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Citrix XenSource

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 2/2

November 13, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this second part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, the Citrix XenSource CTO denies that there is more than a ‘fabulous partnership’ between Microsoft and Citrix. In his typical outspoken style, Simon Crosby does not see his competitor VMware take of into the clouds with vaporware. He remains an advocate for open standards and shines his light on Virtualization security issues (aka VirtSec by the insiders).

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A full transcript of the interview is below and the  first part of our interview can be viewed here.

(00:00) Simon, in the blogosphere there are these ever mounting rumors about Microsoft and Citrix. What can you comment on that relationship. Add Cisco, VMware and you’ve got a complicated puzzle.

It is.

(00:10) It’s intriguing though.  Many people see a lot of interesting things going on there, what can you say about that?

So our partnership with Microsoft is great.  I mean fabulous.  Microsoft makes a ton out of everything of what Citrix does and they give us scale and we basically take the platform, extend its features set. We’ve done this for years.  It turned out to what XenSource was doing in Virtualization with Microsoft, very similar to the traditional Citrix model of working closely with Microsoft to extend the platform and deliver a bunch of features.  So we do that today and so we’re partner in Virtualization for XenDesktop and runs great on Hyper-V, runs great on XenServer and you know, that’s a terrific partnership.  We’ve partnered also in the area of Virtualization generally and interoperability is key. But XenServer in the platinum edition, not generally known, has the ability to run VMs on VMware or Hyper-V or Xen or even bare metal. Okay, so once you’ve taken your VMs and centralized them into a central repository, we can boot them and run them on anything, right?  Which allows us to extend the concept of Virtualization beyond just Xen, to other hypervisors and even bare metal.

(01:23) If we go back to the cloud concept, because that has been buzzing this industry for a few months now.  What I find quite intriguing is that there’s no standards.  Every cloud has its own APIs and with VMware launching its newest product line (vCloud).  It’s not very clear what those APIs are going to look like, nor when we’re going to have them.  Xen is also moving in that direction with CCC or C3 (Citrix Cloud Center).

Yeah, though not from an API perspective. I agree with you that the APIs are an important one and the ABI.  That is compatibility between the enterprises that counts a big deal. The VMware announcement yesterday, the demonstration around the clouds, the big bullet point on Paul Maritz slide was compatibility, okay? Which basically says that every cloud is going to have to buy by VMware.  You know what?  It’s just not going to happen, okay?  So compatibility is an important concern.  It’s really important that enterprise that  adopt Virtualization know that their VMs will run great in their enterprise but also in the cloud and if the only way we can achieve that is if everybody buys VMware, I can tell you the industry is sunk.  That’s not going to happen.  So compatibility is an important consideration.  OVF is a great component of that and I think it gives us a good way of migrating that whole process.

(02:43)  Do you think that the DMTF is a good standards body to also look into APIs that the vendors agree upon from Amazon to Citrix?

(02:50) Simon Crosby:  I’m not so sure about the Amazon guys. You should go out and speak to Werner on that. But in general, you know Amazon is very open to moving towards standard based APIs, kind of an innovator out there. But VMware, to give them credit, is doing a great job in the DMTF.  They really are.  So, I got to tell you that I’m not a fan of LibVirt you know in the Linux world, it doesn’t have strong semantics.  It doesn’t have like a well-defined API or ABI but the DMTF world is moving forward terrifically, yeah very good.

(03:24) Virtualization was a way of abstracting. Now clouds are another way of abstracting?

They are just another hypervisor platform for me.

(03:34) What about an OS.  What would be your definition, VMware is calling it an OS? 

Oh, the data center OS?

(03:42) Interviewer:  How do you define such an OS?  Do you consider it an OS, a framework or an API set?

You know what?  I think it’s vaporware, right?  So let’s be real for a bit, there are several key things that people want to achieve.  They want to achieve greater agility, greater dynamism, and greater security. There are a lot of ways to get there. But defining a data center OS based on a product which has got a single point of failure, isn’t the way to get there.  There are very interesting technologies that one can bring to solve that problem. In general, I don’t think they (VMware) have them.  Now, it differs between enterprises and clouds on how you want to do this. Enterprise IT runs in a very different way than the cloud.  So we know today that NetScalers drives automatically very large files, that is we can use NetScalers sitting in the application hard drive to dynamically move traffic between machines whenever machine fails, between data center whenever data center fails and on the fly bring up new VMs and servers on the basis of need. Because we can watch the application response times and drive the data center in that way.  That is in particular like a kind of cloud architecture. There are some enterprise adopting it. But at data center OS which is built in the management domain out of a bunch of stuff which is really just managing software.  I don’t buy the concept.  It’s an important concept that people start to think about, that is agility and dynamism and data center reintroduce a whole bunch of complexities but it isn’t here yet.

(05:14) Maybe to finish off, you mentioned security?

Yeah.

(05:18) How do you see that involve, it’s one of the major concern of these people.  How do you secure Virtual issues?  How do you make absolutely sure that they can’t break out?

There are three things here, one of them is how do you secure the guests?  How do you secure the hypervisor?  And how do you virtualize the security function generally, okay?  So let’s start. How do you secure the guest?  You know, the basic capabilities of inspecting the traffic, block an I/O, everybody can do that.  That’s straightforward.  VMware took a one step further with VMsafe which allows their plug-in security appliances to inspect the memory of running guests.  The black hat folks just don’t like this approach, okay?  We have an equivalent thing in open source that the big scary moment is if you compromise that interface, you can get hold of any memory of any guest.  It’s really, really scary.  So you have to do better than that, you know. 

But in general, virtualizing the security function is thought very open area and Chris Hoff has a perfect take on this, you know it’s very, very early days and has a ton of work to do.  Moreover is I/O starts to go back into hardware so we just get IOV devices coming.  None of those security appliance gets to look at the traffic anymore, so it’s going to be very interesting.  So all has to get down again.  Securing a hypervisor, we’re absolutely concerned about that.  That is one of our key focuses, I guess VMware is concerned about it.  They have a big code base.  I think one of their big things that they do is they went from you know ESX to ESXi was to ditch the console OS which is a major headache for them.  You know we’re down onto tens of megabytes in software now, generally written onto read-only flash and we focus manically on securing our box, right?  That’s absolutely what we have to do.  Now can we make guest more secured?  Absolutely we can do that and that’s the next big one which is how you can use the Virtualization platform itself and Virtualization to provide greater security for the workload while it’s running and through its life cycle.  So once you separated the software from the server, can I take a guest to walk out of the building without a memory stick?  That’s an interesting question.

(07:31) Simon, I’d like to thank you for the time you’ve given us and for the straight talk and your views on Virtualization and everything around it.  See you.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, CitrixXenServer, CTO, interview, Las Vegas, Simon Crosby, video, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, XenEnterprise, xenserver, xensource

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 1/2

November 11, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

Below is the first part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, where Citrix XenSource CTO Simon Crosby tells us where he sees Virtualization going in general and shares his view on the future of security, networking and I/O virtualization in particular.

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Feel free to check on the I/O Virtualization vendors we covered in the past, such as 3Leaf, Neterion, NextIO, VertenSys with Neterion or Xsigo.

A full transcript of the interview is below. you might want to check on our previous chat with Simon at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to see if what he claims is consistent on both sides of the atlantic.

(00:11) Simon Crosby, you’re the CTO, Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.  What are the next challenges you see coming up in Virtualization?

Simon Crosby: So Virtualization today is server only, right?  So in fact the question to me is “where does Virtualization go generally”?  The technology works superbly for clients.  It applies in terms of virtualizing the client device and it works great in PDAs and various other mobile internet devices and so on.  So Virtualization is going down that path.  Xen already runs on all machines of that category and does so with great performance.  So now we can expose real devices, models, straight up to Windows and so on and we can get terrific performance.  So Virtualization technology will go much more broadly into the execution environments.  Virtualization adoption by enterprise It’s a big, big change, right?  Because everything changes.  So just to get beyond 10% or 12 or whatever adoption percentage we are at right now, the whole of the enterprise IT process has to be rethought.

(01:13) Where do you see the real challenges when it comes to security and virtualization and how can you organize those?

Today, I think you know we do a pretty good job of pulling in the storage and the compute side of it, that is we dynamically drive storage for virtualization.  Networking is still way out there.  I mean because the security folks want to know exactly where the bump in the wire is. Arguably as you move the virtual machines around in the data center because of those network security policies you got to follow them.  That doesn’t happen yet.  So, all of that has  to change but as you start to do this, people who got a very rational concern for knowing where things are, that they are secured, that they die when they should and all that sort of stuff, right?  And so, the general complexity that virtual machines bring is that our appetite for computers have not gone down.  There are more VMs than there are physical servers.  They live some place you don’t generally know where.  At any point in time, you need to find the darn thing.  Check if it’s secured.  Check if it’s updated.  Manage it through its life cycle and then throw it away securely.  So it actually complicates things.  So the great thing by Virtualization is we now get as a bunch of IT vendors, to go and redo it all and do it right and do it better and that’s the opportunity.

(02:34) Now Simon, one of the major announcements here at VMworld was that, VMware together with Cisco, they’ve launched VN-link which is a new standard for networks to become virtual machine aware.  What’s your point of view on that, on this merging of virtual network solutions and standards in that field?

The fundamental driver here is Moore’s law., So we get more and more and more VMs per server.  That means that the switch technology that we use in the virtualized platform in general, has to become more and more like a network based switch.
So that’s a good observation.  Therefore, all of the separation and other policies that you want to have in a network have got to follow your VMs, right?  So there is an interesting question of what you do there?  Now the VMware virtual switch (indeed there is one in XenServer too) are based on the bridge code that came out of Linux. We modified  so it can support VLANs and everything else, but that’s where it came from.  So there’s a very rational question as to how this evolves over the time?  Now, the technology that’s coming down the wire is essentially IOV. If you do SRIOV..

03:35 Could you quickly explain what IOV and SRIOV stand for?
SRIOV stands for single root I/O virtualization.  It’s the I/O Virtualization standard coming out of the PCI SIG and with that, essentially you introduce the ability for a NIC-card to have a full layer 2 switch on it.  So what’s going to happen is that it’ll all move to hardware. And those layer 2 switches will look like existing real physical switches in your Ethernet, okay?  And so, in general, you know we have to have the same ability to control those and manage them as we do with our physical network infrastructure today.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, CitrixXenServer, CTO, interview, Las Vegas, Simon Crosby, video, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, XenEnterprise, xenserver, xensource

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

November 2, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts, People Tagged With: citrix, citrix xenserver, Citrix XenSource, industry moves, recruitment, Roger Baskerville, virtualisation, virtualization, Vizioncore, XenEnterprise, xensource

IDC Virtualization Forum West: Simon Crosby (Citrix / Xensource)

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series of guest posts by investor, Open Source pioneer and the creator of the Concurrent Versions System Brian Berliner. The original posts, recapping much of what was said at the IDC Virtualization Forum West in San Francisco, have also been published on Brian’s blog.

Simon Crosby, formerly the Founder & CTO of XenSource and, since the acquisition, now the CTO of the Virtualization & Management Division at Citrix, did a very nice job with the morning’s kick-off sponsor presentation at the IDC Virtualization Forum West conference.

Some takeaways that I found interesting:

  • Virtualization is not an end-goal in and of itself. Virtualization is a feature set and simply serves a role in IT Application Delivery.
  • Simon took a few jabs at VMware and, why not? Citrix/XenSource is now squarely positioned as the #2 contender. When you have the chance, you take a shot at the big boy. And, VMware is a big boy, to be sure. Simon said, “This is the year the world strikes back” (against VMware, I presume).
  • Simon also said, of one of the sleeping dogs in the Virtualization space, “Microsoft is going to radically change the environment for virtualization”. Presumably with their Hyper-V solution and their partner muscle.
  • About the movement of the hypervisor into the firmware of server (and at some point), client computers: “Where this feature ends up is still in play — in the OS, or in the hardware”. Personally, I think the answer is clear. Hypervisors are becoming commoditized and will become a component of the hardware/firmware/BIOS. It can’t be stopped.
  • Citrix will create a set of Open Extension API’s for Value Added Dynamic Infrastructure Services. Basically a way for third-parties to interact with the lower layers as part of building a truly dynamic data center (which, EVERYONE is talking about getting to at the conference) – Something that we predicted while building the business plan for Cassatt in 2003. The industry/market is absolutely catching up.
  • I think I heard that XenDesktop will be released in Q2 of this year (i.e., soon).
  • On the issue of scaling the virtual desktop infrastructure: “When I talk about scale, the Desktop scales way worse than any Data Center”. He cited a customer example where the customer has 250,000 desktop PC’s. They absolutely DO NOT want to have 250,000 Virtual Machines! The Citrix approach to scale here is intriguing (and quite likely correct): Break the OS from the Configuration from the Applications. Assemble them in real time for the desktop virtual machine. Result is 1 (or a handful) of OS images that you have to deal with and patch in order to update thousands of desktop machines. Much better scale solution.

I liked what Simon had to say about the virtualization landscape. It is very clear that the choice of Citrix as their acquirer was a good one. Lots of good synergies between the companies.

I had lunch with Simon as well, and we continued the discussion. I was impressed with his understanding of the customer requirements and political challenges to the rollout of a virtualized infrastructure.

[Original post can be found here]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Brian Berliner, citrix, Citrix XenSource, IDC, IDC Virtualization Forum, IDC Virtualization Forum West, Simon Crosby, virtualisation, virtualization, xensource

The Present And Future of Xen

April 7, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Over the past few months, a number of people have been vouching the idea that Xen’s development and adoption is slowing down because of the Citrix’ acquisition.

Paula over at ZDNet appears to have misunderstood what XenSource/Citrix explained her.

Citrix might have jumped some marketing hoops by first claiming to be an application delivery company, then trying to position itself next to VMWare as a virtualization company, and subsequently buying XenSource in order to reclaim its application delivery role while trying to benefit from the Xen brand.

But rest assured: they are still heavily backing Xen.

Paula proclaims:

“Open source backers will likely take another look at Xen and re-consider other open source firms embracing virtualization”

Well … it’s true different open source integrators were confused when XenSource decided to take their XenEnterprise 4.0 management GUI Windows-only, leaving the Linux Desktop users in the cold. Yes, some customers were lost, but the open source guys were never interested in a GUI that limited the functionality of an open and free product they were used to work with anyway, and neither were the kernel code contributors. So the question is if they were looking at XenSource in the first place.

At FOSDEM, we asked Ian Pratt how he feels about the evolution of the Xen open source community after the Citrix acquisition and if he thought the contributions from the community were slowing down. An excerpt from our interview:

“We certainly haven’t seen that , if you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes. When we left the University to set up XenSource people were worried we might go of and take Xen in closed source or something, but we didn’t. It’s the same group of guys, basically myself, Keir Frasier, Steve Hand working on the project, and now many more of course. The Citrix acquisition of XenSource was obviously something we had to explain to people. I think the community has seen that nothing has changed . One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency, set up Xen.org , the Xen advisory board and the Xen.org website. The advisory board has members from companies like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, … big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have oversight from the advisory board, so I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

In a video interview with Tarry Singh at VMworld Europe 2008, Simon Crosby stated:

“You have to understand that Xen is the foundation of the faith, we (Citrix) are first and foremost committed to this community and to that method of development for the server tools and Hypervisor. So one of the community questions was that Citrix was not known for open source and what was gonna happen with Xen.

It turned out, otherwise we would never have agreed to go, that Citrix has thrown a huge amount of money towards the open source community. We’ve setup Xen.org – we’ve always wanted to do that, as a start-up we could never get there.

Xen.org is run by a charter committee of the major contributors and it has its own program management and it’s independent of us (Citrix) and that’s exactly the way we wanted it. Ian still leads the project, we still probably contribute about 60% of the code, but also all of these major partners deliver to us.

So the community is going from strength to strength, which is terrific.

We had 2 or 3 developer summits each year, at the one we had at the end of last year in Santa Clara we had more than 200 people attend.”

When comparing Xen.org to Eclipse.org, Simon replied:

“The difference is that Eclipse is an independent legal entity. With the Xen community, we discussed whether or not to do that and the cost of it and we decided that we would not do that, so we set up a steering committee which oversees several key components of Xen. First of all, the road map that advises the project on where to go, it sets the policy by which the Xen trademark is used and then that is all administered for the benefit of the community with the explicit admission by the advisory board by Citrix

It leaves us without the cost and the legal infrastructures of setting independent .org but with all principle and all the guiding.”

RedHat

The Last Xen Summit was a 200-person conference, mainly Xen developers, with people from Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Intel, AMD, Samsung, Solarflare, Google and of course Xensource/Citrix It’s too bad Ohloh doesn’t support Mercurial (the Xen.org source managemt system) or we could have had real statistics on the Xen contributions but it’s fairly obvious most of the big players are contributing.

Which linux distro didn’t adopt Xen as a virtualization technology ? Xen Adoption in which distro ? True they are supporting other open source technologies apart from Xen and they are working on creating a uniform way to manage different virtualization techniques, but no matter how you look at it.. they all adopted Xen.

So let’s have a look at the companies that are adopting Xen in their products, starting with Citrix.

When XenEnterprise initially launched, Peter Levine told the world that their target audience was to provide easy-to-install (in less than 10 minutes as he could do himself) bare-metal virtualization for the Windows market. They were not planning a RedHat / MySQL style Xen distribution in free and commercial versions with support and updates, they went straight for a target audience that was used to buy proprietary software from a vendor, the Windows users.

Apart from Citrix, which is planning to launch their XenEnterprise 4.1 release in the next couple of months, amongst the first adopters were RedHat and Novell.

Novell

When Novell claimed first adoption , RedHat was saying Xen wasn’t stable enough yet. But today, Xen is a core part of both major Linux Distributors offerings. (and with them lots of other Linux distributions) The race however continues when RedHat and Novell started fighting over which version was about to offer better Window guest support 🙂

Amazon was also a really fast adopter. When Jeff Barr announced the Elastic Compute Cloud Beta, he told the world that they had built EC2 using Xen. In essance, Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, allows users to deploy server instances on-demand. Amazon isn’t selling Xen as a product, they are using Xen to provide the world with one of their most used services. Different startups and SMBs are using EC2 as their home on the web.

And let’s have a look at the people selling Xen implementations.

Virtual Iron came from a dubious non-Xen background and is now positioning its platform as an Enterprise-level platform for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management. Their product consists of a Java-based Virtualization Manager that is used to manage the virtualization services that are deployed on bare-metal servers.

Back in 2007, Simon Crosby wrote:

“The Virtual Iron Hypervisor is not the Xen Hypervisor – it’s a proprietary product (some of which is open-sourced because they use bits & pieces of Xen code). Virtual Iron has not yet made any significant contributions back to the Xen community. Presumably they believe this gives them an edge in the market. Maybe it does. But if that’s the case, I don’t understand why they don’t just stand up and say so, rather than trying to jump on the Xen brand-wagon.”

Simon invited them multiple times to join the Xen community and it seems they accepted the invitation as the Virtual Iron people were even presenting on the last Xen summit. According to Wikipedia, today – as so many others – their platform is based on the Xen Hypervisor. The exact answer is probably somewhere in the source code.

Oracle

When in November 2007, Oracle first launched their OracleVM there was a lot of fuzz because Oracle claimed both features other people didn’t have as well as better performance. Back then I blogged:

“First, seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don’t. I don’t know where he gets that idea.. I have to admit I don’t remember which year it was, but it was somewhere in December when I first started with Live Migration of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy GUI, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use. Second, he is claiming that Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition. The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it. Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Because if they are redistributing the source, everybody just got a faster Xen.”

Earlier, Charles Philips from Oracle had been telling GCN that cite “We’re big proponents of Linux and standard technologies, so we’re going to put the time toward Xen,” Phillips said. “Our strategy will be around Xen.” which didn’t surprise anybody as Oracle had been pushing before to get a single virtualization supportive interface into the Linux kernel.

The openSolaris people started out with building a DomU for Xen, at first, but what they really wanted was to run openSolaris for both their Dom0 and DomU. Today Sun is supporting the sun seemed to be working on Xen for Sparc but it seems they abandoned that effort.

Obviously Sun has is Solaris Zones technology but as running different isolated environments on one kernel is totally different from running different kernels Zones and xVM are obviously complementary technologies.

Toon Vanagt asked Ian Pratt :

“When I look at the Xen GPL License, I found it interesting that Xen is being renamed as xVM by Sun, OracleVM by Oracle. Oracle first announced OracleVM and then had to admit it was actually a tweaked Xen version. But they didn’t publish the tweaked code, did they?”

Ian’s reply:

“Oh no, they have. I mean, the fact is that there are lots of different vendors shipping Xen products that also they ship the Xen engine, pick up the Hypervisor the core engine and incorporate it into their own products. Obviously, the Linux vendors Novell and Redhat, there is Sun, there is obviously Xensource / Citrix , Virtual Iron, etc. Lots of different companies are doing that. Actually the GPL license means that any changes they make will go back into the main project. In reality, pretty much all those companies just pick it up as is. Take the latest stable release, which is maintained, they might add the odd little patch to it, but it really is all very clear, there is all uniformity in the Xen versions that are out there.”

“Most of those companies are very close to mainline Xen. They post a couple of patches in some cases, but not always. What they’ll be doing is taking Xen and it’s really on top of Xen , in the rest of their Virtualization stack that runs in user space, that’s where they’ll be probably doing their own of things, they’ll have their own management tools, they’ll have their own way of wanting to present virtualization to the user, so if you think about what the operating system vendors are typically doing is they want to expose virtualization using the same tools and user interfaces etc. they use for exposing other facilities in that operating system. Which if you think about it, is quite different from what companies like say Xensource is trying to do , which is to try and effectively build a virtual machine hosting appliance. You know, you just put the CD in the server, install it and just manage it from let’s say a windows GUI or a webinterface . So every company is bringing Xen to market in a different way for a different kind of user . And that is where the differentiation happens, but the core engine is the same throughout.”

So which Xen should you choose? One of the main decision points when choosing a Xen vendor is probably whether you want to virtualize Linux, Windows, or a mix. The different vendors have different relationships with Microsoft and will therefore be able to provide different levels of support and integration with their products. But one thing is certain: you have a lot more choice when going for a Xen alternative, than the other way around.

Building and maintaining a community is and will remain a difficult thing. Sun is learning that and Citrix / Xen.org will also have to learn that. Six months from now, the story might be totally different. But today Xen.org is growing stronger every day with corporate contributions from all over the planet.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts, News, People Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, Ian Pratt, linux, Novell, oracle, oraclevm, RedHat, Simon Crosby, Solaris, sun, sun microsystems, virtualisation, virtualization, Xen, xen summit, xen.org, xenserver, XenServer Enterprise, xensource, XVM, zones

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld Europe 2008)

March 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

The interview below is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc.

This interview was recorded at VMWorld Europe 2008 in Cannes, France, and features Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource (Citrix).

DivX HD 1280×720 3.5mbit/s: Play (pop-up)
WMV HD 1280×720 3.5mbit/s: Play (pop-up)

Flash versions: Blip (embedded below), Myspace, Putfile, Revver, Sevenload, Vimeo, Youtube

Interviewer: Tarry Singh
Video blogger: Charbax

Filed Under: Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, CitrixXenServer, CTO, interview, Simon Crosby, video, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWorld, VMWorld Europe, VMWorld Europe 2008, XenEnterprise, xenserver, xensource

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