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The race to become the virtualisation infrastructure provider of choice started to look like a truly two horse contest yesterday as Citrix unveiled key server vendor partners for its XenSource business, and an agreement with Business Objects that will deliver the industry’s first business intelligence appliance. 

On day two of its iForum conference in Las Vegas, Citrix’s CEO Mark Templeton used his keynote address to showcase Hewlett-Packard’s decision to support, deploy and certify the Citrix XenServer Express and XenServer Enterprise Edition, and an agreement with Dell that will see the embedded version of XenServer shipped across the PowerEdge server family from the beginning of next year.

Dell also said it plans to support, deploy and certify XenServer Enterprise Edition on PowerEdge, and will offer the option for customers to upgrade to the multi-server XenServe enterprise version via a downloadable license key. 

With similar agreements or statements of intent already in place with NEC, Fujitsu and IBM, Citrix is close to matching the server vendor support the VMware has garnered for its own embedded virtual machine server, ESX Server 3i.

The embedded virtual machine server market offers Citrix its best chance of catching up with VMware in the core virtual machine server market. VMware currently holds 80% of this market, but it is a dominant share of market that has barely begun to come into its own. 

IDC estimates that only 725,000 of the 7.4 million x86 servers it expects to ship this year will be virtualised – just over 9% of the total. As virtual machine servers begin to be shipped in hardware, the proportion that are ultimately virtualised is set to grow dramatically. Citrix’s Templeton said he is confident that embedded Xen technology will win a more significant share of this business.

Whilst the endorsement of Dell and HP for XenSource allows Citrix to match VMware in the embedded server space, Business Objects’ announcement of a BI virtual appliance aimed at the Xen platform is something of coup for Citrix. 

Business Objects, which is in the process of being acquired by SAP, revealed that it has been working with Citrix, rPath and RightScale to produce a BI virtual appliance that will be simple to deploy and aggressively priced to attract small and medium enterprise (SME) customers.

As a virtual appliance, Business Objects Crystal Reports Server XI will be compatible with any standard hyper visor product, but it is clearly intended to be deployed primarily via Citrix’s application delivery technology, with rPath providing the virtual machine packaging. RightScale’s contribution will be to provide a “push button access” to the virtual appliance over the Internet – giving Citrix and Business Objects customers an opportunity to test the technology remotely before downloading to Citrix virtual machine infrastructure. 

VMware attempted to kick-start the market for applications delivered as virtual appliances last year, when it created its own online market.

Templeton said this market has so far produced “more smoke than fire”, but expects flames to appear as more market leading products like Crystal Reports are adapted for delivery as virtual apps.

Further reading

iForum 2007 Day One - Citrix prepares end-to-end virtualisation vision

Citrix leans on Windows Still endebted to the fat client king.

The new virtual platform The virtualisation revolution has just begun. Expect the most radical benefits to appear at the processor level.