There have been lots discussions lately about what’s happening around Citrix XenServer. Perhaps too many. For what it is worth, I was one of the people discussing this on the net (Twitter, Blogs etc) with some other folks. I originally drafted a blog post when Citrix bought XenSource but it never made it (officially because I was busy, unofficially because I couldn’t figure out “why”).

I think that what it is happening is pretty clear at this point. The market landscape is being consolidated with Oracle acquiring VirtualIron as well as the “Sun Xen thing” within the overall grand plan of the acquisition (of the remaining) of Sun. All these solutions have hardly, in the past few years, managed to make a difference in the industry and their names were floating around more with the hope that VMware could feel more pressure and competition, and hence lower the prices. In the meanwhile, VMware increased their price which speaks for itself.

This is leaving (apparently) the x86 virtualization market with 3 relevant viable alternatives that are VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. I have always said this is going to be a two-horse race and I still stand behind this statement. The first horse is VMware and the second horse is what I call Microtrix ™. There have been a nice Twitter discussion a few days ago on why Citrix bought XenSource and the future of it etc. This was my tweet in the discussion which, in a way, summarizes my thinking:

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