Citrix declares war on VMware?

Straws in the wind suggest that the desktop virtualisation market is starting to warm up.

We're quite accustomed to the idea of virtual servers today: data centres are filling up with hefty, high-powered devices whose job increasingly is to host a number of guest servers, replacing separate lumps of hardware.

The client desktop on the other hand is a different story. There are some significant challenges, mainly associated with the user experience, including responsiveness, application compatibility and - to an extent - 3D graphics. There's also a lot more desktop clients out there than servers, and users feel protective about their personal computers.

So the virtualisation industry has taken the easier route and mainly concerned itself with servers. After all, that's where their customers find it easiest to make major changes.

But an entry on the well-known virtualisation blog virtualization.info has raised a bit of a firestorm.

Blog owner and analyst Alessandro Perilli posted a story about Citrix targeting VMware's core desktop virtualisation technology VDI with its Xen-based product line. Citrix' heartland has long been about remote control desktops anyway, and virtualisation added extra power to its elbow. Perilli flagged up that Citrix had posted a comparison matrix on its site that amounts to a declaration of war - or at least a statement of intent.

And that's provoked comments from users of both products - although Citrix users seem to be especially scathing. Comments such as: "lots of this material is pure marketing stuff, exaggerations, and confusing statements", and "We tried to deploy it but there are too many moving pieces that have been put together" are typical.

It's just one argument, it's just one post among many, it's just today's little spat. But it's also a straw in the wind that hints at a bigger head-to-head in future...