Last year, Citrix purchased a company called XenSource. This product is a set of management tools that manage virtual machines that run on the free, open source Xen hypervisor. Citrix later renamed this product to XenServer. XenServer is meant to compete on the same level as VMWare ESX (although there is much to debate on the pros and cons of each). Citrix reportedly paid 500 million for XenSource (in cash and options). This brought out a lot of controversy as to why Citrix would pay so much for a set of tools that manage an open source hypervisor. Some of this speculation may come to light in a recent article posted by Brian Madden titled “Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM“. One of the gists in the article suggests that XenServer will re-focus on adding value to the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. This is kind of a natural fit for Citrix/Microsoft. After all, Citrix has been in the business of adding value to base Terminal Services for years. Anyway, it will be fun to see how all this pans out.

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