by
Brian Madden
In case you missed the action last week...
On Monday, I wrote an article called "Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM." Later that day I added a very short clarification, "Citrix XenServer is here to stay." (The point I was clarifying was that I thought Citrix would drop the open source Xen hypervisor, not the XenServer product. The XenServer product would have a nice long life for Citrix managing Hyper-V, not Xen hypervisors.) The first article has 55 comments so far, and the little two-sentence clarification has 19 comments, so these are obviously hot topics in peoples' minds.
Dozens of bloggers responded to my two articles. The most prominent was Citrix's own Simon Crosby. Blogging on the official Citrix Community Website, Simon posted a point-by-point rebuttal to my original blog. I agree with some of it and not with other parts. (Like, for example, I'm 30, not 20! :) Simon's post is well-written although [understandably] very Citrix-centric. The comments posted in response over on Citrix.com are worth reading too.
As for comments and reactions from the rest of the blogosphere, most people just wrote "Look at Brian and Simon"-type posts that didn't add much to the conversation. Keith Ward wrote that my ideas are interesting but premature, and probably not technically accurate. Scott Lowe agrees with Keith and adds that "my idea is so far fetched that it's nonexistent."
Vinternals, on the other hand, agrees with me 100%. The folks at Virtualization.com aren't ready to make a prediction now, although they have agreed to buy me free drinks if I'm right.
Zooming out of the "Citrix and Xen" thing and looking at the bigger picture of Hyper-V's impact on the market, Rupert Collier provides some original insight on why the Citrix / Microsoft relationship is different now than it was in the Terminal Server days. He even uses the word "dastardly" to describe VMware, which is a word that only a Brit can use properly.
Virtualization.info's Alessandro Perilli has a great overview of the larger hypervisor scene, mixing news and analyst opinion about how this whole thing will shake out.
And finally, there are my friends at VMware and Citrix. Though it probably goes without saying, my VMware friends are generally saying, "We agree 100%. This is what many analysts think too," while my friends at Citrix are saying that I'm crazy, this is extremely caustic and short-sited, and in general, I'm way out of my league on this one.
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