14 DAY TRIAL // The leaders in a field they invented themselves - "infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor" - announced XenEnterprise, its commercial offering, based on Xen 3.0 .
So far, Xen has been a Linux operation almost exclusively. Now, the company is pushing the industry's new buzzwords to the Windows server market. XenSource has licensed Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format, which will enable the importing of virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server.
"Customers have open source software and commercial software, and expect it all to work together. By licensing the VHD format, XenSource and other partners are able to build value-added tools to interoperate with Microsoft's Windows virtualization technologies," said Bill Hilf, manager at a little known company in Redmond.
"Value-added" for Microsoft drones means potential market growth for Xen. "This allows us to consume virtual machines that are created in the Virtual Server world and get them up and running on Xen," said Simon Crosby, XenSource CTO, according to The Register.
The market got some good news when Intel and AMD announced that their processors will incorporate elements to aid virtualization. Microsoft customers, on the other hand were told that Virtual Server will not be getting an update until "early 2007". It's conceivable that this will encourage migration to VMWare and Xen, which already include code to use those features; Xen especially, since the company has managed to get its tools included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Novell's SUSE Enterprise Server 10.