Virtualisation Toolkit

Xen: The start-up in Citrix clothing

Tags:
Vice President,
Vmware,
Kernel,
Budget

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 Oct 2008 07:47 GMT

...device drivers and so on. And that is bad.

We also have broader support. You don't have to have Linux to run Xen. It runs on Solaris or BSD. KVM requires Linux.

Does virtualisation itself still have good prospects? Is it the recession-proof part of IT?
Everyone is doing it — and they are still doing it. Virtualisation is a mature technology and the benefits to the bottom line are clear. You do it to save money, and people will continue doing that! The savings are immediate.

Having said that, some use cases may get pushed further out. For instance, some green sales may get delayed, where the motivation is partly reducing carbon footprint.

That's just where the company's IT power budget isn't reported clearly, surely?
Yes. If the chief information officer's budget includes energy usage, then the company is more likely to deploy virtualisation. But there are still plenty of companies where energy is treated separately, as part of the facilities budget.

So virtualisation isn't absolutely recession-proof — nothing is. But it has very good prospects.

Now is a good time to have a product that is a better value of solution. It's not a good time to be buying Rolls Royces. It's time to be buying Priuses [earlier, chief technology offier Simon Crosby compared Xen to a Toyota Prius and VMware to a Rolls Royce].

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As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
Client virtualisation is an area I'm spending time on. It's an area where Xen leads — despite some bluster from VMware. It's an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualised smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualisation into its processors — they didn't put that in for fun.

Virtualisation in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualisation in the x86 market. Client virtualisation is going to happen quite quickly. It won't go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualisation solution, because virtualisation won't exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it.

My other main area of interest is cloud computing. Between client and cloud, I have quite enough to do. They are both areas where Xen is a leader — and historically any area that wins on the client, ends up winning on the server.

A Xen presence on clients will bolster what we are doing on the server. And the cloud will help Xen, because it makes it easier to move virtual machines into the cloud. It will be possible to bridge from the cloud to the enterprise, so resources can be added dynamically.

Why pay for machines in the server room, when you can push them out into the cloud? In particular, functions like test and development, and disaster recovery, can be in the cloud. And if that cloud and the server room are both Xen, then it is much easier to do.