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23 octobre 2008

Catalyst EU Update - VMware and Citrix Express Interest in Working Together

The virtualization track at this week’s Catalyst Europe conference included a lot of really good information from Steve Herrod (VMware), Ian Pratt (Citrix), Etay Bogner (Neocleus), Dan McCall (Virtual Computer), and excellent virtualization deployment and management insight from Alexander Schanz (Head of Datacenter - DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH).

I plan to post a more thorough assessment of Catalyst EU’s virtualization highlights tomorrow, but I wanted to take a moment to share some really good information. In the track’s final session, I moderated a vendor round table on debating the hypervisor’s future. During the panel, all panelists talked at length on complexities that exist in hardware device models in the virtualization layer and the barriers that differences in hardware abstraction pose to interoperability. If you recall, Citrix recently announced interoperability with Hyper-V, meaning that you could create a VM on Citrix XenServer, copy it to a Hyper-V platform, and run it. That’s it. No conversion necessary.

So if Citrix and Microsoft can get together on this level of interoperability, why can’t Citrix and VMware do something similar together? The answer is that they can. At the panel’s conclusion, Ian Pratt and Steve Herrod agreed to continue the conversation on exchanging device driver models, with the expectation of further simplifying VM packaging by the ISVs that ship virtual machine appliances and also easing hypervisor interoperability. I’m going to go out on a limb and say if when this happens, the entire virtualization community would stand to benefit. Now to be fair, we need at least a three-way exchange at a minimum (Citrix, Microsoft,and VMware), but to hear Citrix and VMware entertain the idea is extremely encouraging. Let me package a virtual machine appliance that I can simply expand and run in any virtual environment, with all necessary device drivers pre-loaded.

Vendors often agree that the barriers we see in virtualization deployment, management, and interoperability are not technical, but political. Political battles often take a long time to resolve, but I’m a patient guy. Let’s resolve them one at a time. Today was a good step in that direction.

http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=200

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