Gartner has released its annual Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, positioning VMware and Microsoft in the leaders Quadrant. Leaders in this market have a clear strategy and road map for their offerings, understand virtualization’s role in infrastructure and operations transformation, and have a clear vision with respect to cloud computing.
![clip_image001[6]](http://virtualization.local/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/clip_image00162.png)
It’s interesting to notice that Citrix has left the leaders Quadrant (where it was in 2012) and can now be found in the visionairies Quadrant. Visionaries in the x86 server virtualization infrastructure market have a differentiated approach or product, but they aren’t meeting their potential from an execution standpoint. It will be interesting to see, if Citrix is able to become a leader again after its recent decision to hand over the development of the Xen Hypervisor to the Linux Foundation. For now, the just released XenServer 6.2, contains new features, but also has lost support of a lot retired and deprecated features as mentioned in the Release notes. For more information also read the post on XenServer 6.2 by Andreas Groth, who also publishes the Virtualization Matrix.
Oracle stays in the challengers Quadrant. Challengers in this market have a strong ability to execute but a more focused marketing or product vision.And both Parallels and Red Hat stay in the nice player Quadrant. Niche Players have either not capitalized on their opportunity yet or are focused on specific niches where they can be successful versus competitors that have a more general approach.