Citrix completes XenSource virtualization buy
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Citrix's $500 million acquisition is done. Next up: new server and desktop virtualization products.
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Citrix Systems and Microsoft announced this week a new technology cross-licensing deal meant to assure the continued enhancement of Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services.
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Thinstall hops into fat wallet All the investor capital jingling in VMware's pockets has given the virtualization giant a healthy appetite for acquisitions. VMware said today it's planning to buy Thinstall, an application virtualization software firm based in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum.â¦
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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As part of a software upgrade, Citrix Systems is adding application streaming capabilities designed to help companies cut the umbilical cord connecting mobile users to Citrix servers.
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(InfoWorld) - Linux desktop and server vendor Xandros on Wednesday acquired Scalix, which develops an open-source e-mail, calendar, and groupware platform. Xandros, which develops a Linux desktop, server, and set of management tools called BridgeWays, said the acquisition would help it build toward its goal of developing a complete Linux stack, including desktop, small and midsize business, and advanced enterprise servers, cross-platform management tools, and IT infrastructure applications. "Instead of being a point-solution player we can to be an end-to-end solutions provider with desktop, management, server, and applications," said Andy Typaldos, CEO of Xandros and now president of Scalix. "If you package all the pieces together [users] don't have to have a fragmented set." In March, XandrosÂ announcedÂ that its Xandros Server 2 would come bundled with Scalix 11, which includes improved Web client access, support for mobile users, support for Microsoft Outlook and interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. The bundle was targeted at the SMB market.Typaldos said close engineering and executive level collaboration with Scalix on that deal led to exploring the acquisition. As part of the acquisition, Xandros said its BridgeWays management tools for administration, deployment/management, systems monitoring, and storage management would be adapted to manage Scalix on the platforms it supports. Those management capabilities are expected to be available later this year. The company's overall goal is to offer single-vendor, cross-platform support that spans Linux and Windows platforms. Xandros made news earlier this year when it became the second Linux vendor to signÂ a cross-patent licensing dealÂ with Microsoft. Part of that deal included ensuring interoperability between management tools from both vendors and Windows-based servers, and Typaldos said that part of the agreement would help fill out cross-platform support. Scalix is an open source mail server, based on OpenMail, which runs on Linux servers, and uses e-mail standards such as POP, IMAP, SMTP, and MIME and works with any standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory. Xandros says Scalix, whose software runs on the Xandros, Red Hat, and Novell SuSE platforms, will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary. Xandros said it will continue to provide "full and equal" support for all the Scalix platforms. The company also said its server would continue to support other messaging platforms, most notably Zimbra and Open Exchange. The company also said that the free Scalix Community Edition would remain available on all current platforms and that Xandros would continue to offer the source code to the Scalix platform via the upcoming ScalixForge Web site. Terms of the deal were not announced. Xandros said it will absorb all of the engineering, support, and most of the sales support staff of Scalix, pushing its employee total to more than 100. Scalix CEO Glenn Winokur and other Scalix managers won't join Xandros, but Winokur will work on the Xandros Advisory Board.
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Company discusses its product road map following the acquisition of virtualization vendor XenSource.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft and Novell will enable virtualization for each other's server operating systems as part of the companies' ongoing alliance to make Windows and Linux more interoperable. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 will let users host Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 as a virtualized guest, and the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, will have the ability to host Novell's Linux OS as an enlightened guest using built-in virtualization technology. In turn, Suse Linux Enterprise Sever 10, using Xen virtualization technology that is embedded in the OS, will be able to host Longhorn as a paravirtualized guest. Enlightenment and paravirtualization are different terms that describe similar, but not identical, techniques to improve performance. An enlightened guest OS is modified to make it aware it's running on Windows Server virtualization. A paravirtualized guest OS is modified to make it aware it's running on the Xen hypervisor. A virtualized guest OS running on Virtual Server 2005 R2 does not require modifications to make it aware it's running in a virtual machine. Thus, it is not "enlightened" or "paravirtualized." Longhorn, the long-awaited update to Windows Server, is due in the second half of 2007. Virtualization is just one of four key areas on which the companies said Monday they will focus their collaborative efforts this year. The other areas are Web services-based network management, directory interoperability, and document format interoperability. In the Web services-based management area, Microsoft and Novell said that they will both incorporate WS-Management (Web services for management) in their products to enable OS management through Web services. Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will both support WS-Management this year. WS-Management is a specification of a Web services-based protocol for the management of servers, devices, and applications. Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and other companies published the spec in March 2005, and it was ratified by the Distributed Management Task Force for adoption as a preliminary standard in August 2006. Novell also is working to develop an open-source implementation of WS-Management, the company said. Microsoft and Novell already have introduced technologies to make communication between the global standard file format for office documents, ODF (Open Document Format for XML), and the default file format in Microsoft Office 2007, Open XML, easier. On Feb. 2, Microsoft announced the availability of theÂ Open XML/ODF TranslatorÂ for Office 2007, Office 2003, and Office XP. Later this month, Novell will release an Open XML/ODF Translator for the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org open-source productivity suites. On the directory and identity-management fronts, both companies continue to work on technologies to make their offerings in these areas interoperate, but they have not announced specific progress yet. Microsoft and Novell said they will offer a more detailed roadmap for how their directory and identity management products will interoperate later this year. As part of the deal struck in March, Novell and Microsoft agreed, among other things, to co-develop technologies that would help Novell's Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows OSes interoperate more seamlessly. The alliance between the two -- particularly Novell's payment to Microsoft for patents -- has inspired much controversy. Novell especially seems to have lost some credibility within the open-source community for joining forces with the proprietary software giant.
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Finding peace with virtualisation deal XenSource has signed an agreement with NEC which it hopes will push demand and boost sales for its virtualisation server platform, XenEnterprise.â¦
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SLES 10 and Solaris welcomed too Viridian remains Microsoft's virtualization priority, but that hasn't stopped the software maker from refining the existing Virtual Server package. Microsoft this week dumped a number of new virtualization tools in the final version of Service Pack 1 for Virtual Server 2005 R2.â¦
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Citrix Systems, Inc., has signed an agreement with Microsoft, which will enable Citrix to deliver more comprehensive access solutions on the Windows platform.
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(InfoWorld) - VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum has poured tepid water on the recent acquisition of open-source virtualization vendor XenSource by remote desktop company Citrix as well as outlining his demands to the chip vendors. He made his remarks during an exclusive interview with Techworld at virtualization industry event VMworld, during which he also outlined what additional support for virtualization he wants the chip vendors to provide. Commenting from a technology perspective on the Citrix buy-out, which was announced last month, Rosenblum said: "If I were in Citrix's shoes, would I have gone in that direction? There is a layer to control -- I can see it from that point of view as they've long suffered from being on top of Microsoft.... I can see why they might do it, but there are a lot of challenges." Rosenblum also laid out a blueprint for some of the issues he'd like to see the AMD and Intel tackle. He said that VMware didn't always get what it wanted from the processor makers and that VMware needed more visibility into how virtual machines use the processor cache in order to provide better quality of service. In particular, he referred to the problem of a VM demanding huge amounts of processor resource that affected other processor cores. He said: "We've made great steps, but if you have a 10-gig NIC with tiny packets coming, it can consume a whole CPU just looking at each of them, so it's really difficult trying to match line rate." Rosenblum also claimed that his comments about virtualization being a threat to Windows were taken out of context. He said: "Journalists like to put things in headlines that I actually didn't say.... The point was that once you have the virtualization layer driving the hardware, that's taken away some of the functionality of the OS, which gives the OS a chance to focus on its other major goal, which is still very much needed in the application environment. So where modern OSes have gone is to control hardware and the application and are running into a dead end."
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(InfoWorld) - Virtual Iron and XenSource both are introducing new virtualization software to undercut on price the dominant player in the field, VMware. On Monday, Virtual Iron is set to start offering Version 3.1 of its enterprise-class virtualization platform for a license price of $499 per socket, which is less than 20 percent of the $2,875 per socket price for a comparable VMware license, according to Virtual Iron. Virtual Iron argues that VMware's pricing is a barrier to more widespread adoption of virtualization in data centers, citing IDC research that only 6 percent of data center operators deploy any type of virtualization. Also Monday, XenSource introduced new and upgraded virtualization products, also at sub-$1,000 prices. Both XenSource and Virtual Iron build their proprietary products on top of the open-source Xen platform for virtualization hypervisors. A hypervisor is technology that makes it possible for one computer to run multiple operating systems at the same time. VMware's products are not based on open source. Virtualization refers to software and other system management tools that are used to better utilize servers. Virtualization makes it possible for one physical server to run multiple applications simultaneously. Advanced virtualization features include tools to seamlessly move computing workloads from one physical server to another, set up infrastructure and test new software. Revenue at VMware, a wholly owned subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, grew 86 percent in EMC's fiscal third quarter to $188.5 million. If that pace keeps up, VMware's annualized revenue would be $750 million, VMware said. Virtual Iron and XenSource intend to slow that pace. "We are taking a very aggressive stand on pricing," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer for Virtual Iron. The Charlotte Observer newspaper in North Carolina uses Virtual Iron. It took 45 minutes to run a particular job on its legacy Unix-based servers, said Geoff Shorter, the Observer's IT infrastructure manager. VMware completed the same job in 11 to 13 minutes, but so did the less expensive Virtual Iron. The license for the high-end VMware product costs $5,750 to run on a dual-socket server, Shorter said. Virtual Iron's license is $499 per socket, so the total cost for a dual-socket machine license would be $998. Pricing for XenSource's XenEnterprise starts at for $488 for an annual subscription license for a dual-socket server or $750 for a perpetual license. XenServer for Windows, introduced Monday, sells for $99 per dual-socket server, per year. It has fewer features than XenEnterprise. "Our intention is to dramatically shift the landscape under VMware," said Simon Crosby, XenSource's chief technology officer. Virtualization is following a classic economic model of an early mover dominating a market and charging a premium, soon followed by challengers competing on price, said Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata Inc., a technology research company. Haff said enterprises that have deployed VMware are seeing a positive return on their investment despite the price and he doesn't think price alone is keeping enterprises from adopting virtualization. "Even if virtualization software were free, it wouldn't become ubiquitous because of the complexity of the implementation," he said.
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Citrix Systems, Inc. a global leader in access infrastructure solutions has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Net6 Inc.
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HP has moment of Xen as well Citrix Systems has wrangled Dell as the first Tier 1 server vendor to embed the Xen hypervisor in its x86 servers.â¦
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - November 1, 2004 â-ERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq: VRTS), today extended the capabilities of VERITAS OpForceâ¢ distributed server provisioning software to include software application discovery and configuration.
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Friends of friends XenSource, the server virtualization company, has added a second former Microsoft staffer to its management ranks, recruiting the exec responsible for leading a number of big Windows products.â¦