Independence Day: More Momentum for Xen as a Client Hypervisor

Citrix Systems made multiple major announcements today centered around making Xen a ubiquitous bare metal client hypervisor for PCs.  Among the announcements:

• A partnership with Intel to bring Xen-based hypervisor technology to millions of Intel-based PC platforms.
• Project Independence, an exciting vision for how client virtualization will transform desktop computing.

As you might expect, Brian Madden put together a solid overview and assessment of the announcements over on his site.

At Virtual Computer, we see these industry developments providing tremendous validation of our approach of using client virtualization technology to redefine desktop computing in a way that is better for IT professionals and better for end-users. The reason we chose to use Xen as the foundation for NxTop Engine, our bare metal client hypervisor, is that we felt that it would take an industry ecosystem and the added leverage of the open source community to realize such an ambitious vision.

The technical challenges of deploying a bare metal hypervisor on a end-user PC are very different from the requirements for servers performing backend data center workload.  While we have overcome a great many of these challenges on our own, working with the open source community has already yielded significant advantages as we set out to complete against companies like VMware who have substantial resources but are constrained by their use of a proprietary hypervisor.

A major push, led by Citrix and Intel, to make Xen the de facto standard client hypervisor technology will provide even greater advantages to small but innovative ecosystem players like Virtual Computer.