Virtualization, "10 Minutes to Xen"

Virtualization took another step forward with Citrix's acquisition of XenSource. XenSource is a competitor to VMWare in a way that Microsoft Virtual Server is as well. XenSource is a fully matured virutalization product that installs quickly and offers similar access to SAN infrastructure and hardware clustering that VMWare ESX and Microsoft Virtual Server offer.

XenEnterprise supports IDE, SATA, SCSI, SAS, fiber based SANs, NFS NAS, iSCSI and boot to SAN for blades. Boot to SAN capability can dramatically cut down on the number of hard drives needed for an infrastructure by consolidating all storage needs into the SAN, rather than separate host OS disks which then facilitate access to the shared storage.

Hardware clustering is similar to the concept used in software clustering, however, managing the virtual environment is typically supported better by software vendors as the software does not have to function in failover modes required by services such as Microsoft Cluster Server.

For those interested in the open source community, the software is based on the industry standard Open Source Xen 3.1.