There is strength in numbers, or so the saying goes. For virtualization
vendor XenSource, the hope is that, by enabling others to expand its platform,
Xen’s numbers will be greater than VMware, the current virtualization king.
To that end XenSource today released its flagship commercial product
XenEnterprise v4. Though it includes a host of new features, including
XenMotion live virtual machine migration, XenCenter virtual infrastructure
management and other built-in features, it is XenEnterprise’s extensibility
that its CTO is most hopeful about.
“The whole thing is to come up with an ecosystem play and not be heavy
handed in terms of having to own all the features,” XenSource CTO Simon
Crosby told internetnews.com. “The cool thing about this is we can
then work with the major players in every sector where virtualization is
relevant and make virtualization a component of what you do rather than the
be all and end all of what you do with the product.”
A key part of XenSource’s ecosystem play with XenEnterprise v4 is something
called the Open Storage Repository API.
“We have an open concept of a storage repository into
which you can plug various drivers for storage infrastructure that allows us
to tightly couple storage management for virtual machines with the concept
of a resource pool,” Crosby explained.
Crosby
XenEnterprise users can take advantage of NAS
Crosby said the XenSource approach to storage is different than what
VMware offers, where its customers end up buying VMware’s backup solution
as opposed to being able to plug into other vendor solutions.
referred to VMware’s backup as yet another forklift that the customer base
has to put in to deal with VMware.
Though XenSource is competing against VMware, the strategy is not to try and
build another company like VMware. Crosby noted that he’s interested in
measuring XenSource’s ecosystem richness versus VMware and that’s where he’s
trying to go.
“The ecosystem is probably the only way the market will tolerate another
virtualization entrant,” Crosby said. “I don’t think there is room for
another VMware-sized company.”
XenSource is the commercial firm behind the Xen open source hypervisor.
XenEnterprise is a commercial offering that includes the open source
hypervisor though it is the management capabilities and support that set it
apart.
The first XenEnterprise release for Linux came out in August 2006, with the first release on
Windows in November.
At this point in the company’s lifecycle, Crosby explained that XenSource
just needs to scale its model and execute.
“We’ve shown that there is no technology
risk, no product risk and we can deliver a good quality solution,” Crosby
said. “To be perfectly honest our intent is to remain at about 30 percent
of the VMware price and to leave plenty of dollars on the table for our
channel partners that will deliver things that we cannot.”
