Citrix published some performance benchmarks comparing Xen and VMware ESX. The information was posted by Barry Flanagan at Citrix. The results show a pretty close neck and neck race between the two technologies. There have been some rumors that Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology is showing well in its performance. Of course a big difference between the Xen and both VMware and Microsoft is that Xen is open source, the net result being a big disparity in cost.
But Xen’s future has been called into question after XenSource’s purchase by Citrix. Will Xen become an application virtualization product that better fits Citrix’s business? Will Xen continue to be open source and supported as it has in the past? Does Citrix understand open source or will they screw up Xen? Many questions still remain.
Included in the blog post is information about who is advising the Xen project, what are its goals, and where is Xen headed. I have to say that the roadmap stuck me as extremely light and not very forthcoming. My guess is that Citrix is squashing the release of some of this information but that’s only a guess.
Here’s the Xen Product roadmap, as published by Ian Pratt, leader and chief architect of the Xen project. Judge for yourself if the Xen roadmap is a bit short on details.
Server
– Performance and scalability optimizations
– Enable Smart IO devices
– SCSI pass-through
Security– Domain0 disaggregation; XSM Xen Security Modules
– Secure boot, TPM, certification, multi-level secure systems
Client– Power management
Suspend and hibernate; Clock management
– 3D video
direct h/w access; high-performance guest virtualization
– USB device pass-through
Like this? Here are more recent posts.
How Microsoft Can Save Vista And Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Live Workspace – Anybody Home?
Virtualization Center Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Release Candidate In Server 2008
Cutting The Microsoft Apron Strings
It’s All About… Location, Location, Location
Visit Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, opinion from around the Web. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.) Also check out Mitchell’s personal blog The Converging Network and SSAATY Podcast.
