In this episode, Dana Gardner and an expert panel examine virtualization trends through the acquisition this summer of by Citrix. They also discuss the US$1.6 billion purchase of Opsware by HP (NYSE: HPQ) as a way of analyzing IT management, automation and operations, as well as the impact on SOA.

Join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Neil Macehiter, research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton; Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst and president of the Kusnetzky Group; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Todd Biske, enterprise architect at Monsanto, formerly with MomentumSI; JP Morganthal, CEO of Avorcor; and Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies. The discussion is hosted and moderated by Dana Gardner.

Excerpt:

On Virtualization and Citrix-XenSource

Todd Biske: Virtualization is definitely something that organizations are looking at right now. For the clients I've worked with, it's been a mix. Some are really trying to embrace it on the server side and make use of it right now. Others are looking at possibly using it on the desktop for developers, when they need to get a specific development environment, but it's definitely in people's minds today. So, I would definitely classify it as in the list of strategic initiatives that companies are looking at and determining how to use appropriately.

Tony Baer: The interesting thing about XenSource is that it's been considered to be the leading, emerging alternative to VMware. It essentially virtualizes the machine to a slightly more native approach than VMware. It's a very interesting acquisition because Xen has had a relationship with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , where it gets access to Microsoft's virtualization technology, and it also fills a key gap for Citrix (Nasdaq: CTXS). ... Microsoft will still need some way of interoperating its hypervisor with the Linux environment. So, even though the relationships may change somewhat in the long run, there will still be some sort of technology sharing here.

Jim Kobielus: The XenSource acquisition by Citrix is good for Microsoft, because it allows Microsoft to buy some time until Viridian is ready. A year from now, Microsoft can say, "Oh yeah, we don't have Viridian ready just yet, but look at this. Two of our primary virtualization partners have gotten together to field an ever more comprehensive virtualization product portfolio, which is integrated or will be integrated fairly tightly with Viridian when that comes out." So, we'll hear Microsoft saying, "We don't have it all together today, but we have partners who can give you a fuller virtualization portfolio to compete with EMC/VMware."

Dan Kusnetzky: If we look at Citrix's portfolio, every single piece, service or product offering is matched by something Microsoft is pushing now. That, in essence, means that Microsoft is trying to acquire the business that Citrix has and slowly remove Citrix from the limelight and off to the sidelines. ... [Citrix] needed a broader strategy, one that wasn't focused solely on access mechanisms. The acquisition of XenSource gives them a broader story.

If we look at just the idea of what XenSource was doing with their processing virtualization management security, particularly their recent announcement of partnership with Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC)  for the Veritas Storage Foundation software to be included in XenEnterprise, you could see that Citrix starts to have a more top-to-bottom virtualization story than they every had before. So, from a product portfolio view, this acquisition appears to make some sense.

JP Morganthal: We've been dealing with issues of the Microsoft platform for a long time around resource management, where we're fighting with SQL Server and other applications or resources, and each one has different memory requirements. This virtualized environment allows us to focus on giving our application 100 percent of the resources, and thereby never running out of things like TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol) sockets or having memory thrashing errors slowing down wireless communications, which is critical to Web services doing their job. So, it's having a profound effect on the production environment.

Biske: This is a really interesting acquisition that will help XenSource at least get more mind share in the enterprise. Companies obviously have lots of Microsoft investments on all their desktops. There's a good chance that major enterprises have significant investments in Citrix as well, if they've got any need for remote access for their systems, terminal services, etc. It will open it up to a few more environments to add in this virtualization capability for organizations that were still unsure about what to do with open source. It's a good thing from that perspective.

Morganthal: On the datacenter side, the promise there is better utilization of resources. As I said, if you really want to get into it, you could find a way to tune Microsoft. But I have a sys admin working in one of my clients who is fighting with this 3GB initialization parameter. When he puts it in one way, one app gets hit when he puts it in there. When he doesn't put it in, other apps get hit. But mine [virtualized] works fine.

This is a clear case of where you go out and get an additional operating system license and put this into each application and in its own virtual machine running on a four-way or eight-way Intel (Nasdaq: INTC)  Duo Core 2 machine -- they are running a storage area network (SAN) -- and you have one of the cleanest, most high performing environments I've ever seen.

Brad Shimmin: SOA is, in effect, heightening this issue, because of the need for discrete services running with their own horses and their own power. ... What virtualization does is let you set up that verified stack on your server and not have to worry about breaking it down the road, because it's sitting in it's own virtual environment.

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