One of the main arguments of VMware to counter the recent strategy of Citrix to give away its virtualization technologies for free, is that XenServer is not mature enough compared to ESX, and that the product has not the features needed to satisfy the enterprise customers.
Today somebody with a certain relevance in the industry says that it’s not more the case: the Burton Group.
A few months ago the analysis firm announced a very interesting project to compare the virtualization offerings available on the market and see which ones met their criteria to be an enterprise-grade platform.
Richard Jones, Service Director of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, presented this analysis at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 in May and turned some heads for sure.
At that time the only platform that passed the Burton Group requirements was VMware Infrastructure, something that confirmed the level of maturity and rich feature-set that Fortune 500 customers recognized so far in the product.
But today, Chris Wolf, the well-known Senior Analyst at the Burton Group, informally announces on this personal blog that Citrix XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition met the requirements as well, so now the firm recognizes the hypervisor an enterprise-grade product as well.
Agree or not, this is probably the first time that the two offerings are publicly considered valid alternatives.
It’s just a pity that Citrix is passing its customers to Microsoft now that it starts to get this kind of recognition.