virtualization.info

At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.

Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:

• Latest Xen 3.4.1
• Linux 2.6.27 Kernel
• Windows PV Drivers, Microsoft Certified (Binary Only)
• XAPI Enterprise-class Management Tool Stack (web based management interface)
• VM Lifecycle: Live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
• Resource Pools: Safe live relocation, auto configuration, DR
• Host Configuration: Flexible storage management, networking, power management
• Event Tracking: Progress, notification
• Secure Communication using SSL
• Upgrade and Patching Capabilities
• Real-time Performance Monitoring and Alerting
• Basic SR-IOV Support
• CDROM and Network Host Installer
• Full Featured “xe” CLI and web services API

Xen.org also published a tentative roadmap for version 1.0:

• vSwitch Integration - first step to enabling multi-tenant network infrastructure, to enable firewall and routing rules to follow VMs as they migrate, and to enable flexible traffic monitoring of virtual ports
• Netchannel 2 Integration - improve scalability of xen networking on larger systems and to accelerate inter-VM traffic
• SR-IOV Networking - Although Xen support SR-IVO NICs today, configuration requires manual steps. By extending the control strack we can make SR-IOV simply a transparent optimization that is enabled automatically where possible
• Booting guests from SR-IOV HBAs
• Libvirt bindings
• Native support for OVF in the tool stack
• Drive DMTF standards for virtualization and cloud
• Smart error recovery to minimize impact of hardware errors
• Work closely with other projects and vendors to enable web-based mutli-tenant mgmt and provisioning; e.g. Eucalyptus, Enomaly, OpenNebula, etc.
• Increased management scalability for dealing with 1,000s of Xen hosts - federation of resource pools
• Aggregation of cheap local storage - integrated drdb/parallax
• OCFS2 integration

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Last week both VMware and Citrix announced their Q3 2009 earnings.

VMware reported its US revenue in decline for 1% (to $246 million) from Q3 2008.  International revenues instead grew 9% (to $244 million) from the same period of 2008.
Services revenues (software maintenance and professional services) increased 33% (to $250 million) from Q3 2008. 

Citrix instead reported a global decline of its license revenue for 18% (-15% in EMEA, -5% in APAC and +5% in Americas) from Q3 2009, while the revenue generated from license updates increased 7% for the same period.
Technical service revenue (consulting, training and technical support) increased 20%, while online services revenue (most likely the GoTo product portfolio) increased 21% from Q3 2008.

The two competitors are performing pretty well in the stock market if we look at the year performance:

Labels: Citrix, VMware

The article virtualization.info published just last week about Citrix joining the The Linux Foundation generated a lot of interest and comments.
Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, personally answered a few readers about the reasons behind the value of a free XenServer and the strategy behind it.

In doing so Crosby disclosed very interesting information. First he claimed that XenServer costs to VMware $300MM per year in lost revenue, probably a Citrix internal projection considering its current market share.

Much more important than that, today Crosby candidly unveiled that Citrix is about to fully open source XenServer.
You read right: the company CTO is not talking about Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community. He’s talking about its commercial implementation, XenServer, where Citrix invested so far, that is offered as a free product since February and that the Burton Group considered as enterprise-ready as VMware ESX.

Here’s his full answer that contains the breaking news:

XenServer is 100% free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capabiliy, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes form Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head to head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present.

Crosby further confirmed his words after the comment above.

This move may or may not increase the Citrix market share, and may or may not oblige VMware to drop the price of ESX earlier than expected.
virtualization.info will publish additional details as soon as they are available.

Meanwhile it’s worth considering what Oracle and Novell will do after this will be formalized.
Both companies have their own implementations of Xen, and both are working to release more sophisticated platforms that offer the same features that XenServer offer today.
If Citrix gives away the code, does it make any sense for Oracle and Novell to continue their own development of the hypervisor?

It will also be interesting to see if this move will generate more virtualization players, as it makes so much cheaper and easier to enter the virtualization market by focusing just on the management layer.

Update: Citrix reached out virtualization.info to add an official statement to this move:

XenServer is offered to the community as the basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).  There will be substantial additional contributions coming from other community partners, but we aim to make all of our technology in XenServer (other than XenCenter, which is a stateless Microsoft .NET client GUI and therefore not appropriate for the XCP community and its intention to make a great cloud platform for large scale clouds to consume and automate using their automation and management systems) available to the community in OSS. 

Other features will come in too, like the Open vSwitch, and we will drive from there to develop additional storage repositories and so on.  But the key emphasis is the use of XCP as a platform for the entire community, with a starting point, for which we have offered the code base of XenServer. 

Key partners such as VA Linux, Oracle, Novell, Fujitsu and Intel and AMD are all committed to the ongoing delivery of additional value to the platform, which will therefore have multiple routes to market, a strong ISV community and hopefully deliver revenue to a broad sector of the market.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced the newest version of its XenDesktop. While the product is about to deliver interesting features, many customers complained about the new licensing scheme because Citrix moved a concurrent user model to a named user model.

The product is not out yet (the release is planned for November 16) but Citrix, listening to the feedbacks, already changed its pricing strategy.

With an informal announcement on his corporate blog, Sumit Dhawan, Vice President of Product Marketing, describes the new rules:

1. Customers can choose between the “per named user” model and the “per device” model for XenDesktop Enterprise ($225) and Platinum Editions ($350).
   Same license for both uses. Same price.
2. The Standard Edition license is replaced by a brand new VDI Edition which has a “per named user” and “per device” license model ($95) as well as the dear old “per concurrent user” license model ($195).

The new VDI edition doesn’t include XenApp but still supports 3rd party hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware VI/vSphere.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

A week ago virtualization.info introduces a new comment system powered by Disqus.
It has a number of features we were really keen to offer: it allows our readers to log-in with their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID profile, it allows threaded conversation (and subscription to them by email and RSS), it allows to vote and flag for review comments, etc.
It even exposes a trackback URL so that our readers know which websites are continuing the discussion started here.

There's no way to know if this new system helped or if it’s just because of the articles we recently published, but for sure the number of comments we are receiving skyrocketed. 
Some of the last ones are very interesting like one coming from Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

In our article titled Citrix joins The Linux Foundation, looking for a Xen-powered kernel?, Crosby answers to Jagane Sundar, founder of Thinsy, and exposes a very interesting information about the competition with VMware that we don’t think Citrix ever published:

…is certainly true that lots of folk have not made money out of Xen - that is, it has become a competitive tool rather than a profitability tool. That is, none of Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or Citrix with XenServer, charge for the base platform. However Citrix XenServer is 100% a revenue generator for Citrix. First, it represents approximately $300MM in lost revenue for VMware per year…

This is probably an esteem that Citrix made internally, considering the amount of XenServer installations that customers report. It remains a claim until there are some numbers and 3rd party verification.
Nonetheless it’s interesting to report because it gives a raw idea of how much Citrix may be disturbing the VMware activity.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

In July VMware attempted to win those Virtual Iron customers left in the cold by Oracle with an aggressive discount program.

Now it seems that VMware has to defend against a similar move from Citrix, which launches today the Open Door program.

The rules are simple:

The Project Open Door promotion will be effective worldwide from October 1 – March 31, 2010. Customers who decommission five or more VMware vSphere 4 or VI3 servers and replace them with XenServer or Hyper-V plus the Citrix Essentials solution, receive the following: 

• A free five incident support pack (5 by 8 hours) for every five servers converted
• A voucher for six hours of online training for every five servers converted
• Free migration tools for seamlessly transferring virtual machines from VMware to XenServer or Hyper-V

The attempt doesn’t seem particularly aggressive and in normal circumstances we won’t cover it on virtualization.info. But there’s one thing that makes the announcement worth the mention: Citrix is investing its support and training money even if customers switch to Hyper-V (plus Essentials).

At this point it’s clear enough that Citrix wants to replicate the profitable synergy “Microsoft Terminal Server plus its Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp” with “Microsoft Hyper-V plus its Essentials”. 
But it is still notable that Citrix is now actively encouraging the adoption of a hypervisor that is not XenServer.

Of course the logic behind this move is always the same: “Both hypervisors are free. If the customer wants XenServer we are there to make money with Essentials. If the customer prefers Hyper-V, well, we are there to make the money with Essentials as well.”

The point is that who’s winning the most here is Microsoft. Citrix in fact may turn into a giant promotion and sales machine for Hyper-V. 
The Citrix sales force may not have any incentive to push for XenServer if the customers is more inclined to adopt Hyper-V. And if the customer feels that Citrix doesn’t XenServer at heart itself, then he will build no trust on it and will more likely go to Hyper-V.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

By now every virtualization.info reader knows that VMware and Citrix are completely focused on competing in the VDI space rather than on “simple” server consolidation.
For now most of the discussion is mostly around their connection brokers (and their remote desktop protocols), but in a matter of months it will be extended to their application virtualizations solutions and their upcoming client hypervisors.

Now, a question: What is one of the most viewed threads on the VMware VMTN forums dedicated to the connection broker View?

Answer: A thread titled “What made you chose VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop”, which was started at the end of April and so far collected almost 3,000 views.

The thread is full of interesting comments. Of course it’s impossible to say if all of them come from real customers. For sure many come from well-known VMware users.
Also, not every comment, even the genuine ones, reports correct information. Nonetheless the sum of them contributes to clarify the customers sentiment about both products, and most of all about VDI as a technology.

Some of the things they said so far are well worth a mention here and should be considered along with the architectural reference blueprints that both VMware and Citrix released so far (our emphasis):

…I have found View very easy to install, configure and manage, from bare metal to delivery of 4 nodes less than a day. you have two consoles, vCenter and View Administrator.

Now compare this to XD the same 4 node deployment was over a week of shoehorning etc, bear in mind this is on Tier one hardware. Also to get similar functionality you will be presented with I think 6 different management consoles. you also have the added benefit of Offline Desktops (albeit experimental) with view that is not available with XD.

True ICA is a better remote protocol that RDP, but form my opinion the pain points are too great for the product…

…Finally as for price, again, I can only tell you what we've gotten back and XD has come in more expensive than View and that includes purchasing Splitview as well.

…There is a learning curve for most who enter the Citrix world. There is a bit more complexity in the configuration as some has stated, but we are reaping the benefits…

…Basically the biggest reason is that most companies are a VMware shop. So it makes sense to only have to call one vendor for end to end support.

Also cost. View costs less per desktop compared to XenDesktop i.e licensing, more VM's per physical host, linked clones for storage savings etc. TCO is very important because desktop costs are already very low.

Stability. View has less components and VMware historically does great QA on the products that they release. Microsoft and Citrix, not so well.

Big reason, VMware views linked clone technology. SAN storage is not cheap, PC hard drives are. You need to be able to sell this to senior management. When you tell them the hard drive storage is going to be 4 times as much they will laugh at you…

…To be honest, we chose VMware for the cost. Presently we are having a few issues that have made us reconsider our choice.

One issue you need to closely look at is in regards to using remote virtual desktops, if that is your intended use, and the interaction with the OS of the clients who will be connecting in. Page 18 of the View Manager Administration guide is a must see if you want to use remote clients through the view portal. Information I wish I had during our evaluation…

…One of my vendors was giving me a lot of pressure to validate XD for my environment. I am PoCing View 3.1 right now. I'm not looking at XD for the following reasons:

1) I'm a VMware shop 1 throat to strangle.

2) Just because XD works with ESX backends now doesn't mean they will in the future…

…To be honest, the only advantage that Citrix has right now is their ICA display protocol. This is the only reason that Citrix is even being evaluated at most companies…

(please note anyway that all the comments above refer to View 3.x and XenDesktop 3.x and not the upcoming XenDesktop 4)

Citrix felt the need to address some of the points emphasized above, and published an article that covers the installation and management complexity, the RAM consumption, and the price.
This one is worth a read too.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

In 2007, when Citrix, one of Microsoft's strongest allies, acquired XenSource, a startup whose success depends on an open source product (the Xen hypervisor), nobody really believed the move would benefit the community in any way.

The major concerns were that, over time, Citrix would abandon the development of Xen to focus on a proprietary hypervisor, that Citrix could try to influence the Xen development to provide an indirect advantage to Microsoft and/or that Citrix could use its influence on the Xen project to damage all the competitors that were relying on it (at that time Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Oracle).

After the XenSource acquisition, some major vendors (Red Hat and IBM for example) and individual contributors lost interest in the Xen project and started to focus on KVM (IBM effort, Red Hat effort). Possibly because of this relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, possibly because Citrix has never been an open source champion.
Of course VMware did all its best to facilitate the exodus from the Xen project.

virtualization.info is unable to exactly track or measure the Citrix contributions to the Xen project since the XenSource acquisition, which made progresses in the last two years and has an impressive roadmap.
People more informed on this aspect are welcome to comment to the post with details.

For sure Citrix approached the open source world from different angles: it invested in the networking vendor Vyatta, which competes against Cisco an open source software router; it’s behind the development of the first open source virtual switch for virtual infrastructures, the Open Virtual Switch, and now it’s supporting the creation of an open source cloud computing platform, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Whatever the company has done so far, it was not enough to convince Linus Torvalds and the other Linux maintainers to include Xen in the kernel, side by side with KVM.
It seems like just a technical issue, but maybe it’s more than that.

The Citrix new move to the open source world is joining the Linux Foundation.

The official reason behind this move is to ensure that the Linux operating system works the best inside its XCP cloud and in the upcoming client hypervisor XenClient:

“The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaborative work on requirements for Linux and complementary projects such as the Xen Project, Xen Client hypervisor Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative,” said Ian Pratt, founder and chair of Xen.org and vice president of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems. “Citrix has joined the Linux Foundation both in its role as leader of the Xen Project and because it ships commercial products based on Xen.”

In addition to developing the Xen hypervisor, the Xen community is working on the development of complete client hypervisor and cloud virtualization platform products, which incorporate Linux as an embedded, secure, optimized run time for the Virtual Machine Monitor. The Xen community also develops open source technology to permit Linux to run with optimal performance on other hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server.

Anyway, it’s probably safe to speculate that more than anything else, Citrix wants to see Xen shipped out-of-the-box with every Linux distribution in the market. And becoming a Linux Foundation member may be the first step to achieve the task.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Xen

Just before the launch of XenDesktop 4.0, Citrix released a 42-pages reference architecture on how to build a VDI environment for 10,000 seats with the following characteristics:

The blueprint specifically applies to the previous version of XenDesktop and discusses the following areas of the project:

• Virtualization Infrastructure: A detailed design on the underlying virtualization infrastructure focusing on hardware, capacity, high-availability and storage.
• Operating System Delivery: A detailed design on the delivery of the base operating system to hosted and streamed desktops with a focus on farm design, capacity, cache and high-availability.
• Application Delivery: Focuses on the integration of the application layer in regards to desktop delivery, specifically applications, integration and application optimization.
• Desktop Delivery: Creates a design for the desktop delivery process, with a focus on capacity, groups and group settings.
• Virtual Desktop: Focuses on defining the components of a desktop image for hosted and streamed desktops. The section looks at virtual desktop specifications, desktop images and storage requirements.
• Access Design: Focuses on how internal and external users receive their resources.
• Business Continuity Design: Focuses on designing a solution that reduces the impact of service faults on users.

Independently on the decision to adopt Citrix technologies, it’s a good starting point that anybody interested in VDI may want to check.

In the past VMware published similar papers, like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Deployment Considerations and VDI Implementation Best Practices.

Labels: Citrix, Papers, VDI

Yesterday Citrix announced the forthcoming release of XenDesktop 4.0, which will be available November 16.

The Citrix answer to the upcoming VMware View 4.0 (and its software version of Teradici PCoIP protocol) is more aggressive than ever.

First of all, the XenDesktop 4.0 Enterprise and Platinum editions are going to include a full, unrestricted edition of XenApp.
The new strategy at Citrix, called FlexCast, is to make no distinction between a desktop deployed on a virtual machine (what we call today VDI), one on a bare metal machine, or one served by a terminal services farm.
XenDesktop plus XenApp are going to allow remote access to all these desktops or to some of their applications, along with application and OS streaming where applicable.

It wouldn’t be too surprising if, over time, Citrix would decide to completely fade out XenApp as a stand-alone technology and name, to focus just on the XenDesktop brand.

The second thing is that the new HDX adaptive technology (which includes the ICA protocol) has been further improved and includes the following components:

• HDX MediaStream for Flash
  Accelerates multimedia performance sending Flash content in its native compressed format to the user’s device and leveraging the local processing power for playback to provide truly local PC-like performance.
• HDX RealTime
  Enhances real-time communications by enabling support for webcams and improving voice and music audio quality while still consuming minimal bandwidth.
• HDX Plug-n-Play
  Enhances support for specialized keyboards (such as the Bloomberg keyboard) and dictation devices like the Philips Speechmike; Also provides users with flexibility to customize their multi-monitor configurations with special screen arrangements (such as U, L, T, reverse L and inverse T shapes) and different sizes, resolutions and orientations.
• HDX 3D
  Extends desktop virtualization to advanced users of CAD/CAM and engineering applications, even over WAN connections. HDX 3D enables organizations to source talent on a global basis, rapidly provision those workers with high powered desktops and professional 3D applications, yet maintain centralized control over intellectual property.
• HDX IntelliCache
  Optimizes performance and network utilization for multiple users by caching bandwidth intensive data and graphics throughout the infrastructure and transparently delivering them as needed from the most efficient location.

Citrix also changed the licensing model of XenDesktop, moving from a concurrent user model to a named user model, as Brian Madden details in his coverage.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, has additional insights about this topic that are really worth a check.

Last but not least, XenDesktop 4.0 ships with both XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V (and continues to support VMware ESX).
Which is like saying that to Citrix it’s completely irrelevant now which hypervisor you use. They just want the premium profit coming from the renewed global effort to centralize the employees workstations.

And to be absolutely sure that XenDesktop arrives in the enterprise customers’ hands, XenDesktop 4.0 is going to be available free of charge to the ones that subscribed the software assurance. Even if it now packs more features than previous versions.
All the others, with a special focus on the XenApp customers which represent the core business of Citrix, the company is offering a remarkable trade-up program to convert them into XenDesktop customers.

Update: The XenDesktop 4.0 licensing change (and its pricing policy) didn’t encounter the favor of customers and prospects.
Citrix reacted quickly to try to recover the positive mood around the product features, and promised to “actively investigating appropriate licensing programs for XenDesktop 4 to address [the use cases where the per-named-user licensing doesn’t work]”.

Citrix has four big challenges:

• How move its core audience from presentation virtualization (XenApp) to hardware virtualization+application virtualization+presentation virtualization (XenDesktop)
• How to attract a new class of customers, that are more interested in hardware virtualization than presentation virtualization
• How to build a brand awareness (which implies trust) that can rival with VMware in the hardware virtualization market VMware leads
• How to justify the jump to and create confidence in desktop virtualization

As Brian Madden already said in his article, the reactions that this licensing change provoked don’t seem to help Citrix in solving any of the four above.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

Last week Citrix announced the public beta of its premium management solution for the Microsoft hypervisor: Essentials for Hyper-V 5.5.

The main new feature of this version is the support for Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 (plus Windows 7, for the OEM’ed VMLogix Lab Manager), but it also introduces the StorageLink Site Recovery technology for Hyper-V.

StorageLink Site Recovery allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays offer without using multiple consoles, and allows to test the recovery process by restoring the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The technology may become the foundation of a new product able to compete with VMware Site Recovery Manager, and now Citrix is in the position to offer it to its customers and the Microsoft ones.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

Less than 10 months ago, Citrix released its own data center orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The future of virtualization (and cloud computing) depends on automation, so products like this are very welcome here at virtualization.info.
Unfortunately, for many customers, it’s not easy to recognize their value at today.
A company has to reach a critical mass of virtual machines before it can finally see the benefits of automating a large part of their lifecycle.

At the same time orchestration is often associated with scripting, which sounds like a complex procedure that only the most technical members of the staff can own, and that can be used only in very circumstantiated scenarios. 
Orchestration is much beyond scripting but virtualization vendors in general are not doing a great job in clarifying so, and so it’s still really hard to get the real potential of the technology.

Citrix, like VMware or Novell with their products, didn’t push much its Workflow Studio so far.
Even for the launch of Workflow Studio 2.0 the company isn’t really spending much effort to say what’s new:

• Native XenApp activity libraries (and many other additional activities)
• Remote runtimes
• Simplified management interface
• Enhanced security features
• Simplified installation and configuration
• Improved SDK
• Simplified workflow Designer
• Globalization support

What the above means? Let’s put aside the last six items. Are the first two anything that a non-scripting guy could understand?

Unless the vendors will start to reconsider the way they communicate the value and capabilities of their orchestration frameworks it’s very unlikely that a significant number of customers will get interested.

Labels: Citrix, Platform Orchestration, Releases

More than one year ago IBM signed a partnership with the startup Desktone to implement a 1,400 seats VDI architecture powered by their technology at the Pike County Schools.

That move cleared the IBM plan to become a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud provider which became a reality at the end of last month.

Two weeks ago in fact IBM announced the upcoming availability of its new Smart Business Desktop, a IaaS architecture powered by VMware, Citrix, Desktone and Wyse products.

The company website doesn’t clarify which vendors will provide which components but it’s pretty easy to guess (Citrix helped with a specific announcement): VMware will provide the hypervisor (ESX) and management layer (vCenter), Citrix will provide the connection broker (XenDesktop) and remote desktop protocol (HDX), Wyse will provide the thin clients and Desktone of course will glue the whole thing with its self-service portal for customers and policy manager for the cloud provider.

IBM plans to launch the Smart Business Desktop offering in October 2009 with a subscription model.

For the very first time a hardware virtualization architecture will be an alternative to the web-based architectures that Google represents so well. Hopefully virtualization.info will be able to access the IBM cloud and report about it after some extended use.

Labels: Citrix, Desktone, IBM, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

Earlier this week Amazon announced its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, a segmented version of its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) that is accessible only through a VPN connection.

There were at least a couple of reasons to launch VPC right now: sure, it is the 3rd anniversary of EC2, but most of all it’s the week before VMworld, the VMware conference that this year is going to have a major focus on cloud computing.

Both Xen.org and VMware will in fact launch two new initiatives called Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and VMware vCloud Express.

XCP will be a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, to extend the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. And it will be supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board members, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle.

So the Xen Cloud Platform will merge together new and existing pieces of software in a single package even if it’s not clear at the moment what will be part of the platform exactly.

For sure XCP will include support for the DMFT existing and upcoming standards: the OVF  to load virtual machines from any 3rd party hypervisor (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, etc.) and to migrate them across federated clouds, and the upcoming VMAN interface.
The VMAN support alone won’t be enough to grant a seamless migration from a private virtual data center to a public or private XCP cloud, so it’s very likely that the platform will support some virtual machines live migration capabilities.

XCP will also integrate the just surfaced Open vSwitch, an open source virtual switch which offers features similar to the ones provided by the Cisco Nexus 1000V in VMware vSphere 4.0.

XCP will also feature some advanced storage capabilities that support multi-tenant cloud services, and this mean mean that Citrix will contribute the project by releasing a part of its StorageLink technology as open source.

The presence of standardized interfaces and open components means that any commercial offering could be able to interoperate, extend or manage the Xen Cloud Platform in a not-too-distant future.
And this includes existing clouds like Amazon EC2 or RackSpace Cloud Servers (formerly Mosso) as well as the products offered by any vendor, including VMware.

Of course it’s entirely expected that Citrix will launch a version of its Essential for XCP but we already know for sure that the Xen Cloud Platform will support open source management solutions like Eucalyptus (adopted at NASA) and OpenNebula.

The existence of VMware vCloud Express, was revealed by Forbes just two days ago.
Forbes describes it as a “an easy way to get up and running with vCloud service”, but the moment there are no other news about it.
VMware is expected to formally announce the product early next week.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, VMware, Xen

In May, during its main conference Synergy, Citrix announced the existence of an open source virtual switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V that Cisco made available for VMware vSphere.

In early June, the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby shared a very few details about it, but so far most of the virtualization community doesn’t know much about it. But the official website about the project quietly appeared online now: the product is called Open vSwitch and is released under the Apache 2 open source license.

The first release (which is almost complete and available online as well) is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:

• Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN
• Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
• Per VM policing
• NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing
• Kernel-based forwarding
• Support for OpenFlow
• Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
  (The Open vSwitch can be even used inside a plain Linux distribution in place of operating system bridge)

On top of that the following features are part of the roadmap:

• User-space forwarding engine
• sFlow
• Compatibility layer for VDE
• Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation)
• Full L3 support + NAT
• Priority-based QoS
• More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NetFlow)
• 802.1x/RADIUS
• Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)

The version available online is near the 1.0 (0.90.4), but it’s only available as source code.
The online documentation already explains how to use it with a XenServer 5.5 host.

Labels: Citrix, KVM, Xen

Yesterday Citrix announced that more than 10% of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated XenServer for production use in the last four months.

This seems to imply that these companies are actually using the Citrix hypervisor in production side-by-side with ESX, but the sentence may also mean that the product has been activated and there’s a plan to use it in production in future.
It doesn’t really matter: a 3rd party trusted entity has to confirm this market share increase before any conclusion can be drawn.

Anyway, if confirmed, it may be a bomb against the VMware fortress: it is a well-known fact that one of the biggest VI3.x selling points is its massive adoption in Fortune 100 (100%), Fortune 500 (98%) and Global Fortune 500 (95%) companies.

If more 10% of Global Fortune are really using the XenServer in production side-by-side with ESX then the landscape is changing more quickly than what most people believe.

More importantly, this may open the doors for a new wave of virtualization products that support multiple hypervisors as their first feature.
Of course the market already offers a number of them in different segments (capacity planning, P2V migration, VDI connection brokering, etc.) but the strategy for most vendors is to focus on ESX support and then carefully evaluate if Hyper-V or XenServer (rarely both together) are worth spending additional resources.

Not too surprisingly, this announcement comes just a few weeks after the Microsoft claim that Hyper-V conquered 24% of the market share.
It’s evident that the two are progressively increasing their pressure on VMware in this moment of transition.

Labels: Citrix

Exactly two years ago Citrix announced the acquisition of XenSource, officially entering the server virtualization (with XenServer) and desktop virtualization (with XenDesktop) markets, in direct competition with the former partner VMware.

Citrix invested $500 million in this operation but spent the minimum possible effort to spread the word about its existence in the hardware virtualization universe.
Of course the relevance of XenSource in the open source world, the implications on the Xen project and the price paid for the startup, engaged the community for a while, but beyond that the company did almost nothing to change its image of terminal services / application delivery company into something different, that could attract a large number of competitors’ customers.

It is safe to say that for the first 18 months after the acquisition, the Citrix marketing didn’t take any major step in reposition the company as a real player in a market that was completely new before the arrival of XenSource folks.
So it doesn’t surprise much that most customers didn’t perceive (and still do not) XenServer as a serious alternative to VMware ESX.

Still now, the only major tool that the company uses to evangelize XenServer and its efforts in the server and desktop virtualization space is the voice of the well-known Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO of XenSource and now CTO of the Virtualization & Management division at Citrix.
But his voice is just a whisper compared to the massive marketing effort that VMware puts in place every quarter and the tireless activity of its ubiquitous community.
Without the Virtual Reality Check benchmarks (Feb 09) and Burton Group's report on XenServer maturity (July 09), life would be even too easy for competitors.

Something is changing anyway.
Citrix probably decided that competing on the server virtualization market with VMware is a useless waste of energy as the hypervisor may become a commodity that customers prefer to find inside their operating systems, and so gave away XenServer for free. And it’s getting aggressive on the desktop virtualization space.

For the first time since the acquisition Citrix openly and directly address competition against VMware, and does that very aggressively.
On the corporate website a comparison matrix titled Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View: Which Is the Best VDI Solution? is a public declaration of war:

On the blogs and webinar, Citrix even calls allies like NetApp (which is the biggest competitor of the VMware parent company EMC) when talking about Storage Best Practices for High Definition VDI and says:

FAQ:  What differentiates the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution from the one from VMware?
Answer: As outlined in the detailed competitive comparison on our website,  the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution differs from the one from VMware in four key areas: 
1.       User Experience:  Citrix's HDX Technologies optimizes the user experience by leveraging integrated client/endpoint-, server-, or network side technologies to allow users an optimal high definition user experience to a broad range of applications - streaming media, Flash, audio, 3D graphics, etc - over both the Local Area Network and the Wide Area Network.  This is in stark contrast to VMware View, which will work for LAN use cases, but not for the WAN.
2.       Application Management:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution includes integrated XenApp, Citrix's proven application virtualization solution, which works with 1000's of Windows applications, in either a Hosted or Streamed mode.  VMware View integrates with VMware's ThinApp application virtualization technology.  However,  the VMware View solution requires bundling all delivered applications into the VM, which makes application delivery much more cumbersome and difficult to manage.
3.       Flexibility:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution offers IT organizations the flexibility to use a variety of VM Infrastructure - Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, or VMware ESX.  By contrast, VMware View ties an IT organization to only VMware ESX.  This gives the customers the flexibility to choose the most powerful cost-effective best-of-breed VDI solution.
4.       Policy-based access control:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution leverages a familiar Microsoft and/or Citrix management user interface for managing granular -  by user groups or individuals - access to data and applications.

The point is not if the statements above are true or not (plenty of virtualization.info readers will rush to clarify this, for sure). The point is that Citrix may have finally decided what to do with XenSource technologies and it’s moving to execute the plan.
If true customers now at least have a more concrete understanding of the strategy to make their decision.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

During his last earnings call the VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t just announce a 38% drop in profits and the hiring of several new executives, but also the company forecast for the VDI adoption.

It’s not a secret that VMware is pushing hard on VDI since April 2007, when it acquired the startup Propero and decided to compete against its former best partner Citrix and all the rest of the ecosystem that itself created in 2006.

So it’s surprising to hear Maritz saying that a serious adoption of VDI won’t happen before another one or two years.

The question was submitted by a Citi analyst during the earnings call, who asked to separate the hype from the reality. Maritz answered:

…That’s going to take a while for them to get comfortable to really understand all the issues involved and actually get into production so we view this as incredibly important with tremendous amount of potential but it’s really going to be into 2010 and 2011 I think before we start to show a significant impact in terms of large amounts of revenue…

The comment is even more surprising when we compare the results that VMware and Citrix announced in the desktop virtualization space.
Maritz said that his company secured two new Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) in Q2 2009, while the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reported 200 new customers for the same timeframe, and 10 of them booked over 1000 virtual desktops.

It more than clear that VDI is not ready for a mainstream adoption, but this lack of confidence from VMware is something pretty new.
Maybe this is why the company is actively looking for a new CTO that can lead the desktop virtualization strategy.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

At the end of July Citrix announced the financial results for Q2 2009.
Like VMware, also this company is managing well the worldwide financial crisis, keeping a flat revenue and a nice profit growth, but it’s still unclear how positive has been the release of XenServer for free. In details:

Citrix Q2 revenue is flat compared to Q2 2008, staying at $369M.
The new licenses revenue is down 15% while the license renewal revenue is up 9% along with technology services revenue (+3%) and the online services revenue (+18%).
In Americas Citrix gains 3% while in EMEA it loses 12% in revenue.

The company reports a 23% profits increase, up to $42.5M compared to $34.6M in Q2 2008.

A more detailed analysis reveals that the XenApp business is losing 8%, while the NetScaler business is up 4% in revenue but the most important fact is that the XenDesktop business is grew 250% from Q2 2008, and more than 50% compared to Q1 2009.
Interestingly, Citrix is reporting that about 20 customers (10 just in Q2 2009) have XenDesktop environments with more than 1000 seats. The largest XenDesktop customer, Collier County Schools, has now reached 12,000 virtual desktops and Citrix claims it could be the largest VDI implementation in the world at the moment.
Overall the XenDesktop business unit secured 200 new customers the last quarter.

No specific details were provided about how XenServer support licenses and Essentials licenses revenue scored during Q2, but Citrix reports over 100,000 downloads in this period for its free hypervisor.

Compared to the crazy hiring rate that VMware had in the last few months, Citrix was substantially flat in the headcount and so there’s not a significant increase in the operating expenses.

Citrix is very conservative in its forecast as it expects a flat growth for Q3 2009.

The earnings call full transcript is available here, courtesy of Seeking Alpha.

Labels: Citrix

In the last couple of years virtualization.info reported how the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is getting tighter and tighter around virtualization, well beyond the historical Terminal Server/Metaframe partnership.

In the name of a planned integration that the two announced two years ago, XenServer uses the Microsoft virtual hard drive format (VHD), the Citrix Essentials management suite controls Hyper-V (and Citrix gives a part of it away for free) and the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will manage XenServer and XenApp.

It’s not finished anyway: yesterday Citrix announced further integration, this time about App-V and XenApp.

Citrix will now support the Microsoft application virtualization platform on its Receiver in H2 2009 and in the new Dazzle management solution in H1 2010.
Additionally, in H1 2010 Citrix will release a connector for System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to distribute XenApp virtual applications through the Microsoft management solution.

About the first part of the announcement the new CTO of XenApp division at Citrix, Harry Labana, addresses the key question immediately: is Citrix stopping Application Virtualization development?

Well, now that I have the advantage of having access to status reports I don't have to speculate anymore. I know for a fact that there are a number of enhancements that our development teams are working on, so these enhancements continue in preparation for the next XenApp release. Moving beyond just the next release of XenApp, we plan to continue to invest to enable delivery of Windows applications as a service.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

A couple of weeks ago HP announced its support for the StorageLink technology that Citrix is offering inside the Essentials management suite.

StorageLink allows the XenServer and Hyper-V administrators to manipulate the SAN LUNs directly from inside XenCenter and Hyper-V MMC console.
HP is supporting this technology on its StorageWorks SANs, including EVA, MSA and LeftHand Networks arrays.

With this move HP may be trying to consolidate its position in the SMB market, as the announcement comes just a little before the Citrix one about a free version Essentials for Hyper-V (called Express Edition) that includes the StorageLink layer.

Labels: Citrix, HP

While much is changing at VMware, something big is changing at Citrix as well: the company hired a new Chief Technology Officer for its application virtualization division.

Harry Labana, who was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs for the last nine years.

To announces his new position Labana published two posts (one and two) on the Citrix corporate blogs, sharing some interesting views on how the product line will evolve:

…There is some really cool stuff coming with power management, so watch this space, and some future ideas that I hope we gain traction on. There are some advanced management ideas that we are thinking about and upcoming features that will help simplify your lives. HDX/ICA will continue to get better and you will see some new capabilities in very near term releases of the protocol…

For the ones that are wondering: Simon Crosby is still at his position as the CTO of the Virtualization & Management division.

Labels: Citrix, Leadership

One of the main arguments of VMware to counter the recent strategy of Citrix to give away its virtualization technologies for free, is that XenServer is not mature enough compared to ESX, and that the product has not the features needed to satisfy the enterprise customers.

Today somebody with a certain relevance in the industry says that it’s not more the case: the Burton Group.

A few months ago the analysis firm announced a very interesting project to compare the virtualization offerings available on the market and see which ones met their criteria to be an enterprise-grade platform.
Richard Jones, Service Director of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, presented this analysis at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 in May and turned some heads for sure.

At that time the only platform that passed the Burton Group requirements was VMware Infrastructure, something that confirmed the level of maturity and rich feature-set that Fortune 500 customers recognized so far in the product.
But today, Chris Wolf, the well-known Senior Analyst at the Burton Group, informally announces on this personal blog that Citrix XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition met the requirements as well, so now the firm recognizes the hypervisor an enterprise-grade product as well.

Agree or not, this is probably the first time that the two offerings are publicly considered valid alternatives.
It’s just a pity that Citrix is passing its customers to Microsoft now that it starts to get this kind of recognition.

Labels: Citrix

Citrix didn’t quite finish to give away its technology for free.
They started with XenServer in February, deciding to pack it with the multi-host management console (XenCenter), the virtual machines live migration (XenMotion), the dynamic resource management (Resource Pools) and a basic storage management capabilities.

To survive to this huge investment, which is on top of the $500 million paid in 2007 to acquire XenSource, the company changed the business model: profit would come from the support licenses and the sales of a premium management package called Citrix Essentials.

There’s a lot of skepticism about this new model, and while the SMB customers may greatly appreciate the move, many think that this is a nice way to slowly fade out Xen to finally adopt Microsoft Hyper-V and re-establish the well-known synergy already seen with Terminal Server and Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp.
But if Sun can use this model for its Solaris operating system, and plans to do the same with the XenServer competitor called xVM Server, then Citrix probably can do that as well.

Things get much more complex today, as Citrix releases a free version of Essential for Hyper-V.
The formal announcement will be given next week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

Called Express Edition, this version is capped to two Hyper-V hosts and one storage array.
It does have the StorageLink technology but doesn’t have the other premium features like the lab and stage management (OEM’ed by VMLogix) or the orchestration framework (Workflow Studio).

Despite that, it’s more than enough for an average SMB to build a redundant virtualization platform (Hyper-V R2 with VM live migration will be out next week) for server consolidation. And that’s a big problem.

The problem is that, while it may sound fantastic for the customers, it exposes more than ever how the Citrix strategy is totally depending on Microsoft.

If Hyper-V is free and also Essentials is free, who’s gonna adopt XenServer in the SMB market? A customer may not like the idea of using a Microsoft technology as its mission critical platform but at this point sticking with XenServer, free or not, is just not convenient anymore. And during a worldwide financial crisis money talks, more than ever.

The plan to “assign” the SMB market to Microsoft and the Enterprise one to Citrix is now crystal clear (but virtualization.info highlighted how it was evident since day one): Citrix facilitates the adoption of Hyper-V by giving away enterprise technologies like Essentials, and Microsoft directs its enterprise customers to Citrix for VDI and large-scale deployments.

But even with such defined plan, a lot can go wrong: what if a big customer decides to start a very small pilot by choosing the less expensive option (which now is Hyper-V R2 plus Essentials Express Edition)? 
And most of all what will happen when Microsoft will feel confident enough to push hard its hypervisor (let’s say Hyper-V 3.0) on the enterprise market?
Citrix has no way back. It cannot recover the customers that passed to Microsoft.

No matter how convenient and transparent Citrix makes the migration of virtual machines from XenServer to Hyper-V (for example with a live migration between heterogeneous hosts).
Switching the virtualization platform is a painful process and people will think a million times before moving.

Maybe Citrix believes that, over the long term, selling Essentials Express Edition support agreements to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft small customers will generate more profit that trying to win those SMBs by itself with XenServer.

In any case Citrix has to clarify the long-term strategy here or this endless give-away will generate more suspects than trust.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

Yesterday Citrix announced a new OEM agreement with Fujitsu Technology Solutions (formerly Fujitsu Siemens) about XenDesktop.

Starting next month, the Citrix connection broker will be part of the Virtual Workplace product, which basically is the end to end VDI architecture that Fujitsu offers to its customers by assembling together several 3rd party technologies, from the physical servers to the application virtualization platform.

The two companies also preannounced an upcoming OEM deal to ship XenServer with the FTS PRIMERGY racks and blade systems.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Fujitsu, VDI

Citrix just release the first minor update for its P2V/V2V migration tool XenConvert 2.0.

This version introduces the support for OVF contents created with VMware vSphere 4, plus it enhances support for OVF and VMDK files created with other VMware products, including VI 3.x, Workstation 6.5.2, Studio 1.0, OVF Tool 0.9, Converter 3.0.3 and 4.0.

The product is free and available here.

Labels: Citrix, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

Citrix is working to raise the interest around its commercial offer called Essentials now that XenServer is free of charge.

As part of the effort the company is releasing a free 6-hours training online course (CEX-100-1W).

The course includes the following topics:

• Introduction to Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5.5
  XenServer and Essentials overview
  XenServer and Essentials benefits
• Citrix XenServer 5.5 Features
  Active Directory Integration
  Enhanced Backup Enablement
  Fast Cloning
  XenCenter Search
  Historical Performance Monitoring
• StorageLink
  Overview
  Installing StorageLink
  Configuring StorageLink
• Workload Balancing
  Overview
  Deploying Workload Balancing
  Installing Workload Balancing
  Configuring Workload Balancing
  Workload Balancing Administration
• Lifecycle Management
  Lab Manager Overview
  Installing Lab Manager
  Configuring Lab Manager
  Maintaining Lab Manager
• Assessment

Citrix informs that this course will stay free only for a limited amount of time, but they should seriously consider to keep it free forever, as this seems the best way for a customer to truly understand what he’s missing not adoption Essentials.

Labels: Citrix, Training

The Xen.org community and Citrix are arranging an interesting event for late June in Berlin called Xen Direction Europe 2009.

Compared to the well-known Xen Summits, this seems easier to understand for somebody that is not a Xen hacker (read: it contains more marketing material) but no less interesting as the agenda includes some presentations that are probably worth the visit like:

• Virtualization - it's not just for servers anymore Intel
• Highly available virtual infrastructures based on Xen Lufthansa Systems
• HXEN: Hosted Xen Hypervisor Project Citrix

Of course the last one is especially interesting as it will cover the progress of the new hosted VMM architecture that will power a Citrix product called XenWorkstation, at least accordingly to the virtualization.info sources.

One session promises to be very funny (underline is ours):
Virtualization of mission-critical deployments Oracle with Xen: Oracle users choose Oracle VM
Like the Oracle users have a real chance.

Labels: Citrix, Events, Xen

After 5 weeks of public beta program, Citrix released today XenServer and Essentials 5.5 (codename project George).

The list of new features is well known since a while but so far Citrix did a poor job in detailing what is included with the free XenServer and what is instead only available in Essentials Enterprise and Platinum editions (the release notes are identical for both packages).
While waiting for an official clarification virtualization.info guesses the breakdown as follows:

XenServer

• Active Directory integration
  Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Expanded guest OS support
  RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.
• Snapshot support in XenCenter and CLI
  Create and manage virtual machines live snapshots from within XenCenter or the xe CLI.

Essentials

• StorageLink integration
  CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with optional automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• LVHD
  Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs)
• Workload balancing
  Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.

Of course XenServer 5.5 stays free while Essentials 5.5 starts at $2,500 per server.

Labels: Citrix, Releases

When Citrix announced for the first time its plan to deliver an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM, virtualization.info wrote that it could be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Vyatta to compete against Cisco and slam it.

That virtual switch is about to be unveiled now but the two companies didn’t reveal if there’s a collaboration on this project.
Even if there’s not one, there may be in the near future as Vyatta just secured $10 million in its Round C funding, and Citrix is one of the investors.

The highly respectable Om Malik at GigaOM wrote that Citrix did so because it is losing ground to the VMware-Cisco Systems colossus.

Quite the opposite.

The enormous interest around the Cisco Nexus 1000V just demonstrates that the market needs a more enhanced virtual networking and that it’s ready to buy. Despite that the Nexus 1000V has been released just few days ago so the customers around the world will need time to verify its efficiency and reliability before purchasing, delivering it in their virtual data centers and impact the XenServer sales.
The investment of in Vyatta demonstrates that Citrix isn’t wasting time and it’s preparing to compete.

For now, the Vyatta router has been certified to run on XenServer virtual machines. Very likely much more will come in the future.

Labels: Citrix, Funding, Vyatta

At his annual conference Synergy, Citrix unveiled its plans to release an open source distributed virtual switch that may compete with the just released Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere.

A few details were disclosed about it, like the fact that it will be available for both Xen and KVM, and that it will support advanced networking management features (Netflow, SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN) and some needful security features (ACLs and 802.1x).

Anyway we could be very near the full launch of the project as last week Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization Division at Citrix, used his Twitter account to calls for beta testers of the “XenServer distributed virtual switch”.

Labels: Citrix

At the end of April, Citrix announced the upcoming features of XenServer 5.5 and Essentials for XenServer / Hyper-V 5.5, opening the public beta program.

Last week during the Synergy conference, the company clarified which features will be included in the free XenServer and which ones will be part of Essentials:

Citrix also announced the general availability date, June 16, and the recommended price for Essentials: $2,500 per server, regardless of the number of processors.

But the less the most interesting feature has yet to come: a pluggable, open source virtual switch for Xen

This code will be used by 3rd party network vendors to develop virtual switches for XenServer that can compete with the Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere 4.0.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group has some juicy details about it on his personal blog:

The virtual switch will be open source and initially compatible with both Xen- and KVM-based hypervisors.
It will provide centralized network management.
It will support advanced network management features such as Netflow, SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN-
It will initially be available as a plug-in to XenCenter.
It will support security features such as ACLs and 802.1x.

Chris Hoff, the former Chief Security Architect at Unisys, knows even more about this upcoming module and wrote a long and interesting insight about it on his personal blog.

No words on when this virtual switch will be available but we can guess who will be involved in the project: the fearless Vyatta is already competing with Cisco thanks to their amazing open source router; if the company would ever decide to also release a virtual switch, this is their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Labels: Citrix

It doesn’t matter if you are a loyal customer of VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. Anytime one of these three vendors (or any other in the market) mentions its effort in the cloud computing space using virtualization the comparison term is Amazon.

Amazon has been the first to develop a general purpose cloud computing infrastructure and offer it to the general public. The company launched the (beta) service in August 2006, adopting the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine of choice.
So far their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is the biggest and most mature Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture existing on the market.

During the last three years Citrix acquired XenSource, the leading company for the Xen project, and released the commercial implementation of Xen, XenServer, free of charge.
Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about its Xen implementation, but it’s same to assume that the company engineers had to develop a lot of tools and features on top of Xen.
Now the company can have for free enterprise management, virtual machines live migration, resource sharing, integrated storage management and, at the same time, can count on the enterprise support that Citrix now offers.
This must be a tempting proposition to lower the EC2 maintenance costs.

If, in the future, Amazon wants to use EC2 to develop massive virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and offer hosted desktops in the consumer market, Citrix is ready, as they are about to release a client hypervisor based on Xen, XenClient, for free as well.

So how long before Amazon moves from Xen to XenServer on EC2?

Maybe not so much: last week at the Synergy conference (which co-hosted the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009) Citrix announced a new partnership with Amazon to offer and support part of its products on the EC2 virtual machines.

As Richard Jones, VP of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, said on his corporate blog:

The announcement on May 6th at Synergy of Citrix-Amazon collaboration on internal/external cloud interoperability has “we’re moving to Citrix XenServer as our EC2 hypervisor infrastructure” written all over it.

Labels: Amazon, Citrix, Xen

Citrix doesn’t seem happy enough to give away a free server hypervisor (XenServer) and its management console (XenCenter). Now the company wants to give away for free also that client hypervisor that will be so important in next generation virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

During his opening keynote at the Citrix Synergy 2009, Mark Templeton announced that the much discussed Project Independence (developed in collaboration with Intel) is now called XenClient, and that Citrix will offer it for free.
Duding the second day keynote, Ian Pratt showed XenClient in action on a PC and, with much surprise on an Apple hardware. It’s not clear what kind of agreements exist between Citrix and Apple but so far the Cupertino company never allowed a type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor) to run on its computers.
The complete recording of the demo is available here.

The first technical preview/beta of the PC version should appear in H2 2009, with an RTM expected for the end of the year.
Pratt didn’t provide any specific date for the Apple version.

The more Citrix announces free products, the more the customers have concerns about the feasibility of the new business model that Citrix is pursuing.
But at the same time, every time Citrix announces a free product it creates serious issues to VMware, which has to justify every day more frequently the premium price that its customer have to pay.
It will probably take some months before we’ll be able to see how this strategy will impact the VMware behavior.

Labels: Citrix

At the end of the last week Citrix announced its Q1 2009 earnings. The company suffered a 2% revenue decrease, moving from $377 million in Q1 2008 to $369 million.
In details the company lost 24% fot new licenses revenue but gained in renewed licenses (11%), online services (16%) and technical services (8%).
EMEA is where Citrix is losing the most (11% decrease in revenue) compared to Americas (1% decrease) and APAC (9% decrease).

Interestingly, while the application virtualization business lost 10% (year-on-year decline), the hardware virtualization business (XenServer, XenDesktop) gained over 150%.
Citrix now scores over 5000 customers for those products, and Essentials sales are just started.

For the next quarter, pretty much like VMware, the company expects no growth or a further decline.
Despite that, the price of VMware vSphere 4.0, the features that will appear in XenServer and Essentials 5.5, and the new things that will be announced at the Synergy conference tomorrow, may help Citrix to surprise the financial analysts.

Labels: Citrix

As announced a couple of weeks ago, just before its conference, the Synergy 2009, Citrix opens the new beta program for its free hypervisor XenServer.

Unlike we suggested in our previous article, the new version, codenamed Project George, is numbered 5.5 and not 5.1.

As already said the new product includes the following features:

• Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
• LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs)
• Snapshot support in XenCenter. Create and manage disk snapshots from within XenCenter.
• StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with optional automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.

Citrix expects this beta to last one month.
Enroll for it here.

Labels: Citrix

Citrix is working to release as much as possible in time for its Synergy conference in May.
While waiting for the beta of XenServer 5.1 (or whatever it will be called) the customers can now download the just announced XenConvert 2.0 technical preview.

XenConvert is the XenServer physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool.

This new version will import VMware virtual machines in VMDK format and OVF packages (it doesn’t matter which virtualization product generated them). 
Citrix is a member of the DMFT so it implemented the support for the new OVF 1.0 standard as soon as possible.

As most readers know by now Citrix decided to give XenServer away for free so the P2V/V2V migration tool becomes a fundamental part of the strategy to move customers away from VMware.
It’s easy to guess that the final version of XenConvert 2.0 will be free as well and that the company will invest on this product much more in future.

Enroll for the beta here.

Labels: Citrix, P2V/V2V Migration

Citrix has just opened the beta program for the next version of XenServer, which is and will be free as everybody knows by now.

The new product is codenamed Project George (but the final name will be XenServer 5.1 according to our sources),  and features some interesting capabilities:

• Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
• LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs).
• StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.

Citrix says that the RTM code beta will be open for the end of April. It’s clear that the company is anxious to have it ready for the Synergy 2009, to be held in Las Vegas in early May.

Labels: Citrix

In early March virtualization.info broke the news that Citrix was about to release a hosted version (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor) of of XenServer, called XenWorkstation, that could compete with VMware Workstation, Parallels Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox and so on.

There are good reasons for Citrix to do so, and the impressive number of visits we received on that article confirms a great interest about such product.

XenWorkstation was not launched the week of March 9 as we speculated.
While some people (including ones that claim to be Citrix employees) reported that this product doesn’t exist, our sources tells us that Citrix decided to postpone its launch.

True or not (virtualization.info long time readers know that our sources are very reliable), Citrix just released to the Xen community the open source code of a type-2 VMM version of Xen, currently called KXen.

The virtualization platform supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (all 32bit) as host OSes.
64bit of these Windows versions will be supported soon, as well as Mac OS X.

Please note that the KXen code is a snapshot of the Xen code base used in XenServer today.
Future versions of this product will be based on Xen 3.4 and following.

The code is available here: Windows version / Linux version.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Citrix is one of the few virtualization vendors that strongly believe in a future where data centers will be accessed through mobile devices.
The company started to tease about a presentation virtualization client for the iPhone in June 2008, announcing an official commitment in December 2008.

Today, finally, version 0.9.0 of the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone (codenamed project Braeburn) makes its appearance on the iTunes App Store:

Citrix did an amazing job to map the Windows applications commands to the iPhone interface and gesture model.
The company published a nice video about the integration that is really worth a look.

To further improve the mobile experience Citrix released a XenApp extension called Doc Finder that allows users to easily find, view, edit and send documents.

Labels: Citrix

At the end of February Citrix unveiled its new strategy to compete against VMware: giving away the full version of XenServer and offer a premium management pack, called Essentials, for its hypervisor and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The free XenServer comes with a lot of features (including VMs live migration, resource pooling and storage management), but Essentials has a number of additions that may seriously appeal the high-end enterprise customers.

Citrix recently published the videos of three features included in Essentials: the Dynamic Provisioning Services, the Automated Lab Management (coming from an OEM agreement with VMLogix) adn the Advanced StorageLink Technology:

These videos are now broadcasted on virtualization.tv, the new webTV channel of virtualization.info.

Labels: Citrix

Yesterday Citrix released under GPL2 open source license a new component of its Project Satori, the software stack for paravirtualized Linux guest OSes that run on Microsoft Hyper-V.

The core of this software has been already released by Microsoft under the name of Linux Integration Components in September 2008.
It included the hypercall adapter for Hyper-V, the optimized disc driver (called StorVSC) and the optimized network driver (called NetVSC).

The package missed an optimized mouse driver (called InputVSC) that implies poor performance when the Hyper-V console is remotely accessed and the use tries to interact with the Guest OS from inside it.

The InputVSC driver is now available here.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Releases

The early preview of the Citrix/Intel Project Independence published by Gabrie van Zanten a couple of weeks ago raised a lot of doubts about the architecture of the upcoming client hypervisor (and some negative reactions from Citrix).

To clarify where they are going the two companies just published a joint interview that spread some lights on a couple of technical aspects:

Interviewer: What is Project Independence?

Simon Crosby (Citrix): Together, we are building a Type-1 hypervisor based on the Xen open source hypervisor. It's tiny, tiny as in just a few MB of flash memory associated with the platform, so small enough to be a bios extension. It owns all hardware including trusted platform modules and has full control over devises, but more than that, it can actually decide which platform it hands through to different guests…

…

Interviewer: How are Intel Virtualization Technologies leveraged in Project Independence?

Fernando Martins (Intel): Project Independence leverages a wide portfolio of Intel vPro technologies.

The solution derives from the Xen hypervisor and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) is a key underpinning of Xen. 

Two distinct Intel Virtualization Technologies play a role in this solution: our VT-x technology which provides CPU virtualization support and is required by Xen and VT-d  which is a technology that allows for direct assignment of devices to virtual machines therefore reducing overhead and increasing the overall reliability of the platform.

Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) allows the hypervisor to become part of the trusted compute base such that you can ensure that the hypervisor that is running is the one that is supposed to be running.

Project Independence uses Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), for out-of-band updates and access to the client…

Labels: Citrix, Intel

At the end of January Citrix and Intel announced a major partnership to jointly develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Project Independence).
The news definitively had an impact on competitors as VMware felt the need to remark that its partnership with Intel is stronger.

The two companies plan to release the new product somewhere in H2 2009 (likely immediately before or during VMworld 2009) so nobody really expected any additional information going public for a while (at least nothing before the upcoming Synergy conference in May).

Unexpectedly, last week Gabrie van Zanten, a well-known virtualization blogger, published an early preview of the Citrix client hypervisor, highlighting interesting features:

…After the primary partition is loaded, the other partitions (virtual machines) can be managed through a web interface in the primary partition. This interface integrates with XenDesktop (VDI) and XenApp (Presentation Server), which gives the user great control over what technique to use, depending on the device he or she is or the location. The user will also be given the option to check out a VM to take it on the road…

as well as some concerning design approaches:

…the primary partition will often hold the users “private” OS. The OS that he or she will use to install all the stuff he downloaded from unknown sources, the OS that will hold pictures of family, etc. If it is anything like my home pc, Vista will already claim at least 1GB of RAM after startup. This memory is no longer available to secondary partitions that will be started…

As van Zanten says the idea of using the primary partition for the untrusted personal environment is really concerning for the corporate security:

…I’m willing to accept that the network stack going through the primary partition is safe enough, but if this primary partition is needed to boot the whole client hypervisor, present the web interface and manage the VMs, isn’t this “dirty home OS” primary partition connected to your business network then? There should be some kind of firewall in between that is managed by the hypervisor that can detect the business network and isolate this primary partition from the business network. At this point Citrix has no solution for this.

As this an alpha Citrix may have to reconsider its approach several times before hitting the general availability but if this is the direction they took, they’ll have a lot of work to do to convince the customers that this architecture is secure and suitable for a corporate environment.

Labels: Citrix, Intel

For the release of its vSphere 4.0 platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure), VMware will drop the label “experimental” from one of the most interesting features released with VI3.5: Distributed Power Management (DPM).

It’s not yet clear how much DPM will impact the data center operations today, but CPU power management certainly is a feature that is influencing the roadmaps of several vendors:

• Intel will release a Dynamic Power Node Manager with its upcoming Nehalem CPU
• Microsoft will release Core Parking and CPU power consumption controls as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which Hyper-V 2.0 will leverage

At today, Virtual Iron is the only vendor that officially supports power management capabilities: their implementation is called LivePower, available since August 2008 in Virtual Iron 4.4.

Citrix may be playing catch-up as well.
A recent post on the corporate blogs reveals that the company has worked on an unofficial project called PowerSmart for XenApp (at that time Presentation Server).

The project was halted and it’s now morphing into something official.
As XenApp and XenServer are deeply connected now and Xen continues to develop power management capabilities, maybe the next version of XenServer may feature something like DPM soon.

Labels: Citrix

It doesn’t matter how hard you look, it’s almost impossible that you are going to find a performance comparison that involves Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) specifically says that the company won’t recognize any 3rd party performance testing before it has the chance to review and approve the adopted methodology.

(before June 2006 the situation was even worse as VMware simply didn’t allow the publishing of any benchmark comparison)

At these conditions, the chances that you’ll see an independent benchmark where VMware is outperformed by its competitors are zero.

Despite that, last week a group of brave reporters at Virtualization Review challenged VMware and published an independent analysis without asking any permission.

To ensure the validity of our test results and testing environment, Virtualization Review enlisted the help of Stuart Yarost to formulate and validate the test plan. Yarost is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with more than 22 years' experience in the software and quality fields. Yarost currently holds the position of Vice Chair of Programs for the ASQ Software Division.

The results are more than interesting:

• In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it's a real, viable competitor for the competition.
• XenServer's test results are impressive, but are they enough to justify a replacement of your current hypervisor? For environments with virtualized systems that have a large number of CPU- and memory-intensive workloads, it may be a good choice. The caution is that those high I/O workloads flirt with not being good virtualization candidates, so some administrators might instinctively place these workloads on physical systems. Make no mistake, however: XenServer did extremely well, posting excellent performance numbers.
• For the first two tests of heavy workloads, VMware underperformed both XenServer and Hyper-V. For the lighter workloads on the third test, the results were almost indistinguishable across the platforms, but ESX had the best results in three of the four categories.

Easy to guess, VMware is not happy and yesteday severely criticized Virtualization Review on the corporate blog Virtual Reality with the post: A big step backwards for virtualization benchmarking.

The list of objections is long:

• The fact that ESX is completing so many more CPU, memory, and disk operations than Hyper-V obviously means that cycles were being used on those components as opposed to SQL Server.  Which is the right place for the hypervisor to schedule resources?  It’s not possible to tell from the scarce details in the results.
• All resource-intensive SQL Servers in virtual and native environments have large pages enabled.  ESX supports this behavior but no other hypervisor does.  This test didn’t use that key application and OS feature.
• The effects of data placement with respect to partition alignment were not planned for.  VMware has documented the impact of this oversight to be very significant in some cases.
• The disk tests are based on Passmark’s load generation, which uses a test file in the guest operating system.  But the placement of that file, and its alignment with respect to the disk system, was not controlled in this test.
• The SQL Server workload was custom built and has not been investigated, characterized, or understood by anyone in the industry. As a result, its sensitivity to memory, CPU, network and storage changes is totally unknown, and not documented by the author.  There are plenty of industry standard benchmarks to use with hypervisors and the days of ad hoc benchmark tests have passed.  Virtual machines are fully capable of running the common benchmarks that users know and understand like TPC, SPECweb and SPECjbb.  An even better test is VMmark, a well-rounded test of hypervisor performance that has been adopted by all major server vendors as the standard measurement of virtualization platforms or the related SPECvirt benchmark under development by SPEC.
• With ESX’s highest recorded storage throughput already measured at over 100,000 IOPS on hundreds of disks, this experiment’s use of an undocumented, but presumably very small, number of spindles would obviously result in a storage system bottleneck. Yet storage performance results vary by tremendous amounts. Clearly there's an inconsistency in the configuration.

VMware highlights how this analysis was not reviewed and approved, and that because of this kind of work they don’t remove the EULA restriction.
And to be absolutely sure that everybody know about the flaws of this benchmarks, this morning the company sent out an alert to its entire Channel.

How the other two vendors reacted?

Citrix didn’t comment so far, while Microsoft validated the study by linking it on the corporate blog.
Now if they want to defend the Hyper-V score in this benchmark is better they publish a counter-analysis explaining why VMware is wrong.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Two weeks ago Citrix announced the unthinkable: XenServer, one of the technologies that acquired from XenSource for $500 million almost two years ago, becomes a free product.

The move raised an unprecedented level of attention, from customers, partners and competitors.
It’s not a speculation: the virtualization.info statistics reveal how serious the echo of this action has been and still is.

To make profit Citrix counts on support agreements (which is exactly the same model Sun is using for its Solaris operating system and what it plans to adopt for the upcoming xVM virtualization portfolio) and on the sales of premium management features, packed in a new Essentials product, available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Citrix wants to obtain a lot of things with this strategy:

• with XenServer for free it wants to build a serious brand awareness in the virtualization industry and, at the same time, disturb the VMware activity in the enterprise market
• with Essentials for XenServer it wants to demonstrate its enterprise prospects that it has something serious to pit against VMware vCenter
• with Essentials for Hyper-V it wants to reproduce the successful combination of Microsoft Terminal Server plus Citrix Metaframe that made its early fortune

Of course the key part of the strategy is the synergy with Microsoft and not the free hypervisor.

Essentials for Hyper-V is in beta starting today.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group published some early feedbacks about it and seems pretty satisfied:

…As you can see, this is a massive improvement for Hyper-V VM provisioning on networked storage. My experience with the software was basically what I’ve come to expect from beta software, and did include one hurdle to overcome – CVSM provisioned storage and created VMs without a problem, but did not create the VM passthrough disks and associate the correct LUNs with each. I had to do that step manually using the Hyper-V manager tool. Note that other beta testers also identified this problem, and it has been fixed. Also, only passthrough (raw) disks are supported today; virtual hard disk files are not supported. I’m hoping that virtual disks will be supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster shared volumes, once they’re available.

Still, after doing the initial work to create the storage repository and VM template, VM deployment was a piece of cake. And what’ not to like about spinning up a bunch of new VMs in seconds? …

Now, what will happen if Citrix releases a version of Essentials for VMware?

The question is legit and comes as a reaction to the post of Rakesh Malhotra, Program Management Team for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) at Microsoft, about the capability of SCVMM 2008 to manage VMware ESX.

His post clarifies some of the design decisions that Microsoft made when developed the ESX management part, and how some of the features work.

One of his early sentences generated the question above:

…Let me start by saying that no software is perfect and we are constantly trying to improve and respond to customer feedback. In fact, the whole VMware ESX management feature was a result of customer feedback. Put simply, people want to use a single primary console for day to day management of virtual machines across multiple hypervisors so we went after this problem. As a result, multi-hypervisor management via SCVMM 2008 has proven to be enormously popular with customers and partners alike…

In normal conditions it’s hard to believe that a customer may drop the vCenter console to manage his ESX farm with SCVMM, but we live in interesting times where enterprise customers can have hundreds or thousands of machines virtualized with different hypervisors.
SAP for example is about to virtualize 500 servers with XenServer side by side with its current VMware Infrastructure.

Microsoft believes it can manage ESX better (or at least as good as) than VMware itself. And Citrix believes it can manage Hyper-V better than Microsoft itself (something that Microsoft is not arguing actually).
So why Citrix shouldn’t try to extend its Essentials offering to manage ESX as well?

There’s no risk to validate the competitor too much. VMware is abundantly validated by its market share.
The only (positive) result would be that Citrix would become the first virtualization vendor to provide enhancements for all the three major hypervisors on the market.

If it’s true that there are customers out there that look for a single primarily console for virtualization management, why they shouldn’t be interested in such offering?

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Normally virtualization.info doesn’t cover customers case histories but in this case we’ll make an exception.

SAP as a software is one of the most important mission-critical applications in the world.
SAP as a company is one of the savviest companies in the industry about virtualization: during 2007, the company fully embraced hardware virtualization, supporting VMware, Xen (both Novell and Red Hat implementations) and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.
They even have a 3-days conference called Virtualization Week.
But most of all SAP is one of the key partner of VMware as the company demonstrated at the recent VMworld Europe 2009, when Paul Maritz granted SAP no less than 30 minutes of his opening keynote.

The fact that SAP is virtualizing around 500 servers with XenServer is remarkable.
It really validates the Citrix hypervisor.

To be fair the press announcement specifically say that XenServer will be used to virtualize the worldwide training centers first and the project management division later, which will P2V migrate hundred of dev/test/support machines.
So SAP is not yet ready to use XenServer for the production environment (or maybe they are but cannot).

Anyway, VMware representatives sometimes say that XenServer is not an enterprise-grade hypervisor. Now they’ll have to explain why one of their best and most trusted partner is going to adopts it so widely.
Is it the price to blame? Or is it that they are overlooking the competition?

Labels: Citrix, SAP, Xen

While a new startup works to unofficially open source the VMware VMFS, Citrix has officially open sourced its implementation of the Microsoft VHD format.

Citrix and Microsoft adopt the same virtual hard drive format since September 2007, when they closed a deal to adopt VHD in all the upcoming products.

In over two years Citrix has developed an optimized implementation of the product and it’s now giving it back to the open source world by submitting its code to the Xen community for inclusion in the hypervisor code base under the BSD license.

If approved, Citrix partners and competitors that adopt Xen (like Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun, etc.) will be able to use it side by side with QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW).

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Xen

By now it should be clear that Citrix will do everything possible to keep its leadership in the application virtualization space and increase its relevance in the hardware virtualization space.

The first step was giving away XenServer (with Live Migration, Resource Pools and much more) for free.

The second step will be releasing a free virtualization platform for the desktops: XenWorkstation.

Please note that this has nothing to do with the client hypervisor that Citrix is developing with Intel.
This is a type-2 version (or hosted VMM) of Xen that will run on consumer hardware, exactly like VMware Player/Workstation/Fusion, Parallels Workstation/Desktop, Sun VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC.
And Citrix may release it as soon as next week according to virtualization.info sources.

Xen will run as a kernel module and will be available for Windows and Mac OS X hosts.

A part of the VMware early success depend on Workstation: the product is so good that spread across the world and crawled into the biggest corporations without passing through long enterprise sale.
System and software engineers introduces the culture of VMware inside their companies using Workstation on daily basis for simple tasks: testing a new product or OS, developing code, separating the private and the business workspace, etc.

Citrix badly need to build a reputation in the virtualization community. And a free XenWorkstation may be another good way to do so.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Last week several bloggers and mainstream journalists reported a major news: Citrix is about to release XenServer for free.
Of course the lack of details generated a number of speculations and confusion that today the company clears up with an official announcement.

First of all Citrix is releasing for free the Enterprise Edition of XenServer.
This is not a scaled down, limited version of the hypervisor. From the end of March on, there will be only one edition of XenServer which will be free.

Secondarily, Citrix is giving away for free with XenServer a remarkable number of enterprise features, including the enterprise console to manage multiple hosts (XenCenter), the VM live migration (XenMotion) technology, the resource sharing (Resource Pools) technology and the enterprise storage management technology.

The comparison against VMware ESXi is immediate (and of course unfair):

The move is a huge hit against VMware.

So far Citrix had difficulties in spreading XenServer not because the product is not competitive: virtualization.info reviewed several NDA competitive analysis that state quite the opposite and Amazon did a superb job with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to demonstrate that Xen can be enterprise ready and cloud-computing ready.  
The main reason why Citrix is struggling to enter the customers site is because VMware had almost ten years to build a loyal customer base that simply is not interested in considering other solutions because ESX is a great product (the ones that may have some concerns about this point are locked down with multi-year Enterprise License Agreements).

But when Citrix releases such rich enterprise package for free, what company can afford to skip a XenServer evaluation in the current economy climate?
And this is exactly the Citrix goal: give the potential customers the good excuse to try XenServer against ESX.

Additionally it’s worth to remember that Citrix, thanks to its XenApp (formerly MetaFrame and then Presentation Server) is almost everywhere in the enterprise segment.
Now the company can go to each of its customers and give the free hypervisor as a Christmas gift.
And this is why Citrix is also announcing today that XenServer is now included as a core feature of XenApp.

To give further credit to this move may come once again Amazon, which at this point may want to upgrade the Xen hosts on its EC2 facility to XenServer.

The big question is: how Citrix is going to generate revenue now?
The company bets on two things: enterprise support and premium management capabilities.

Not much to say about the first point of the strategy: pretty much like Sun is planning to do with its endlessly delayed xVM Server, Citrix believes that giving away the enterprise edition of its hypervisor will greatly accelerate its adoption, which implies a support agreement for any serious deployment.

For the second point, Citrix developed a new management package called Essentials which includes several most wanted features: the high availability, a virtual lab automation engine (which is the OEM’ed version of VMLogix LabManager), the Ardence VMs provisioning engine (now called Dynamic Provisioning Services), the orchestration APIs (to be used with Workflow Studio), and a new set of technologies that integrates XenCenter with the existing SAN management products (called StorageLink).

This last technology is pretty interesting as it introduces four different capabilities that deserve a deeper inspection:

• StorageLink Gateway enables automated discovery and one-click access to native storage services.
• StorageLink Resource Manager makes common actions in native storage arrays visible from within the virtualization management environment, including provisioning, snapshots, and cloning.
• StorageLink Image Manager provides a centralized library of virtual machine images that can be rapidly deployed to any number of target XenServer hosts.
• StorageLink Connect provides a set of clearly-defined open APIs that make it easy to link XenServer environments to 3rd-party storage solutions and enterprise management frameworks.

Citrix will price Essentials between $1,500 and $5,000 per server and will offer the Essentials package also to the Microsoft customers that are adopting Hyper-V, as part of a renewed partnership agreement with Microsoft (dubbed Project Encore).

The two editions will be available starting April 7, 2009

Labels: Citrix

At least three things seem true in the virtualization industry:

1. It doesn’t matter how many times a vendor repeats that free stuff doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solution, it will end up offering a free hypervisor
2. It doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder
3. It doesn’t matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call

Today is one of those days when the three rules above are true at the same time: Stephen Vaughn-Nichols unveiled on his personal blog the news that next week (Feb 23), during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference, Citrix will give away for free its XenServer hypervisor.

Vaughn-Nichols doesn’t refer to a scaled down version of XenServer. He’s reporting that the Enterprise Edition with all its features will become free (but not open source).

To compensate the lost revenue Citrix will release a new management package called Citrix Essentials, available in two editions, priced between $1,500 and $5,000 per server, one for XenServer and one for Microsoft Hyper-V.
This last version will be available as part of a renewed partnership with Microsoft, dubbed Project Encore.

Project Encore will also imply that System Center (possibly the entire product family and not just the Virtual Machine Manager) will manage XenServer.
The description Vaughn-Nichols provides sounds like a full overlap of the two virtualization offerings, so it will need some official clarification to exactly understand the strategy here.

Anyway it’s a state of fact that every major virtualization vendor on the market now has a free, unlocked hypervisor.
This means two things:

• the battleground is officially shifted to virtual data center automation/orchestration
• the cost of entry for upcoming hypervisor providers (Parallels, Sun) is becoming huge

Who said “strict embargo” ?

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

In October 2007 Citrix closed a major agreement with HP to resell XenServer Enterprise Edition on ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

In March 2008 the two companies took a step further, launching a special version of Citrix hypervisor called XenServer HP Select Edition which comes pre-installed in selected servers and offers a free management console called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC). 

In May 2008, when Citrix launched its new end-to-end VDI solution XenDesktop, HP was there once again confirming support for the product on ProLiant and Compaq thin clients.

The love story continues today with HP announcing that its Blade PC systems will be sold with the just released Citrix XenDesktop 3.

At the moment there are no details about the configurations, pricing or availability. It’s likely that HP will unveil the product at the upcoming Synergy 2009.

It’s interesting to note how many different VDI games HP is trying to play at the same time.

Besides partnering with Citrix, the company is about to use the technology provided by Desktone (which is funded by Citrix) to become a hosted VDI provider.
At the same time it’s refreshing its current VDI offering by updating its own remote desktop protocol RGS and OEM’ing the Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, HP, VDI

For the forth time in few days that benchmarks about Citrix and VMware desktop virtualization (VDI, presentation virtualization and application virtualization) solutions take the central stage.
Is it a sign that somebody is getting nervous?

The first (non-sponsored) analysis came out from two independent enterprise architects, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp, which evaluated how XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V perform in VDI scenarios.

After an immediate reaction from VMware, a XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis popped up from Citrix (to be fair this document was released on Jan 12, days before the Spruijt/van de Kamp work, and further updated on Jan 27).

Then an independent performance comparison (committed by VMware) between Microsoft App-V, Symantec/Altiris SVS, VMware ThinApp and Citrix XenApp was released by the Exo Performance Network team.

The last episode of this saga come out last week from the Tolly Group.

The test lab realized an independent performance comparison (once again committed by VMware) between Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 Enterprise and VMware View 3.0 Premier.

As for any sponsored analysis the results are easy to guess:

The VMware View 3 VDI solution deployed more simply and more rapidly than Citrix XenDesktop 2.1. VMware provided more comprehensive, efficient image and storage management of virtual desktops. It provides end-users with a quality of experience on the LAN that matches or exceeds that offered by the Citrix solution.

Citrix promptly answers from the corporate blog, invalidating the analysis as it covers unrealistic scenarios and evaluates an old product (XenDesktop 3.0 was released just two weeks ago):

There's a prominent sidebar that in the report that states that Citrix declined to participate in the testing - this is true, and I was the one that actually made that call and discussed it with Tolly Group. To their credit, Tolly Group did call us prior to beginning the testing and informed us of the project and shared the statement of work prepared for VMware. We asked some questions and provided some feedback about the testing methodology. I had serious concerns that the proposed tests did not reflect true customer use cases. For example, the user experience testing was only for a few productivity applications in a LAN environment - that was all that was planned, and it didn't seem to realistic based on what we've seen in real customer environments. Tolly took note of our concerns and asked VMware as the sponsor of the paper whether they would alter their approach.  Later we learned that VMware (not surprisingly) had rejected our suggestions and was not open to changing the proposed tests. At that point, it was clear that it made no sense to participate because…

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, VMware

While the virtualization community is still intensely discussing the benchmarks around XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V used for VDI scenarios, provided by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and confuted by VMware, a new study surfaces.

This performance analysis, committed by VMware, shifts the focus from VDI to application virtualization, comparing Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V 4.5, Symantec SVS Pro 2.1 and VMware ThinApp 4.0.1.

The measurements were performed using the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) Clarity Suite: the Clarity Tracker Agent is deployed on the benchmarked Windows machines, the Clarity Studio produces workload simulation, and the results are uploaded for further analysis to the Exo Performance Network.

The conclusion are rather interesting:

• Application virtualization solutions that use an embedded virtualization model (ThinApp) deliver the best application throughput. Only ThinApp delivers the combination of excellent raw performance plus low overall CPU utilization, making it the better solution for organizations seeking to minimize the performance “hit” typically associated with virtualization technology.
• By contrast, solutions that employ a kernel-mode driver or service (App-V, SVS, XenApp) introduce additional layers of software complexity – including significantly higher kernel-mode activity – which translate into runtime overhead that slows the application and/or places an additional burden on the CPU. These agents also consume a considerable amount of memory, both directly – as part of the agent’s process – and indirectly, through expansion of the application’s working set.
• Agent-based solutions also introduce a new and potentially catastrophic single point of failure (kernel mode execution) that IT organizations must factor into the testing and certification of their desktop computing stacks. Functional limitations, such as the lack of support for locked-down environments and/or inability to run on specific Windows versions (x64), further complicate the application virtualization equation, forcing IT shops to invest additional resources into designing infrastructure around these planning and deployment hurdles.

Read the whole document here.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware

The last week discussion about XenServer vs ESX (vs Hyper-V) for VDI scenarios, ignited by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and followed up by VMware, is still hot.
So maybe it’s worth to further discuss the topic by highlighting a recent paper published by Citrix: XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis.

The first part of the 29-pages document describes how a Citrix XenDesktop infrastructure (including XenServer, XenApp, the Desktop Delivery Controller connection broker) was tested against Provisioning Server for Desktops (to deliver new virtual desktops) and EdgeSight (to simulate application workloads) to measure its scaling capability.

The analysis was summarized in the following XenDesktop Environment Sizing Guide:

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix

These days Microsoft Powershell seems the driving force behind all attempts to automate virtual infrastructures:

• Citrix released an orchestration platform, Workflow Studio, built on Powershell
• VMware released version 1.5 of its VI Tookit (aka Powershell SDK)
• Quest released its PowerGUI PowerPack 2.0 for VMware (aka VMware multi-host management through Powershell)
• icomasoft, a Swiss startup, released its VI PowerScripter Professional (aka VMware vCenter plug-in to execute Powershell scripts)

Last week Citrix validated Powershell once again by releasing its Powershell SnapIn for XenServer.

Ewan Mellor, Principal Software Engineer at Citrix, posted some basic examples (here and here) of what can be done with the Microsoft scripting language on XenServer.

Labels: Citrix, SDK

While VMware is busy releasing an open source client for its connection broker, Citrix is busy updating its end-to-end VDI platform.

The new XenDesktop 3.0, released just two months since version 2.1, introduces some important updates and new features:

• Includes XenServer 5.0 rather than 4.1 (which implies a higher consolidation ratio - Citrix claims that XenDesktop 3.0 can now host twice the number of virtual desktop of XenDesktop 2.x)
• Includes Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence Provisioning Server) as an integrated component rather than a bundled package
• Includes additional features from XenApp ICA (SpeedScreen multimedia redirection, USB devices support)
• Includes a brand new set of remote desktop rendering enhancements called HD-X
• Includes User Profile Manager 2.0
• Supports SmartCard authentication

The innovation around HD-X is the important part of the new XenDesktop.
The optimization engine des a lot of things, on server-side, over the network and on client-side:

On severs-side HD-X accelerates some graphic-intensive activities like photo edition, web browsing, video and (bi-directional) audio consumption, and more.
In H1 2009 the technology will also be able to accelerate VoIP software applications as well as 3D/CAD ones.

On network-side HD-X estimates the bandwidth availability (with a special attention to brahcn offices scenarios), prioritizes the virtual channels, balances the remote desktop session

On client-side HD-X accelerates some common UI interactions, like the text-entry or the mouse-click feedback, or multimedia consumption.
Additionally, HD-X extends support for client hardware, like multiple monitors, high-performance display cards or USB devices.
In H2 2009 HD-X will also be able to support the Microsoft Aero Glass interface (possibly both the one included in Windows Vista and the upcoming new version featured by Windows 7).

Anyway the most important enhancement that HD-X will introduce is expected in H2 2009 as well, when Citrix will introduce a technology called SmartRendering.
SmartRendering will basically inspect every component of the virtual desktop infrastructure, automatically tuning the XenDesktop features to deliver the best possible experience.
And this means that HD-X will autonomously decide where to put the rendering load (on the server, on the network or on the client) depending on resources availability.

Labels: Citrix, Releases, VDI

Just yesterday virtualization.info covered the amazing work of Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts that lead two separate Citrix and VMware solutions providers.

Their Virtual Reality Check project is a performance analysis of the leading hypervisors (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V) when running typical Microsoft Terminal Services/Citrix XenApp workloads: a Windows XP virtual desktop loaded with Outlook 2007 and Acrobat Reader 8.

Easy to guess, the post achieved one of the highest page view score in the history of virtualization.info, despite other prominent influencers already covered the project the previous week.

The non-sponsored results published by Spruijt and van de Kamp generated a lot of reactions as their conclusion on Citrix XenApp is:

Not having the ability to overcommit virtual machine memory is an clear disadvantage when
virtualizing desktops. Such a feature allows much more VM’s to be run than physical memory
normally would allow, which makes a virtual desktop solution much more economical.

…

XenServer is clearly optimized for Terminal Server and XenApp workloads, achieving near bare metal performance and even higher user densities than bare-metal configurations. This is possible because 32-bit 2003 terminal server with 4GB memory is relatively very efficient in comparison to other Windows operating systems.

While Microsoft didn’t comment (it has no interest in doing so), VMware immediately reacted: the company’s performance team published a new benchmark just few days (Jan 30) after the project Virtual Reality Check was announced (Jan 26).

The VMware performance study compares XenServer 5.0 and ESX 3.5.0 Update 3 performance when running Citrix XenApp workloads and highlights some odd results compared to what Virtual Reality Check exposed:

ESX supports about 13% more users than XenServer at a given latency while using less CPU.

Why the benchmarks are so different?

Stats and polls can be read in several different ways and manipulated as needed.
Simon Crosby, the CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, provides a possible read:

…

the VMware "study" is not a thorough exploration of a valid set of parameters for the Terminal Services / XenApp workload.  Instead, it is a narrow look at a particular set of configurations which are not reasonable in practice:

• No test of 32 bit workloads - the primary candidates for server consolidation for this workload because a 32 bit OS exhausts its memory at 4 GB and a modern server can pack hundreds of GB and many cores.  Our work in this area has shown a
  compelling benefit to virtualizing TS/XenApp 32 bit workloads on XenServer, and an equally compelling set of reasons not to use ESX for this purpose.
• Unrealistic configuration - The server used in the tests is certainly punchy - the machine had 64 GB RAM and 4 processors--each with 4 cores (16 total processor cores).  Anyone familiar with 64b TS/XenApp knows this machine could easily  support hundreds of XenApp sessions.  But the "scientists" at VMware don't.  They instead chose to run exactly one VM (with only 2 vCPU's and using only 25% of the available memory) and XenApp at minimal levels of concurrency (i.e. 10-40 users).  No multi-VM scenarios, no tests at useful user-counts.  Based on their measurements they appear to gleefully extrapolate deeper into the realm of fiction to proudly pronounce their horse the winner.

At this point we would like an additional comment from Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp as their work is somewhat questioned by the new VMware study.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Last week a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts, Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), launched a remarkable project called Virtual Reality Check.

The non-sponsored joint effort produced a set of valuable benchmark comparisons between VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments:

• Bare-Metal Platform Index v1.0
• Hyper-V Platform Index v1.0
• VMware Platform Performance Index v1.0
• XenServer Platform Performance Index v1.0

To measure the hypervisors performance they used the recently released, free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) and performed over 150 tests.

The best part of the documents released so far is that they carefully analyze the impact of several configuration changes for each hypervisor, suggesting which setup is the most performing.

If you are planning a VDI infrastructure the performance analysis these virtualization professionals redacted is a mandatory reading.

By the way: Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp will speak at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009, in Las Vegas.

On stage the two will discuss the results, unveil additional details that were not published and preview the upcoming new tests.
Additionally, they will teach how to setup a benchmarking facility using Login VSI.

Be sure to check their presentation abstract here.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Last week the public companies busy in the virtualization market (VMware, Citrix and Microsoft) reported their Q4 2008 results. While it’s not possible to make a comparison, as both Citrix and Microsoft businesses are not solely depending on virtualization, it’s yet interesting to have an aggregated view of  how they performed.

VMware

• Revenues for the fourth quarter were $515 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $102 million, an increase of 34% from the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $135 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $111 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $142 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, compared to $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007. 
• Revenues for the full year 2008 were $1.9 billion, an increase of 42% from 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $313 million, an increase of 33% from 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the year 2008 was $469 million, an increase of 39% from 2007.
• GAAP net income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $290 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, compared to $218 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, for 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the year 2008 was $416 million, or $1.05 per diluted share, compared to $295 million, or $0.82 per diluted share, for 2007. 
• Cash was more than $1.8 billion and deferred revenue was $870 million as of December 31, 2008. Since the beginning of 2008, cash increased 50% and deferred revenue increased 57%.

VMware didn’t cut at all its workforce, but because of this uncertainty, VMware is not providing revenue guidance for the full year 2009.

Citrix

• Product license revenue decreased 9%
• License updates revenue grew 13%
• Online services revenue grew 18%
• Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 13%
• Revenue grew in the America’s region by 3% and in the EMEA region by 2%, and decreased in the Pacific region by 6%
• Deferred revenue totaled $533 million, compared to $443 million on December 31, 2007, an increase of 21%
• Operating margin was 15% for the quarter; and non-GAAP operating margin was 26% for the quarter, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense, the write-off of IPR&D, and the non-cash benefit related to the adjustment of payroll taxes discussed under non-GAAP results
• Cash flow from operations was $166 million, compared to $113 million in the fourth quarter of 2007
• Repurchased shares were 2.2 million shares at an average net price paid of $25.89.

Citrix cut the workforce by 10% and expects net revenue to be approximately flat as compared to 2008.

Microsoft

• Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $16.63 billion for the second quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, a 2% increase over the same period of the prior year
• Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.94 billion, $4.17 billion and $0.47, declines of 8%, 11% and 6%, respectively, compared with the prior year

Microsoft cut the workforce by 5,000 jobs and can’t offer quantitative revenue and EPS guidance for the balance of this fiscal year.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

The just announced partnership between Citrix and Intel certainly raised some serious concerns among the many virtualization companies that are developing a client hypervisor.
At least one of the them may be safe anyway: Virtual Computer.

The startup founded by Alex Vasilevski, the founder and CTO of Virtual Iron, launched in September 2008 and its product NxTop, currently in private beta, is really overlapping the Citrix plans to deliver an end-to-end VDI solution.

Despite that, today the company announces Citrix, along with Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, granted a second round of funding for as much as $15 million.

It’s a bold move, considering the investment that Citrix already has in place with Intel, and it may imply a future acquisition.

The news also highlights how active Citrix is becoming in the virtualization market, investing in a number of startups (just ten days ago the company invested in Open Kernel Labs) that may provide innovative products in the next few years.

Labels: Citrix, Funding, Virtual Computer

Without any clamor, last week Citrix released a web version of its virtualization management console XenCenter.

The product, called XenCenterWeb, has limited capabilities as it can’t do much more than list the avialable virtual machines and start/restart/stop them.

Rather than selling the product, Citrix is currently offering it as a Resource Kit component that any partner and customer can download free of charge.
The company doesn’t even support it in an official way.

Nonetheless the product is interesting and may turn into a major feature of future versions of XenServer.

Labels: Citrix

Last week Citrix almost silently released its much awaited orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The first news about the product emerged almost one year ago, but the company didn’t provide access to the bits before June 2008.

Workflow Studio is key piece in the Citrix virtual infrastructure vision as it delivers the mandatory automation layer that makes smart any cloud computing or dynamic data center environment.

This market segment is pretty empty: one of the few serious competitors was Dunes Technologies, which was acquired by VMware in September 2008 and that is about to relaunch as vCenter Orchestrator.

At its first version the product, built on Microsoft PowerShell, is able to automate a number of tasks in XenServer/XenCenter, XenDesktop, XenApp and NetScaler, through an intuitive GUI.
As some of these products supports 3rd party solutions (for example XenDesktop supports VMware ESX), Workflow Studio can automate some of their capabilities as well.

Additionally, any Citrix partner can further extend the platform providing its own automation script (as Workflow Templates and Tasks Libraries).

The product is available for any Citrix customer that has a Subscription Advantage.

Labels: Citrix, Releases

Surprisingly enough in the last few months Intel sold many of its VMW shares (some of them were acquired by Cisco). There may be a good reason: Intel has some serious business to do with the VMware’s competitor Citrix.

Last Friday the two announced a joint effort (codenamed Thunder Lake) to develop a version of Xen for consumer equipment like desktops and laptops (something the industry is calling a desktop or client hypervisor).

Of course the product is not developed for the consumer market, but for the big enterprises with a large-scale population of clients. For this reason Citrix and Intel will offer the new hypervisor along with a centralized management system to control the hypervisor distribution, a delivery mechanism that works on bare-metal hardware, and a security wrapper around the virtual machines to enforce granular access control policies.
The entire platform will be optimized for Intel vPro technology.

The two companies promise near-native performance inside the virtual machines, ability to work off-network (so there will be a synchronization system between the client and the data center) and bandwidth-intelligent streaming.
Many competitors are trying to deliver the same things, including Phoenix Technologies, Virtual Computer, Neocleus, and of course VMware.

Once available in H2 2009, this client hypervisor will be distributed through the major OEMs and will be integrated into upcoming Citrix products.

This news doesn’t come totally unexpected: just few months ago virtualization.info highlighted how Intel mysteriously appeared among the Citrix partners that are developing a client hypervisor powered by Xen in a presentation from Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization department at Citrix.

Update: Citrix published a video of the client hypervisor, codename Project Independence, in action.
It doesn’t show anything about the way it’s installed, configured and managed, but it certainly shows how some multimedia workloads (DVD playing, 3D rendering) are easily served inside the virtual machines.

See it at the new sister (and beta) site of virtualization.info: virtualization.tv

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Intel

Yesterday the embedded virtualization vendor Open Kernel Labs closed its first round of investments: $7.6 million kindly provided by Chrysalis Ventures, Neo Technology Ventures and Citrix.

The interest of Citrix in mobile virtualization is very high and goes well beyond the port of its ICA client on the iPhone.

Xen, which powers XenServer, is being ported on ARM architectures by Samsung since a couple of years now and Citrix seems ready to leverage the opportunity.
Just two months ago Ian Pratt, CTO of Xen and Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix, clearly stated his interest in mobile virtualization.

On top of that the VMware’s acquisition of Trango, a well-known Open Kernel Labs competitor, is further igniting the interest.

Some are already speculating that Citrix may proceed with an acquisition after this first investment.

Labels: Citrix, Funding, Open Kernel Labs

SearchServerVirtualization.com is breaking the news today revealing that Citrix will release a management suite for Microsoft Hyper-V in Q1 2009.
The product, dubbed Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V (codename Encore), will bring in some most wanted features like the virtual machines live migration that Microsoft will be unable to deliver until Windows Server 2008 R2, somewhere in 2010.

Citrix continues to advertise the same strategy since the XenSource acquisition: deliver value on top of the Microsoft hypervisor as it did for Terminal Services in the last decade.
But with virtualization the situation is different: Citrix doesn’t have a solution that depends on a Microsoft product. Citrix has a complete virtualization stack that could totally replace Microsoft in a customer environment. So what’s the strategy for the overlapping components and features?

Lou Shipley, General manager and Group Vice President of XenServer division at Citrix clarifies it: the company plans to stay on top of competition developing software that is 18 months ahead of Microsoft technologies.

The article also reveals that Citrix will introduce a memory overcommit technique, the so called ballooning, in XenServer 6.0, along with virtual lab management and workload balancing capabilities.
The new release is expected somewhere in 2009.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

The virtualization community has different opinions on the value of running a remote desktop inside a tiny screen like the one that the Apple iPhone offers.

Nonetheless when Citrix presented the idea for the first time at the Application Delivery Conference 2008, even if it was just a trick, it raised a lot of attention.

On stage the company hinted at a new ICA client delivered as a native iPhone application, but never made an official statement or suggested a release date.

Now the project Braeburn, this is how it’s called internally, becomes official: Citrix is developing a Receiver for the iPhone.
More than that Citrix teamed up with Apple to use the unique hardware capabilities of this mobile device.

The company set up an entire community website around this project, but stays vague about the release date, suggesting a generic H1 2009 but here a hint for you.

On Dec. 1st virtualization.info launched a Call for Papers for its upcoming Virtualization Congress 2009, May 5-7, in Las Vegas.
The submitted sessions (over 50 so far!) will be published here on Jan 5th so you can vote for the most interesting ones.
Look at those submissions and see if you can spot anything about this topic.

Meanwhile we all hope that Citrix can convince Apple to release a device that looks like an iPhone but it’s as big as an Amazon Kindle, to use it as the definitive Nirvana Device. Citrix please.

Labels: Apple, Citrix, iPhone

In September Citrix silently released the first minor update for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The new XenDesktop 2.1 becomes a serious multi-hypervisor connection broker, as it introduces the support for Microsoft products (both Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that goes side by side with the existing support for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

The product also includes the new Provisioning Server for Desktops 5.0.

To celebrate Citrix has released an interesting evaluation guide: Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Citrix, Releases

In May Citrix released its first fully-featured VDI platform combining together a hypervisor, XenServer, a connection broker, Desktop Deliver Controller (DDC), an OS streaming solution, Provisioning Server, its blockbuster presentation/application virtualization & streaming plaform, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and a bunch of other applications.

Only the most skilled Citrix customers know that this rich suite, called XenDesktop, has a limitation: the remote desktop protocol it uses (internally called PortICA) it’s not exactly the same ICA that powers XenApp.

The reason behind this difference is that the ICA protocol is built on top of the Microsoft Terminal Server platform that is missing in the Windows XP and Vista guest operating systems that populate VDI environments.

Citrix has rebuilt many of the features in the new PortICA and it’s working to have the same feature-set across the two protocols. But for now there’s a gap.
Martin Maierhofer, Product Architect at Citrix, details the missing capabilities on his corporate blog:

• Kerberos SSPI: while a useful feature, this integrates deeply with the logon process, and this is one area where - you guessed it - XenApp and XenDesktop differ considerably. Moreover, for it to be really useful you will typically have to mark the computer that your end users connect to as "trusted for delegation" - and typically . While that may be ok for a relatively small number of well managed XenApp server, it's less clear that you'd want to do this for thousands of virtual desktops, where your users may have full admin rights. Morever, Windows XP doesn't support constrained delegation, which makes this a less attractive solution. Hence we decided to leave this aside for the initial release.
• SmartCards: this is a very important feature for a relatively small, but vocal target market. Again, from a technical point of view it is far from a straight port from XenApp. Having said that, it is a high priority item and we are working on delivering it as soon as possible.
• SpeedScreen: SpeedScreen is a term that refers to a large array of technologies that optimize the end user experience. The first version of XenDesktop shipped with support for the majority of SS features, including SS Browser Acceleration, SS Flash Acceleration, SS Image Acceleration, and SS Progressive Display. Now for the features that didn't make the cut: SS Multimedia Acceleration was unfortunately too late to make it into the first release, but we are well under way with it now. The situation is less clear with SS Zero Latency - XenDesktop already supports mouse click feedback, but keyboard type-ahead is a technology that is not terribly easy to set up, and can be tricky to get working with more recent applications that you would typically find on a virtual desktop. For now, we are assessing how we can best make this functionality available on XenDesktop.
• PDA Sync and Twain: again, these are fairly tied to the Terminal Services infrastructure on XenApp. Moreover, virtually all PDAs and scanners nowadays are USB devices, and we will tackle them in a more compatible and user-friendly manner through our upcoming USB remoting technology in XenDesktop.
• Shadowing: as I mentioned before, on XenApp this is based off Terminal Services capabilities that just aren't available to us in XenDesktop. XenDesktop Platinum comes with Citrix GotoAssist, which is a more than capable replacement for shadowing, or you can also use the built-in Remote Assistance feature built into Windows for a premise-based solution. We also have plans to support shadowing functionality in future.
• SmartAuditor: SmartAuditor is used by a relatively small customer segment, and thus wasn't among the highest priority items for a first XenDesktop release. There has been quite a lot of prep work for this already, and I am confident that we'll include this in one of the future XenDesktop releases.
• Audio on Vista: this is a bit tricky - Vista's audio architecture differs fundamentally from that used in Windows XP, and we need to completely re-implement the audio framework in PortICA to support Vista, which unfortunately has taken a bit longer than we'd hoped, but is nearing completion now. The good news is that we will be able to take advantage of this rework to integrate much better audio codecs in future.
• Perfmon Counters and User Experience Metrics: again lack of support for these metrics was due to resource constraints, and there are only minor technical difficulties to make them available on XenDesktop.

Labels: Citrix, Tech

Egenera is mostly known as a hardware vendor offering its own blade system, BladeFrame, but the most interesting proposition of the company is its management console: PAN Manager.
This software layer is able to aggregate the hardware resources of each blade and abstract them in a sort of computing cloud in a box.

For a long time Egenera tightened PAN Manager to the BladeFrame, making it almost unknown for the wide audience. But more than one year ago, Egenera finally allowed to use the software on other hardware provided by a number of OEM partners.

The resource pool provided by PAN Manager is a perfect companion for a virtualization engine so the company developed a special module called vBlade, which allows a hypervisor to manage the abstracted hardware.
Rather than develop (or acquire) its own virtual machine monitor, Egenera preferred to sign an agreement with XenSource to adopt its XenEnterprise.

Now, thirteen months after opening PAN Manager, Egenera is taking further steps to make its strategy more virtualization-friendly: the new vBlade 2.1 is renamed vmBuilder and it’s shipped with Citrix XenServer 4.1.
This introduces much wanted features to the platform like XenMotion, virtual machines suspend and resume and support for Red Hat Enteprise Linux 64bit as guest OS.

Additionally Egenera may bring VMware ESX on vmBuilder, as announced a long time ago.

Labels: Citrix, Egenera, Releases

Starting November 2007, we had signs that multiple entities (virtualization vendors, phone vendors, embedded CPU vendors) are working to bring hardware virtualization to mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs.

The fact that Samsung is porting Xen on the ARM processor should be more than enough. If not here another confirmation.

The CTO of Xen and Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix and Chairman of Xen.org, Ian Pratt, gave an interview to CNET yesterday and said:

Q: As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
A: Client virtualization is an area I'm spending time on. It's an area where Xen leads--despite some bluster from VMware. It's an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualized smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualization into its processors; they didn't put that in for fun.

Virtualization in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualization in the x86 market. Client virtualization is going to happen quite quickly. It won't go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualization solution, because virtualization won't exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it…

Labels: Citrix, Xen

At the just closed Citrix Partners Summit a number of companies announced their support for  XenServer. Among them:

• DynamicOps VRM Verified Citrix Ready for Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop
• SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer now supports Citrix XenServer 5
• Stratus Avance Software verified Citrix Ready

Labels: Citrix, SteelEye

Last week a Gartner chart comparing virtualization vendors market shares and their hypervisors’ features generated a lot of buzz as, for example, Oracle VM was reported as more used than Microsoft Hyper-V.

The chart was included in a recent article from Datamation, but Gartner said that it was part of November 2007 report.
The analysis firm has requested the news magazine to update its article with the newest version of that chart, based on projections made on March 2008. Let’s compare the two diagrams:

	November 2007
	March 2008

As you can see the data is remarkably different and even more interesting for several reasons:

• While VMware continues to be unreachable in terms of market share, Microsoft now jumps to the second position, ahead of Citrix, despite Hyper-V is really new on the market while Citrix counted 400 new XenServer customers in Q4 2007, to add on top of the XenSource ones won before the acquisition.
• Oracle, which was as good as Virtual Iron and better than Citrix in the first chart, goes back to the lowest rating for the Management / Automation category and for the Maturity / Stability category.
  It’s an interesting degradation considering that Oracle VM updated its hypervisor to 2.x version in July (after the second projection went out): something terrible must be happened somewhere between 1.x and 1.x.x. to negatively influence Gartner.
• Virtual Iron, XenServer and Hyper-V became more expensive

But the chart is interesting also for another reason: now that we have a guarantee about the freshness of Gartner data, we can compare its market share projections with the IDC ones, published two weeks ago generating another strong flow of comments. The difference is more than remarkable:

• Microsoft market share: IDC (23%) – Gartner (7%)
• VMware market share: IDC (44%) – Gartner (89%)

Please consider that the IDC percent refers to an aggregate data that includes both ESX and Server for VMware and both Hyper-V and Virtual Server for Microsoft. We don’t know if Gartner did the same.

In any case it’s clear that there is a major discrepancy between the projections, putting in serious doubts the reliability of every report on the virtualization market shares.

It would be interesting to have additional numbers from other analysis firms. If Forrester, Burton Group or any other wants to play this game we’ll update this post accordingly.

We wonder, no irony intended, if virtualization.info could be used to provide some reliable metrics about the virtualization adoption to compare with the ones above.
To verify this we published a very simple (9 questions) survey covering just the hardware virtualization (hypervisors) adoption.

This should be considered as a first attempt to measure the market through our audience and it’s expected that the survey design may be unsatisfying for somebody.
If the experiment will be successful we’ll work on more sophisticated questionnaires, evaluating multiple aspects of the market.

Every reader but virtualization vendors employees is welcome to answer the 9 questions. It shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes.
The results of course will be published free of charge online as soon as we reach a fair amount of responses.

http://www.virtualization.info/surveys

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron

Datamation just published a new article about Virtual Iron and its potential to win virtualization competitors.

The piece includes a very interesting Gartner chart that reveals surprising information:

First of all the Microsoft virtualization offering is perceived as the less mature and stable compared with the other in the matrix. Even less than Oracle, the last vendor entering the virtualization space.This shouldn’t surprise much considering that Hyper-V is at its first edition while Oracle uses Xen as the hypervisor for its Oracle VM.
Nonetheless it’s a further confirmation that Microsoft still has a huge amount of work ahead if it wants to change the market perspective.

The second interesting detail is that the estimated number of deployed virtual machines for Microsoft already reaches 50,000, while some competitors like Virtual Iron can just double the number despite they are in the space since a remarkable amount of time.
Once again the fact that Oracle VM has more deployed virtual machines than Microsoft is surprising.

The third interesting fact is that Oracle VM is the only hypervisor perceived as secure as VMware ESX.
As mentioned above Oracle adopts Xen as virtualization engine, pretty much like Citrix and Virtual Iron, but compared with the other is the youngest in the space.

It’s unclear how recent this chart is, but for sure it’s related to 2008: considering that Oracle VM has been around for less than one year, if these numbers are reliable maybe it’s time to reevaluate the relevance of Oracle in the virtualization space.

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Virtual Iron, VMware

During its Q3 2008 earnings call Citrix unveiled some interesting data about its server and desktop virtualization achievements.

First of all the Q3 revenues for XenServer and XenDesktop are up by $7 million, which gives good hopes to match the goal of $25 million for 2008.

Even more interesting is the actual number of partners that Citrix hired to sell the two products above: 3,300 so far, where the number of resellers quadrupled just for the last quarter. 
It’s worth to note that only 1,200 of those partners are already trained and certified for XenDesktop, so Citrix still has a lot of opportunities to leverage its channel.

Last but not least Citrix reports 200 new customers for XenDesktop (including Tesco, the largest retailer in the UK, and SAP) added during Q3.

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends

In August Citrix promised the beta release of a new toolkit to author virtual machines compliant to the new Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) standard.

Today is the day: Citrix just released the first technical preview of project Kensho under the LGPL license.

The package at the moment includes:

• an import/export tool (for Windows XP and 2003 only) which can convert in OVF any virtual machine in VHD format, taking it from a folder (the Library) or directly from a Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V host.
• an agent to be installed on XenServer hosts which allows the direct import/export of OVF VMs (this is not needed to interact with Hyper-V as the tool uses the WinRM interface provided by Windows Server 2008)

VMware Infrastructure direct support is not available but, exactly because this is an interoperability, customers can create an OVF virtual machine with the new VMware Studio and import into XenServer with this wizard. Or vice versa.

The tool also does another couple of interesting things:

• it allows the extraction of metadata only from the OVF package, useful if you want to backup the VM configuration
• it allows to map the virtual resources defined in the OVF metadata to the physical resources actually available on the virtualization host, useful to avoid any additional modifications of the OVF VM after the import in XenServer or Hyper-V.

Citrix published a useful video describing all these capabilities.

As part of its OVF effort Citrix also announces a partnership with rPath, the succesful firm that offers an online tool (rBuilder) to build and deliver new virtual appliances by assembling Linux packages like Lego bricks.

The two are working together to allow rBuilder to inject OVF virtual appliances directly into Xen-based cloud computing environments, like Amazon EC2.

If rPath can see itself beyond the current role of self-service portal to build virtual machines, it could morph in a real VM lifecycle management company focused on hosted virtual infrastructures (no matter if the purpose is cloud computing or not).
Citrix is offering them a unique opportunity to reach that goal.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, rPath, Standards

In May Citrix released the second major version of its VDI solution XenDesktop.

The product is much more than a connection broker for virtual infrastructures as it includes a plethora of other Citrix products, from the Provisioning Server to the Access Gateway, passing through the GoToAssist.

The result is a feature-rich and powerful product but the side effect is that newcomers can be very confused trying to understand how the platform works.

To address the issue Citrix just released a lengthy slide deck detailing XenDesktop 2.0 architecture, exploring all the tiers used in different business cases.

The document is certainly not enough to fully get the potentials of this product but it’s good starting point.

Labels: Citrix, Tech

Amazon launched a virtual infrastructure available on demand and powered by the Xen hypervisor, the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), in August 2006.

As far as we know the number of customers that are currently using it is not public, but, despite early security issues and multiple outages, reliable sources reported to virtualization.info that such number is remarkable.
Nonetheless Amazon may have many more customers if it would start offering Windows virtual machines.

So far in fact the company only offers Linux instances. It’s unclear if this depends on technical issues (like the version of Xen that it’s currently in use), on policy issues (like the feeling that EC2 is not robust enough to support million of customers hosting Windows) or licensing issues (Microsoft has to give its blessing for such a massive infrastructure).

It seems that the things are finally changing: with a brief note online Amazon announced that EC2 will have Windows instances this fall.

At the moment the page just offers a notification alert subscription but, interestingly enough, it surveys the readers about possible uses of Windows virtual machines:

• Web Server
• Video Transcoding
• MS SQL Server Database
• Desktop Software
• Microsoft Software
• Backoffice Software
• Development
• High Performance Computing

Of course one of the most interesting options above, and there’s no guarantee that Amazon will allow that kind of use, is for desktop software. And that means that EC2 could become the biggest hosted VDI infrastructure on the planet (Brian Madden posted some interesting questions about this scenario).

Now, considering that Citrix influences the Xen community and that VDI is its main battleground against VMware, it would be interesting to know what kind of involvement it has in the whole project.

It would also be interesting to know if the startup Desktone has some involvement as well: the company is the first currently offering a technology for hosted VDI scenarios (see the virtualization.info coverage here) and, what a coincidence, is partially funded by Citrix.

Labels: Amazon, Citrix, Xen

In the previous parts of this wrap-up we summarized the brand new message that VMware delivered on stage (Part 1), trying to analyze its impact on the market, and the major technology trends emerging from the activity of its partners (Part 2).

In this last part we’ll take a look at how the competitors tried to position against VMware during its own event:

• Citrix developed some impressive guerrilla marketing capabilities, anticipating for the second time the VMware moves right before their event.
  This time the company announced the availability of XenServer 5.0, which includes a number of features like the new high-availability module for Enterprise and Platinum editions developed by Marathon Technologies, the open storage APIs supporting DAS, NAS and SAN (both FC and iSCSI), the virtual machine tagging capability and more.
  XenServer 5 comes with a new Cloud edition (featuring a new consumption based pricing model) that it’s included in a new product bundle called Citrix Cloud Center, along with NetScaler, WANScaler and the upcoming Workflow Studio orchestration framework.
  
• VMLogix continues to position itself as a VMware competitor in the virtual lab automation segment, announcing a new product that once again has the same name of the VMware’s one: StageManager.
  Of course the difference with VMware Stage Manager is that this solution will support Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors as soon as it will be out in December.
• Trigence attempts a (weak) attack on the application virtualization front, announcing the availability of its Trigence AE 3.2 for Windows platform.
• Kace, a system management company, has the same ambition and announces the acquisition of an application virtualization player: Computers In Motion.
• Thinsy, the company that was brave enough to launch the nth commercial implementation of Xen in November 2007, still thinks it has a chance to gain some market share in the hardware virtualization segment and announces the second generation of its hypervisor.

This list may be incomplete but it’s evident that besides Citrix and Microsoft (that made its move the week before VMworld), there few companies that can afford the risk to go against VMware.
We’ll see if next year, when VMware vCenter will be everywhere, this list will become longer or not.

Labels: Citrix

There’s no doubt that VMware is still the top virtualization player, but the upcoming Q4 2008 will highlight in a crystal clear way that it’s no more the only player available.

The landscape is being reshaped by several major vendors trying to erode the VMware leadership with different strategies:

• Citrix is targeting the enterprises with a comprehensive product portfolio for application delivery and highly specific features: the Xen-based hypervisor (XenServer), the management layer (XenCenter), the desktop and application virtualization platform (XenApp), the VDI broker (XenDesktop) and much more.
• Microsoft just started targeting its SMB customer base with competitive pricing, extended support policies, massive interoperability agreements and an impressive number of converging products: its new hypervisor (Hyper-V), its new application virtualization and streaming platform (App-V), the upcoming new management layer (SCVMM 2008), the backup layer (DPM 2007), the performance monitoring layer (SCOM 2007) and more.
• Novell is including new products in its portfolio to extend its capability to sell virtualization outside the Linux world: a new high-performance virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor, P2V migration and capacity planning tools (acquired by PlateSpin) integrated with its ZENworks management layer, and a brand new application virtualization platform (offered through the OEM agreement with Xenocode).
• Oracle is recalling its own customer base with a strict support policy and a new, free of charge hypervisor based on Xen: Oracle VM.
• Parallels is working to release its first bare-metal hypervisor, strongly focusing on the Apple market and on the hosting segment, where it has a real leadership.
• Red Hat just found a unique opportunity to conquer an important side of the market, switching from Xen to KVM and buying the valuable VDI startup Qumranet.
• Sun is about to put on the table the most complete computing stack for virtualization, from servers and storage to hypervisor (xVM Server) and management (Ops Center), passing through VDI (Sun VDI).
• Virtual Iron continues to focus on the SMB market with a high quality virtual infrastructure and key new features.
  While it is the smallest vendor in this list but also the one of the most experienced. Acquiring its Xen-based hypervisor may represent the last cheap opportunity to enter the virtualization market for a big firm (IBM, HP, Dell, Symantec, Quest and few others).

Labels: Citrix

Last week Citrix announced that the its next generation desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0, will be launched on September 10.

The company made the product available slightly ahead of time so you can download a trial later today here.

Citrix also published a valuable Technical Guide for Upgrading or Migrating to XenApp 5 that every customer should read.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Citrix, Releases

Citrix announced that the next generation of its desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0 (formerly Presentation Server), will be released September 10, 2008.

Customers can see an online event on Sep. 9 with keynotes and live Q&A sessions.

The new product includes over 50 enhancements, detailed in a 13-pages comparative document.
Some of the new features are:

• Application streaming via HTTP/S
• Load-balancing defined by groups/users or applications
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• Support for IPv6
• Support for Microsoft XPS Universal Printer
• Support for Radius and Kerberors authentication (web interface)

The retail price per concurrent user is defined as follow:

• Advanced Edition – US $350
• Enterprise Edition – US $450
• Platinum Edition – US $600

Anyway customers can just buy the application virtualization and streaming components at the price of $60 per concurrent user.

Download a trial here (starting Sep. 10).

By reading the first page of the feature matrix above it seems that the Citrix marketing department worked much to redefine the concept of application virtualization so that our familiar terminology is turned upside-down:

• What we call today Desktop virtualization becomes Server-side Application Virtualization
• What we call today Application Virtualization becomes Client-side Application Virtualization

This redefinition, that will create a lot of confusion, was probably necessary because many vendors (including Citrix itself) are now using the term Desktop Virtualization referring to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs).

Following the Citrix approach both Desktop Virtualization and VDI seems wrong. The correct term should be Server-side Hardware Virtualization for Desktop OS hosting, or something like that.

The discussion could go on as the vendors currently use other overlapping terms like OS Virtualization, Server Virtualization and many more.

An attempt to define a firm glossary seems as challenging as designing a virtual machine standard format, so Citrix can’t be blamed for this attempt.

Labels: Citrix

Last month Citrix announced its commitment to adhere the almost ready new standard for virtual machines: the Open Virtual Machine Format or OVF.

Citrix is working on a set of tools (project Kensho) to grant the OVF interoperability and said that a technical preview of its toolbox will be available in Q3 2008 (probably September).

Last week at the LinuxWorld conference the company CTO Simon Crosby added another key information: the core of those tools will be available free of charge as open source technology.

This implies that other Xen-based products (like the ones from Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle) will be able to implement the OVF support much faster.

Crosby also said that the project Kensho will support a number of virtual disk formats including the one that Amazon is using in its Xen-based cloud computing infrastructure EC2: the AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

Maybe, by the end of next year customers will not have to worry about virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations anymore (with much disappointment from companies like PlateSpin).

Labels: Citrix

The application virtualization startup Ceedo last week announced the support for the Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) ICA client.

The news is interesting because so far the preferred solution to virtualize the ICA client was offered by Thinstall. But Thinstall was acquired by VMware (which now sells its products under the name ThinApp) so Citrix is more than welcome to switch its partner.

While the Ceedo platform is flexible enough to virtualize most applications, the company markets this specific application with a dedicated package, priced $89 per seat (perpetual license).

Download a trial here.

Labels: Citrix

Earlier this month virtualization.info reported about an upcoming 10% price increase from VMware.
Easy to imagine, the news generated a number of negative comments.

Now the customers will have a chance to complain with Citrix as well, as both CIO.co.uk and ThinComputing.net are reporting the same 10% price increase, starting September 1, 2008.

Labels: Citrix