Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 11/09/06

Here is yet more evidence that the virtualization market is maturing as VMware competitors advance their technology: The open source Xen virtualization project will soon support Windows.

This week, XenSource, the company that manages the development of the Xen hypervisor and sells subscription and support services for it, is expected to announce the open source virtualization technology now can run Windows virtual machines.

Previously, Xen supported only Linux and NetBSD. XenSource is adding Windows support to the XenEnterprise product it debuted in August and is targeting it at the Windows midmarket, hoping to provide an easy-to-use, less-expensive alternative to VMware.

Windows support in XenEnterprise is available in a beta program and is expected to be generally available for Windows 2003 and Windows XP in December. XenSource plans to add Windows 2000 support in the first quarter of next year, XenSource executive say.

XenEnterprise's features include Xen and guest operating-system installers, tools to migrate physical systems into virtual machines and a wide range of management capabilities.

It will be priced starting at about $488 for an annual subscription license for a two-processor server, the company says.

"This is a fully packaged and supported virtualization platform that includes the Xen hypervisor and offers high performance for both Windows and Linux guests," says John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. "Automated installation and a management console is included. . . . The average Windows IT professional can get this up and running in 10 minutes."

XenSource executives concede that XenEnterprise doesn't have all the bells and whistles of VMware's broad VMware Infrastructure 3 package, which was introduced in June. Pricing for VMware Infrastructure 3 starts at about $1,000 for two processors.

"There is a big gap in the market between VMware at the high end and some of the free stuff like [Microsoft] Virtual Server at the low end," Bara says. "We're looking to occupy that space with XenEnterprise and provide what we call volume virtualization -- virtualization for the rest of us."

Xen is tapping into the hardware-based virtualization capabilities embedded into new chips from Intel and AMD to provide the Windows support, says Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource.

Windows virtual machines also can be run on the free version of Xen, available here. It is better performing in the XenEnterprise product because of proprietary drivers that XenSource embedded into Xen to support Windows, Crosby says.

"You will be able to run Windows on the open source Xen, it will just be slower," he says.