EarthWeb interviewed former XenSource CTO, Simon Crosby, about future of new Citrix XenServer and competition with VMware. In one answer Crosby revealed a major news:
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Q: The XenSource applications are based on open source. In terms of the virtualization market, what are the pluses or minuses of an open source approach?
Open source is an extremely valuable tool for innovation. One of the key things about the Xen code base is that it can be delivered to market by multiple vendors, and will be.
One of the biggest challenges that the hardware vendors have had is that vendors like Microsoft take five years to get new features to market for them. But of course we have support on Day One. So the day that the first Intel VT CPU ships, we have the support. The day the hardware virtualization [launches] we have the support. So we’ve become the industry’s first and best support for an enhanced hardware experience.
And at the same time, we’ve been very anxious to make sure that Xen as an engine was open sourced, but that multiple different vendors could have economic business models built around that. So we commoditize the “engine” – it’s the code base that everyone agrees should be commoditized – and then it has much broader applicability.
So, for example, Xen runs on [certain] PDAs, and Samsung is doing work with those as a product prototype. But it also runs on supercomputers from SGI. That way, we don’t have just one “car” – thereìs everything from Porches to Minis. So you don’t limit its applicability…
Read the whole interview at the source.