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."

Comments

Xen not "closest competitor".

[Courageous]

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//

You've been reading propaganda again

[postbigbang]

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.