In July 2003 XenSource and Symantec signed an OEM agreement to embed the Veritas Storage Foundation inside the XenEnterprise product, which seemed an interesting competitive advantage considering that VMware doesn’t provide yet any native capability to manager storage in VirtualCenter.
Seven months and a Citrix acquistion later that project has yet to take off, and the upcoming XenServer 4.1 doesn’t show any trace of Symantec code.
The Register published an interesting article on the subject revealing some plan changes:
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What you won’t find in Version 4.1 is the support for Symantec/Veritas’ Volume Manager software that the pre-acquisition XenSource folks promised last year to customers. Many of you were told that the Volume Manager would become a standard part of XenServer when 4.1 arrived. Not so.
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All of the “integration” work with Symantec’s Storage Foundation software is completed, according to Crosby. The problem is getting that software to customers – apparently. XenSource used to talk like customers would receive the storage management goodies for free, but it now sounds like you’ll end up paying.
“We said we would bundle it as part of the product,” Crosby said. “It turns out that not all customers wanted us to do that. It is becoming an add-in option for the customer.”…
Update: Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, promptly replied to The Register article:
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When Citrix acquired XenSource, our route to market changed – or rather was amplified – by the Citrix channel partners. The Symantec agreement, which we still view as critical to our ability to address the massive installed base of storage without requiring customers to change their processes, training or technologies for storage management, is now being re-drafted to expand its scope and to ensure that there is complete alignment between Symantec and Citrix in the market. A key part of this is ensuring that the channel is trained to distribute, install and support our product and all of its component technologies, including those of our partners where relevant. Although our integration work against Symantec Storage Foundation is complete, we have not yet completed the work necessary to ramp the channel training, support and certification with the additional Symantec storage management capabilities, so it has been omitted from the XenServer 4.1 release.
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The omission of Storage Foundation from XenServer 4.1 should not be read as any change in the strength or strategic nature of our partnership with Symantec. On the contrary, Symantec is possibly our most strategic ISV partner, because Citrix is not, and never will be a storage management vendor and Symantec offers one of the industry’s most powerful capability sets for managing the diverse storage infrastructure used by our customers today…