ZDnet  had an article on Citrix and their position/dedication to XEN.  For those that weren’t aware, Citrix bought XEN for $500 million last year.  I had one thought about this article until I read one of the comments.  So if you read it, beware maybe don’t jump to conclusions at first.  Here is the comment from Citrix’s CTO VMD Simon Crosby:

I hope this is ok.  If not please let me know and I apologize ahead of time.

Citrix is committed to Xen

It appears that somehow when we briefed Paula, we managed to confuse her. I accept full responsibility for this, but think it is important to state the facts:

1. The Xen project is in great shape, superbly funded by Citrix and the community, and is operated independently from Citrix, by the Xen project Advisory Board. Citrix has more than doubled XenSource’s open source team size already, and is continuing to develop new initiatives for Xen. At the most recent Xen developer summit in December, we had over 200 attendees, and there was fantastic participation from across the industry. Our own open source team operates independently from the product groups and has a blank check for headcount and resource. As I said previously, I’d be happy to fill you in on this.

2. XenServer is a core foundational product to Citrix. Specifically, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and XenDesktop (formerly Desktop Server, addressing the VDI use case) will both include XenServer in all future releases. Why? Because XenServer has been optimized to run the XenApp and XenDesktop workloads, and provides a fantastic set of manageability, availability, scalability, and flexibility options to the XenApp/XenDesktop administrator, with incredible performance (very significantly better than VMware’s, for those same workloads). Today our customers tell us that they hate to use VMware for virtualizing Presentation Server, because of the performance issues, but they need to do so for various reasons: test & dev flexibility, consistency of image management, DR, ease of provisioning etc. XenServer offers them all they need, at much better price/performance than VMware.

3. XenServer itself continues to go from strength to strength. The new release 4.1 boasts over 50 new features and performance optimizations, and a profound and strategic tight coupling between the virtual infrastructure platform and smart virtualization aware storage, such as the NetApp devices. Expect a range of exciting announcements as we move down this path.

In a nutshell: Xen is profoundly important to Citrix, is changing everything about the way that Citrix develops and delivers its products. Citrix is fully supportive of open source and the community, and you will see much more than just Xen as a core community focus from Citrix in the not too distant future.

Simon Crosby, CTO VMD, Citrix.