership independence than we have today, and will provide an organized forum for enabling the community of vendors and users that are building Xen into their businesses to influence the project roadmap," Pratt said.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3 694721
Not so much reading propaganda than using the actual products.
We mostly use VMware ESX, which is really directed to IT departments. All of the tools assume central control. They work extremely well and reliably, as long as you're willing to stick with the centrally managed model. We've been using VMware Server on our development workstations to develop and test applications with specific images.
I've been using Amazon EC2, which is a Xen-based value-adding product, for external software testing and random one-off hosting. I've installed Xen with CentOS 5 and FC6/7 on development servers and workstations, to try it out. The open source Xen tools are extremely rudimentary. The XenSource "enterprise" tools are basically copies of the VMware model, and mimic the centrally managed thing without doing it quite as well. However, the Xen API is very malleable towards a non-centrally-management tool model. By that I mean that you could very easily (and I'm doing just that on my copious free time) build a self-service server station for a IT department, to provide quick service to those internal customers who just need some commodity server space, right now, and for the right price.
Virtuozzo's story is basically over. With absolutely everybody in the underdog space choosing Xen, it's not likely they'll get much new business outside their narrow niche. It doesn't matter how neat your product is, if the product next door is completely acceptable, open to newcomers, free, and adopted by all of your other suppliers.
This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to Xen, from a FOSS perspective.
:-)
Citrix have no interest whatsoever in Linux or in FOSS, being entirely Windows-oriented. Those things are so far off their radar that they probably don't even register as being anything to do with Xen.
What seems to have happened here is that the XenSource directors sold out for mucho $$$. And I can't say that I entirely blame them, as $500m is a lot of cash.
However, this does mean that we'll have to take what's currently available under GPL and fork an OpenXen.
On the bright side, this might even accelerate [Open]Xen's progress within the Linux community, as XenSource have been rather slow with updates --- probably too busy doing "business", as we now see.
Paravirtualization (it's with hardware support) is slower than virtualization in the recent experiments.
;)
So, lguest for linux was invented.
In my home, i want the following things below:
* a lot of cheaper G5 ppc970 (ppc64 only)
* a lot of PS3
* linux to run in ppc64
* dynamic binary translator (dbt) qemu for simulations of ppc64 on 32-bit PCs.
* a lot of virtual ppc64 machines
* a lot of samples virtual images that contain AIX, WinNT, UnixWare, Linux, FBSD, NBSD, OBSD, etc for testing.
The are i386, amd64, sparc64 and ia-64 architectures are archaic and obsolete!!!
Lucky developers!
For all you skeptics out there: If this means that Xen is going closed source, we still have KVM. KVM is growing features faster than any other VM AFAIK. And if Xen stays open source, then all is good anyway.
Actually, the brain drain from Xen to VMware will kick into high gear now that Xen employees have had the big payday they've been waiting for.
A couple of years ago at work, the IT dept. changed all our 486s for terminals and a Citrix network. It was awful. The server and connection to said server were, and still are, buggy. Whereas before, if the network went down, we could still at least type a letter or work on a spreadsheet. Now if the network goes down (which is at least weekly) we're stuck with nothing to do. In an accounts department it is vital that we have Excel, Word, etc to do the most basic of tasks. Worst move ever.
On the plus side, I got to keep my 486 which I installed Linux on and now it runs pretty nicely.
I work for a large financial company and we currently use citrix for remote access. We're using an RSA token at the citrix login, besides a regular password. Once connected, (via my firefox web-browser on OpenSuse 10.2 Linux, and yes, SuSE has the citrix plugins, even had an RPM in my old SuSE 9.2 Pro system), I can access my Lotus Notes, email , documents, and we have metaframe installed. I can open remote-host access from the citrix web and remote access a GUI desktop (xdm) on a Solaris gateway host, full X11. Preformance is reasonable, I'm running about 4Mb download speed over a comcast cable modem. In previous companies we always used remote ssh, some with the sshd configured for RSA token support. And that was fine for text based work. Unfortunately, not all 3rd party software provides good command line interface. This has forced us to use some form of remote X11 desktop access. I'm fairly pleased with the remote Citrix access. I'm anxious to see what Citrix is going to with Xen. I'm running Xen on redhat 5, and on OpenSuse 10.2. We're currently using vmware GSX server and workstation in the office. I'm very pleased with the command-line access of Xen, and the ease of which to configure and resize virtual disks and VM's. I can clone Xen VM's with a script, making a "one-button" clone, and automatically adjusting all the new clone system specifics', like VM nic mac address, hostname, etc. Could never do that on VMWare. Just imagine the possiblities if Citrix integrates Xen. You could have one-button VM creation, then disconnect, go home & reconnect and resume your work on the newly created VM, all thru a web-browser. Geeze, I wonder if they could come up with an iPhone plugin? ;-) An IT Administrator's DREAM!!!
A full list of virtualizers-related.
l _machines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtua
POWER6, 790 Mtransistors, 341mm2 die, 65nm, 8th June 2007, 4.7 GHz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture
* Your future is ppc64!
* ppc64 is your future forever!!!
Wow!!! Lucky developers & users!!!
There goes the free version. Any other *enterprise ready* free options out there?
And the closest competitor to VMWare? While thats a nice gesture , i am pretty sure that Microsoft is currently #2 in the virtualization market.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"XenSource has been in the news twice this week -- Monday they release a product, then Tuesday they get bought for $500m by Citrix. Here's Network World's take on the buyout and on the product. It looks like the product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/081507-citr
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
How free is it? I don't know; I haven't read the licenses, so I don't know if it's free-beer-only-closed-source or Fully Stallman Compliant (unlikely) or somewhere in between (probably.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
you owe me a keyboard!
Xen has a lot of potential. The basic virtualization capabilities are on par with VMWare or anybody else.
What Xen _really_ blows at is usability / manageability. Setting up Xen is a pain in the ass, especially if you're on something other than 32bit x86. Figuring out obscure command line options and text config file syntax won't take them very far.
XenSource has a closed source, functionally limited GUI management tool in their free (as in beer) XenExpress. It makes managing Xen VMs more realistic, but the limitations are too severe (maximum of 4 VMs, missing some features).
If they want to compete with VMWare, and fend off KVM, they'll need a lot more traction. They only way they'll get it is to start building the user-base.
They need to open source their management tools, and make Xen as easy to use as VMWare. Maybe they need to hold back a few enterprise-grade features, so that they can still sell product at the high end. But, the common linux users, and low-end business users could still be enticed away from VMWare, to a more open solution, if it was available. If they continue their half-open approach, they even compete with themselves, in Xen on Ubuntu/Suse/RedHat.
If they don't open up, VMWare continues to dominate. Microsoft's upcoming hypervisor expands to the strong number 2 option, and other wildcards might crop up.. KVM with a good mgmnt too.
We know this. The IOMMU work they are doing is _very_ interesting and I think is going to do that full circle thing (reliable hardware-assisted partitioning even in your sub-10k rackmount servers). They're in on the ground floor with this stuff. As soon as the management tools catch up, we'll be taking all this stuff for granted, and the old mainframe guys will just shake their heads.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If you pay for Virtual Iron, then they hook you up with a better userspace abstraction component and paravirtualized drivers for Windows XP/2003 which are infinitely better than the emulated PCNet cards and stuff (even in HVM mode). Clever bastards.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
We've got an 8-blade Citrix server rack now. Would be nice if they ran each user in their own VM.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Virtuozzo and other Linux virtual server products if everything sticks on time table they will be all gone with the merge of containers. Say hello to linux distro default feature. This alteration will allow Microsoft like CPU bias for desktop vs services and splitting stuff like browsers into there own contained zone so it will be kinda default feature since it will have more uses than what Virtuozzo was used for.
Linux kernel is getting lguest what allows the same kernel to be used virtual or to boot the system. Then you have kvm.
Of course Xen will still have its place as a hypervisor. lguest and xen working as one would be great. One kernel no matter if it was running inside Xen lguest or booting the system.
It's impossible to tell what Citrix' plans are. They've been around long enough to see what happens when products go closed-source, and when companies buy OSS and continue support it as OSS.
If someone were to take the lead and fork Xen, they would need to change the name from Xen to something else - or risk a copyright lawsuit (and we've had enough of that).
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