Tellingly, the XenSource deal surpasses Egenera's existing partnership with VMware. "We announced that we would be porting VMware's ESX server to our platform, but we have not announced that we will be doing the same level of integration that we will be doing with XenEnterprise," says Davis. Open source technology, she adds, enables the faster development of new features and functionality.
But not everyone is likely to go the open-source virtualization route. "Near-term it is going to take some tinkering -- that appeals to a certain audience, but the notion will turn other users off," explains Schulz.
One such user is Ray Brady, technical manager of the computing services division at Johnson & Johnson, and co-leader of the Philadelphia VMware Users Group. "Right now, my perception is that there is a significant gap" between VMware and XenSource, he told Byte and Switch. "VMware is more robust around clustering, resource scheduling, and consolidated backups."
According to Brady, open source virtualization is a risky proposition for large scale projects. "If you're doing a small development project, something like Xen is fine, but if you're doing a major data center and server consolidation, do you really want to bet your career on open source?"
IDC analyst Stephen Elliot agrees that open-source virtualization is still in its relative infancy. "There's a lot of people playing around with it, but, at the end of the day, production environments are a different story," he says.
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