Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for USD 500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology. The XenSource acquisition, which both companies announced Aug. 15, comes just a day after VMware, which has long been the dominant player in the x86 virtualization market, announced an initial public offering of 33 million shares of stock. By the end of its first day of trading, the company's stock closed at almost USD 51 a share.
Member since:
2005-12-18
"Well, time to fork Xen.
Once Citrix, that Microsoft's bitch, takes over Xen, they'll try to cripple or kill it for sure."
You can take this to the bank: Microsoft is extremely interested in seeing Xen succeed because it validates their own efforts to incorporate a virtual machine monitor into the OS (one, that I might add, is architecturally very similar to Xen). This is critical to Microsoft’s efforts to combat VMWare and their potential argument that Microsoft is bundling virtualization software with their product. By both Windows AND major Linux distributions adopting Xen, Microsoft gets all of the above AND a competitor that has cooperated in making an interoperable solution (Microsoft and Xen are both working on interoperable hypercall functionality, VHD format, etc.).
So no, Xen, in the near and distant future, is not going to end up dead or crippled (probably quite the opposite). It is, however, a major component in Microsoft’s gambit to marginalize VMWare and bundle virtualization with their product. It might be an unholy alliance, but it’s an alliance nonetheless.