Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 15th Aug 2007 21:36 UTC
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.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Well, to be brutally honest, Xen was crippled by design from the very start. XenSource pushed against the Xen community to replace a relatively challenging situation with an almost insurmountable challenge. And now Citrix gets to inherit that challenge.
Of course, I'm referring to the initial decision to create the notion of a privileged guest, the Dom0, which deals directly with the hardware. Although other ports have been attempted unsuccessfully, the only viable Xen Dom0 is Linux. A heavily-modified Linux that keeps diverging from Linux as time goes on.
XenSource doesn't like tracking Linux kernel development with their out-of-tree Dom0 patchset, and there's zero future for the Xen Dom0 in the mainline kernel (although the Xen DomU has been merged). They don't like the whole idea of the Dom0, especially since it can't be Windows.
So Citrix is acquiring a company whose technical strategy is to dump Linux as its hardware abstraction layer and develop comprehensive hardware support on its own. VMware seems quite loony these days, but at least their strategy is technically feasible. They already have a "fat hypervisor" with reasonably broad hardware support.
Linux also has a fat hypervisor with very broad hardware support. At least three of them, in fact. One of them is a hardware-assisted full virtualization solution with all the hype of Xen circa early 2005, except it's in the mainline.
You see, the Linux community has already forked Xen. It's called KVM, and it's the right technology at the right time.