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Open Source Xen Promise
February 14, 2008Six months after acquiring open source virtualization vendor XenSource for $500 million, Citrix is living up to its Open Source promises.
A new version of the commercial XenServer product is set to roll out the door and, true to its word, Citrix is continuing to embrace XenSource's open source roots, the Xen project itself.
When the acquisition was first announced there was some discussion regarding Citrix's open source intentions and how they might affect the open source Xen project.
It turns out that Citrix's open source overtures weren't false promises.
"Internally Citrix has more than doubled the resourcing that we at XenSource had thrown at the Xen project and we have pretty much a blank check to evolve that and move it forward," XenSource CTO Simon Crosby told InternetNews.com.
"We're absolutely committed to the Xen project and there are no plans to change that," he said.
Crosby added that one of the key things that Citrix did after acquiring XenSource was to work on setting up Xen.org as a separate entity. Xen.org has its own program manager who is responsible for making sure that it thrives.
Additionally, Xen.org has its own advisory board comprised of the major contributors to the Xen project. The XenServer itself uses the Xen open source hypervisor at its core.
Beyond just continuing and expanding XenSource's open source efforts, Crosby also noted that open source may well end up changing Citrix itself, too.
"I've seen Citrix internalize open source as a core development methodology," Crosby said. "I think Citrix was quite surprised at the way in which we do development."
Crosby argued that Citrix historically did not have processes that scale the way XenSource's open source process scales.
"We have a community that works 24 hours a day around the world and we just get stuff done," he said. "I've seen Citrix look at this and say 'wow this is powerful.'"
Citrix is also incorporating the Xen's brand even deeper into Citrix's core portfolio, renaming Citrix Presentation Server as XenApp.
"A fair number of customers do want to virtualize Citrix presentation server for availability, scaling, test and other reasons and we think that XenServer offers significantly better performance than anybody else," Crosby said.
"It's important to note that the new name for Presentation Server is XenApp, which implies that XenServer will be included within that product," he added.
Though XenApp includes XenServer, Crosby was quick to note that Citrix will still support virtualization of XenApp on other virtualization platforms, including VMware.
XenServer itself is also getting upgraded with a new XenServer 4.1 release as well as a new Platinum edition of the virtualization software. ...
Source: internetnews.com
