Citrix XenServer

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The Citrix XenServer™ Product Family enables businesses to deploy high-performance Windows and Linux virtual machines rapidly and easily, and to manage them and their related storage and networking resources from a single easy-to-use management console.

The family includes three virtualization products that are fully compatible, with additional capacity and features enabled by license key.

The products include:

• XenServer, Express Edition: a free starter package for bringing virtualization to every server
• XenServer, Standard Edition: high-performance rich-featured server virtualization with multi-server management, with capacity for most business-critical workloads
• XenServer, Enterprise Edition: a powerful platform managing virtualization as a flexible aggregated pool of compute and storage re sources, for dynamic managed virtualization environments for the enterprise

The foundation of the XenSource v4 Family is the open source Xen hypervisor, an open, proven and fully supported engine for server virtualization.

What is Xen?

Xen is a unique open source technology invented by a team led by Ian Pratt at the University of Cambridge (who subsequently founded XenSource) and developed cooperatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative data center solution vendors. With Xen virtualization, a thin software layer (known as the Xen hypervisor) is installed directly on the hardware, or “bare metal,” and is thereby inserted between the server’s hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more “virtual servers,” effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. Xen’s paravirtualization technology is widely acknowledged as the fastest and most secure virtualization software in the industry, and is enhanced by taking full advantage of the latest Intel VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization assist capabilities. Xen is exceptionally lean— less than 50,000 lines of code – which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.

The inventors and lead developers of Xen, with the rest of the XenSource team, take this powerful virtualization engine and build out a full managed virtualization platform around it, designed for efficient management of Windows and Linux virtual machines. XenServer combines the performance, security, and openness of the Xen technology with XenCenter comprehensive management — a platform perfect for rapid adoption of virtualization for server consolidation, software development and test, virtual desktops, and business continuity.
XenServer is a native 64-bit virtualization platform, with the scalability required by business-critical applications. The highest host and guest CPU and memory limits available, coupled with fine-grained resource controls for CPU, network and disk, enable it to deliver optimal quality of service.

The Market Opportunity

Server virtualization has proven to be an effective technology for many customers seeking to increase hardware utilization levels, lower management overhead and improve agility when it comes to responding to business change. These are advantages many enterprise organizations take into account when seriously considering virtualization as a standard build for their infrastructure.

The advantages of this emerging technology has created momentum in the adoption of server virtualization which has accelerated dramatically in North America since 2005, according to Forrester 51% of enterprises are now using or piloting the technology. In parallel, interest in server virtualization has grown worldwide, with a notable leap in Asia Pacific.

Furthermore, IDC has observed rapid rates of adoption, and although only 5% of all new server hardware was virtualized in 2005, IDC expects that, by 2010, 15% of new shipments will be undergoing virtualization. IDC also estimates that the market is expected to grow to US$3.4 billion by 2011, with Citrix XenServer being one of the very few solutions that is equipped to pursue this market opportunity.

The Market Landscape

The server virtualization market is an emergent market and as such has many small competitors, but really only three serious competitors with the capability to move the market forward

VMware is viewed as the major competitor in this space with a significant share of a market that has just begun to gain some traction, however, analysts estimate that while they own the lion’s share it still only represents a mere 5% of the market opportunity.
VMware were viewed by analysts as firmly ahead of the server virtualization pack, until recently when Citrix Systems acquired XenSource which analysts believe catapults the Xen™ OPEN source hypervisor firmly into the server virtualization stratosphere.
The third and final competitor is Microsoft who is not expected to release their server virtualization solution - Microsoft Viridian until late 2008. As the leading global software applications provider it has no desire to see VMWare take the server virtualization market on its own, and has strongly aligned itself with Citrix as a result of its interoperability relationship with XenSource. This places a significant strategic advantage firmly in Citrix Systems’ landscape.