Citrix rides virtualization into 2009

You might be thinking that Citrix is bummed out by the Meltdown. Little more than a year ago, it shelled out a whopping $500m for open source hypervisor startup XenSource. But Citrix sees virtualization as just thing a slumping economy needs. As 2009 gets going, however slowly, Citrix is planning on using virtualization as a …

[Anonymous Coward]

..wait...what?

"Roussain estimates that there are probably only 500,000 true virtual PCs (meaning PC images running from servers over the network) at the corporations of the world..."

Wait...what?

How the fnord is that possible. I work at a company that has, oh, 60 people-ish, but does the data volume of something 50 times our size. 90% of our "desktops" are Windows XP living in a VM running on a server in our datacenter, with [random Linux boxen] to RDP in. Run office, communicator, the Point of Sale app, etc. etc. etc. all inside the VM.

Every single one of our servers, rendering boxes, number crunchers, DBs, DCs, E-mail servers, you name it are also virtualized. Whitebox stuff too, not exactly running ESX here. We're moving to second generation stuff now, replacing our older generation of virtualization servers with 2x Single Core CPUs with newer gear, and upping the VM density per rack.

There's probably, in a company of 60 people, 150 VMs, when you include all the servers, web appliances, and desktop environments. How is that abnormal? Everyone else seems to be doing it, and I can not possibly imagine life without virtualization...given the amount of gear we have to take care of, virtualization is an unbelievable time saver.

If we can virtualize to this level with whitebox gear on a shoestring budget, then how is it that everyone and their dog isn't doing the same?

It truly boggles the mind.

[Colin Locke]

Free, really?

"Xen is free, and virtualizing servers will free up existing capacity to support new workloads," says Roussain.

__

Erm, no, it is not free. At least not the version that will be of much use in a corporation.

XenServer 5 Express is free. It is akin to VMware Server, or at very best VMware ESX Foundation.

XenServer 5 Enterprise retails for $2500 USD for up to 4 sockets. That's a tidy sum cheaper than ESX 3 Enterprise-- less than half-- but it currently cannot do DRS or Storage VMotion so it's not an even comparison today.