We <3 Having Citrix Xen Hypervisor Installed on Our Server Rentals

By Erin Monda on Wed, 2011-07-06 10:07

When there’s an outage, disaster, or system failure, we find that our customers reach out to us for their server rental needs. That’s because we like to offer the flexibility of varying software arrays and product configurations – to meet any corporate requirements.

Sometimes that means installing VMware, Windows Server, or Citrix XenServer. Whatever it may be, we’ve learned to adapt. And what we’ve found, lately, is that requests for Citrix’ Xen products have been coming in a little more frequently than they used to.

And that’s no surprise. Over the past year, Citrix’ stock valuation has soared over 94 percent, and there’s no sign of that growth letting up.

Citrix is one of those heavy-hitting names in the virtualization space – and it’s constantly winning awards. Consider its latest: earlier today the company was positioned within the leaders quadrant of Gartner’s "2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure."

Any such honor granted from Gartner, one of the leading tech research and advisory firm, is kind of like getting a "gold star" within the industry. And Citrix has many, many gold stars.

According to Gartner’s analyst, Thomas Bittman, the reason for Citrix’ election had something to do with it s affordability (always a plus, in a recession). Bittman said, "Although market share leader VMware continues to set the standard in products and the pace in terms of strategy, Microsoft has increased its market share (especially among midmarket customers new to virtualization), and Citrix is leveraging its desktop virtualization strengths and its free XenServer offering to expand its server virtualization share."

The Magic Quadrant is an indication of market strength – and it is a good measure of a company’s success. In this sort of economy, with Citrix’ open source Hypervisor offering, we’re not surprised to find Gartner there. The Xen Hypervisor system supports x86, x86-64, Itanium, Power PC and ARM processors – meaning that Hypervisor can support Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows.

Hypervisor is perhaps one of Citrix’ most flexible offerings, as it replaces the existing operating system’s hardware so that multiple "guest" OSes can run simultaneously.