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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.
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KVM needs hardware support for virtualization. Xen is nice for us old folks with old computers.
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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.
my buddy works at citrix. They use some linux boxes on their intranet, but they're not down with it. A cpuple days ago, we were out drinking and looking for tail. He's not a penguin, but he knows I am. He mentioned that Xen would be close sourced, but that was just his educated guess. If ESR or Bruce Perens can get the ear of the CxOs, maybe they'll keep it GPL.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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.