THE ART OF XEN for CITRIX

zen.jpgIf anyone has any doubts about how important virtualisation is, then please take another look. Sure, there are still some performance issues for IO bound operations, but these will quickly disappear and the business opportunities, flexibility and cost reductions it provides for the operations department far out-weigh any small issues ..... like that.

The interesting thing that I am watching is the potential different business angles that different companies are taking. In a recent post I talked about the possibility of the hypervisor technology being embedded in silicon by Intel or AMD given that VMWARE has created OEM licensing for their base technology. BEA, jumped in with both feet last week stating that they will get their LiquidVM Java virtual machine to run directly on the VMware hypervisor, so­ no OS needed. That's an attractive proposition although I think that there are some details that are missing to make this truly happen ( very quickly you need storage, management, monitoring, .... ).

Then there is Microsoft, where it is pretty clear that both the hypervisor (Windows Server Virtualisation ) and the SoftGrid ( App Virtualisation) are going to be part of the Windows Operating System in some form and can host Linux, NT, etc, etc applications.

So for VMWARE and Microsoft it is pretty easy to see, but what about XEN, now it have been formally acquired by Citrix this week? The scenarios in one view are more difficult to consider, but I think that they could be far more interesting if brought out right too. Citrix has a really great customer base of loyal followers who like the technology they see. So here are some thoughts

  1. They could build virtualisation into the core terminal services technology to allow more machine instances to come on-line based on user demand?
  2. They could move into the virtual "hosting in the cloud" business and allow customers to access computing power on an infinite number of machines in the cloud?
  3. For sure they could plug in the UX part of the Citrix terminal server with XEN so that this becomes a ubiquitous virtual machine manager for any operating system
  4. But ultimately they could do a whole lot more and because Citrix are NOT tied to an operating system, they could ultimately win big here.

The virtualisation space certainly get more interesting on a daily basis.