Citrix versus the Xen community
As the virtual machine software competition heats up, one would expect representatives of each of the suppliers to take shots at one another in the media. I've seen a recent example of this.Two of the proponents of Xen, Citrix and Virtual Iron, appear to be having at it in the media.
Pot shots
On July 3, 2008, SearchStorage presented some interesting thoughts on how open source virtual machine software technology, such as Xen or KVM, pose challenges to companies offering single-vendor products, such as VMware and Microsoft, in an article titled "Open-source hypervisors pose challenge to VMware." Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix's Virtualization Management, targeted Virtual Iron with statements concerning which storage virtualization techniques would be best in a Xen-based environment. He went on to say that Citrix owned the Xen hypervisor and that allowed Citrix to offer better, more tightly integrated solutions based upon that technology.On July 9, 2008, Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Iron, fired back in a blog post titled, Simon Says Something Scary. In his post, Tony pointed out that the Xen technology is the result of the efforts of an open source community and the results are open source rather than being owned by a single company. He went on to point out that integration of technology in the areas of management of virtual resources and storage virtualization were key success factors.
As one would expect, both Simon and Tony are right about the importance of integration of virtual machine technology into the overall environment that includes other tools, such as management technology, security, storage technology and many types of application environments. I realize that Tony was attempting to respond to a slight to the whole Xen community, but it really seems important for the Xen community, as a whole, to remember who is the real competition. In the end, other members of the community should not be the primary focus of competitive efforts.
What's really going one?
From a broad vantage point, the X86 world enjoys the luxury of having at least four different lines of virtual machine technology available. The list includes VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. Each has its merits. Each has its limitations. As one would expect the competition among them is becoming quite fierce. VMware and Microsoft are putting forth their own technology. Xen and KVM are both results of community efforts.If we focus in on the Xen community we would find suppliers such as Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, other suppliers of Linux distributions, Sun and Oracle. Contributors to this technology reads like the who's who of X86-based hardware and software.The pot shots we're seeing show that this community is in "coopetition" mode now and it appears that Citrix is trying to blow that up into a full competition. This, in my view, is not really helpful to Citrix's cause or to the community as a whole.
I believe what's really going on is that Citrix paid a great deal of money for XenSource and is struggling to find and then exploit ways to get a positive return on that investment. Since virtual machine software is in the process of becoming a commodity, Citrix can't duplicate VMware's approach of charging a premium price for their product. It is not clear that even VMware can continue down that path when Microsoft's pricing is considered.
Other suppliers of Xen technology simply include Xen virtual machine software technology in their operating systems, embedded it in their hardware or offer it as part of a bundle that includes their management/orchestration/automation products.They expect to receive revenue based upon the entire value they're adding to a customer's environment rather than for the Xen technology all by itself.
Citrix appears to have decided that if it "shoots" all of the other members of the Xen community and ends up that last standing member that it will be able to, in the end, get those premium prices. I'm not sure that when historians look back on this time, that Citrix will be thought wise to have engaged in this battle at this time when it might also mean that the open source community that supports Xen become reluctant to work with Citrix.
With apologies to the folks who love the stilted English in the computer game Zero Wing, it appears that Citrix is trying to tell the Xen community "All your Xen revenues are belong to us." While this might appear to be a good strategy to the folks at Citrix, in the end, it plays into the hands of both Microsoft and VMware. It would be far better if the Xen community banded together and focused on the real competition rather than wasting limited resources engaging one another in battles.