The virtualization spat began as XenSource announced its OEM agreement with Symantec last month when Simon Crosby, XenSource founder and chief technology officer, claimed that potential VMware partners were being put off by the breadth and depth of VMware’s products.
VMware is the runaway success story right now, he said, adding that VMware’s success was causing concern among some of the larger software vendors as customers buying into VMware’s VI3 get the ESX Server virtualization software, as well as VirtualCenter for virtual machine management, high availability, and resource scheduling, as well as consolidated backup capabilities.
Every part of the infrastructure has been changed to VMware, said Crosby. The VMware road show is one that replaces all the other players in the industry. As VMware gets bigger, the potential to disrupt the main players has always been there.
VMware’s Reza Malekzadeh has denied the claim, however, insisting that there is a growing ecosystem of VMware partners and licensees. We have a firm commitment to working to open standards such as the DMTF [distributed management task force], he said, while noting that the company’s virtual machine disk format specification is openly available.
He also noted that Symantec is already a VMware partner, alongside other back-up software providers including CA, CommVault, EMC, IBM Tivoli, and Vizioncore. Indeed, Malekzadeh doubted the wisdom of XenSource picking such a close storage partner.
I don’t think that any vendor should force a customer on any parallel solution, he said. We already have a partnership with Symantec, so in effect, XenSource is playing catch-up with that.
VMware is the acknowledged market leader in virtualization, as its recent successful initial public offering demonstrated, but the likes of XenSource and SWsoft are snapping at its heals, and with the recently released version 4.0 of XenEnterprise, Crosby claimed blow for blow competitiveness with VMware.
The acquisition of XenSource by Citrix is also sure to raise its profile, although it has a long way to go to catch its rival in revenue terms. Citrix’s CFO, David Henshall, recently said XenSource had annual revenue of a few million dollars but predicted revenue of $50m for fiscal 2008. VMware had total annual revenue of last year to $703.9m, up 82% from $387.1m.
One of the fundamental differences in how VMware and XenSource are approaching the market is in VMware’s focus on its own technologies, compared to XenSource’s stated desire to add management capabilities for Microsoft’s forthcoming Viridian virtualisation software, as well as the Xen open source hypervisor.
SWsoft is also looking to provide management capabilities for other vendors’ virtual environments, but VMware is not interested in the opposition, according to Malekzadeh. We don’t intend to be the management solution for everything, we’re focused on our core competencies, he said. At the end of the day, we’re not a management vendor.
