Today Citrix released XenServer 5.6, announced a few weeks ago at the Synergy 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage of the event and our article about the new features and packages).
For the occasion John Humpheys, Senior Marketing Director at Citrix, shares some numbers about the market penetration of XenServer.
The most important information revealed is that XenServer is now the backend hypervisor for more than half of all XenDesktop installations worldwide.
One may think that this number is pretty low, and indeed there’s a lot to do here to leverage the opportunity with a more sophisticated and compelling integration, but the fact that many XenDesktop clients don’t choose XenServer isn’t really surprising.
In the early days, before VMware decided to enter the VDI space with the acquisition of Propero in fact, the Citrix connection broker that today is part of XenDesktop was the product recommended by most VMware partners.
For many, the optimal VDI environment has always been ESX plus XenDesktop. And while the connection broker now supports also Microsoft Hyper-V, ESX continues to be one of the preferred hypervisors for VDI.
So for Citrix this is a sort of major achievement.