By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
In the blog post entitled “Client Hypervisor Management: Evolution NOT Revolution”, I went through a bit of the history of the server hypervisor and management. When we looked deeper into the rise of the hypervisor in the data center, it really wasn’t until the central management capabilities came to being that the true management potential of hypervisors could be realized. However there was an additional dimension to this story. Once an API was made available to the hypervisor, a whole new realm of start-up companies came into being.
It was at this point that the next wave of innovation came to bear through a number of start-up and established companies. Through these companies’ expression of their own management logic on top of the hypervisor, the hypervisor platform benefits moved from hardware consolidation with a management trade-off to a truly transformative management paradigm, despite being based on a closed source hypervisor. The result was a tremendous rising tide that floated many boats.
This unlikely “Band of Brothers”, although in competition for customer dollars, produced and continues to produce an innovative wave in how the data center is designed and managed. Now, with Microsoft pushing the hypervisor to commoditization and Citrix XEN Server being open source, the benefit to IT in the form of downward price pressure, with ever increasing capabilities, continues to be a huge win for the customer.
When looking at the client PC, the industry is at the same inflection point. There is tremendous management and security TCO reduction potential in separating the management environment from the user application environment and is the next logical progression for PC architectures. There are currently only a handful of companies that are working on changing the fundamental architecture of a PC through a client hypervisor. This new virtualization “Band of Brothers” includes Neocleus, VMware, Citrix and Virtual Computer. If we dig a little deeper though, you’ll find that VMware has been working on CVP (which still remains to be seen), while Neocleus and Virtual Computer both use XEN, which is an open source project managed by Citrix. Citrix also has their own XEN based open and closed source client hypervisor projects called the XCI project. The availability of the XEN hypervisor as an open source project has further accelerated the ability for third parties to innovate on the PC Hypervisor and more rapidly bring the next evolution in PC architecture to market in unprecedented time when compared to their server counterparts. This innovation path is already stretching to a party beyond the direct players with the visionary BigFix, OEM’ing Neocleus NeoSphere (announcement seen here).
While each company might have a different vision for how management and security logic is expressed, we all share this common vision that the client based hypervisor will be the driving force that transforms PC architecture to the next logical architectural evolution and will drive client side innovation in a whole new dimension. It will be the combined ideas, perspectives and approaches of these innovative companies, working together to build a strong XEN client hypervisor foundation, which will drive this next great PC evolution. In the end, a rising tide floats all boats and the customer will be the real winner.
