I was weighing topic posts tonight, and Xen won out over VMware. Will this be a trend in the market? Demo v4.1 and see for yourself.I really wanted to write up TechData's announcement on VMware, but I realized that it was covered by Scott Campbell in detail. Then I was going to throw VirtualIron a bone and discuss its euro-market moves with Avnet, but a little voice reminded me I've been laying it on a little heavy regarding channel coverage. Yes, market and penetration stats are newsworthy. But enough abstract sales talk already; lets have some specific sales-y fodder instead...

Did you notice Citrix's first post-acquisition upgrade to its XenServer platforms?

I ran a review of v3.2 last summer back when the brand read 'XenSource,' and I came away impressed both with performance results and usability for the open-source-based platform. I was aware of the product limitations compared with VMware, namely lack of live migration tools, snapshots, or rollback functionality.

If you haven't looked at XenServer since the 3s you may want to re-examine your virtualization options; Citrix is closing the feature gap. I'll be upgrading our test lab to the new v4.1 over the next few weeks.

Advertised features for XenServer 4.1 Platinum Edition:

XenMotion not VMotion! to live-shuffle VMs from host to host Native 64-bit hypervisor New management and provisioning tools for physical and virt servers Optimization for XenApp (used to be Citrix Presentation Server) Integrated Data ONTAP for NetApp fans NIC bonding (yay!) Improved handling of resource pools 10 Gbps connectivity 64-bit Linux VMs Centralized patch management

I'll see if 4.1 plays out as advertised. Time and bleary eyes will tell. I'm pretty sure some of the Platinum features did not make it to the beta. My fingers are crossed that 64-bit Windows guests will be a surprise feature add when production code ships. I'm an optimist; my wife likes to point out I'm still waiting for flying cars.

Per the Citrix press release, 4.1 will be up for purchase in March, starting at $3K for Enterprise and $5K for the Platinum (Q2 availability) based on two-socket servers. You can download the 280-MB ISO of the 4.1 beta here.I was weighing topic posts tonight, and Xen won out over VMware. Will this be a trend in the market? Demo v4.1 and see for yourself.