Will Citrix-branded Cloud.com offer solid support for KVM?

Summary: Even as its Xen brain trust has departed, Citrix is moving ahead with an open source cloud IaaS strategy.On Tuesday, the Ft Lauderdale, Fl virtualization company announced it has completed its purchase of Cloud.

By Paula Rooney for Linux and Open Source | July 12, 2011 -- 09:24 GMT (02:24 PDT)

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Even as its Xen brain trust has departed, Citrix is moving ahead with an open source cloud IaaS strategy.

On Tuesday, the Ft Lauderdale, Fl virtualization company announced it has completed its purchase of Cloud.com and its CloudStack product line. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal is a big step forward for the virtualization company, which recently lost its two top Xen gurus, the founders of Xen.org, who left to launch a startup.

But there is a pending question: what will happen to Cloud.com's KVM support?

Citrix is committed to an OpenStack strategy and Cloud.com is now hypervisor agnostic. But today's press release makes no mention of KVM:

The Cloud.com product line will continue to support leading commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer® and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen®. Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of “platform-as-a-service” development environments, storage systems, servers and management software.

In March, Cloud.com announced a major upgrade of its platform that specifically points out support for KVM and Xen -- both open source hypervisors. Citrix has announced plans to support OpenStack.

Citrix has endorsed Xen for some time.

Here's Cloud.com's release on March, as compared to today's Citrix announcement:

CloudStack 2.2., which became available March 15, is a hybrid cloud solution that is hypervisor agnostic and ships with support for VMware vSphere 4, Citrix XenServer 5.6 and the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) running simultaneously in a single cloud, the company announced.

Update: Citrix confirmed that Cloud.com will continue to support KVM.

Topics: Virtualization, Hardware, Open Source

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RE: Will Citrix-branded Cloud.com offer solid support for KVM?

Confuse 'em with facts is still the magic mantra here. Not a single word about the really important issues with the misnomered cloud services. This kind of stuff only adds to the unknown surprises in store for anyone tryiing to use a server farm. I somehow doubt that the real issues of so called cloud services will ever be properly addressed, let along protected in any strong way. Funny, too, since all it would take is for ISP's to enforce the current RFC's they are supposedly bound by. And that's only the beginnings of a lot of things ISP and server operators could do. In fact, it seems all of them still need class 101 of everything to do with cloud management beyond a few virtual technologies and whatever else they can buzz about and sound authorative about.
Cloud? No thanks; got something better right here & it's less work to use and keep track of!

tom@...

14 July, 2011 10:09

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