Citrix invests in virtual networking provider Vyatta

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When Citrix announced for the first time its plan to deliver an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM, virtualization.info wrote that it could be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Vyatta to compete against Cisco and slam it.

That virtual switch is about to be unveiled now but the two companies didn’t reveal if there’s a collaboration on this project.
Even if there’s not one, there may be in the near future as Vyatta just secured $10 million in its Round C funding, and Citrix is one of the investors.

The highly respectable Om Malik at GigaOM wrote that Citrix did so because it is losing ground to the VMware-Cisco Systems colossus.

Quite the opposite.

The enormous interest around the Cisco Nexus 1000V just demonstrates that the market needs a more enhanced virtual networking and that it’s ready to buy. Despite that the Nexus 1000V has been released just few days ago so the customers around the world will need time to verify its efficiency and reliability before purchasing, delivering it in their virtual data centers and impact the XenServer sales.
The investment of in Vyatta demonstrates that Citrix isn’t wasting time and it’s preparing to compete.

For now, the Vyatta router has been certified to run on XenServer virtual machines. Very likely much more will come in the future.