Citrix and HP team up on virtualization

Virtualization vendors continue to fight the fight for virtualization market penetration by creating bundling deals with leading hardware providers. Citrix Systems and Hewlett-Packard have announced such a deal and will be working together to push server virtualization adoption forward.

ComputerWeekly recently reported that Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition 4 will be offered with HP’s ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. Citrix XenServer Enterprise will offer HP customers live migration of virtual machines, a scalable virtual infrastructure management framework, and an open XenAPI for third-party add-ons. It also supports both 32- and 64-bit environments.

According to the news provider, vice president of Industry Standard Server Software at HP, Scott Farrand, said, “Virtualization has become a necessity for our customers to achieve desired business outcomes.” And HP also claimed that the deal would give its customers the ability to purchase an entire virtualization solution from server to software.

I recently spoke to Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, and he told me that 2008 is all about the hypervisor embedded in server hardware. Crosby added, “XenServer will be an option on over 50% of x86 server hardware in 1H08, ‘baked in’ during system assembly. This offers customers an incredible value proposition built into the box – and dramatically accelerates the adoption of virtualization.”

If you missed my discussion with Simon Crosby over the holidays, you might want to give it a read to check out his insight into the virtualization market into 2008. You can read it, here.