Citrix's Cloud.com now on the Public Cloud

Citrix Systems in now offering the source code for VMworld’s CloudStack cloud management tool. This development happened just recently; Citrix is also developing new provisional support for additional workloads from new hypervisors. It could be remembered that VMworld acquired Cloud.com in July this year, which gave them full control over CloudStack management.

Cloud.com has been in operation as early as 2008 with the company founders led by CEO Sheng Liang, a former lead developer of Sun’s Java Virtual Machine. Other members of the team include chief marketing officer Peder Ulander, who had the Solaris development in his portfolio and VP of engineering Kevin Kluge, who took control of Zimbra’s email service provider.

It was launched at the same time with its business rival, Eucalyptus Systems but, it became only known when it released its VMOp system. And in May 2010 the company sliced their own place in the computer IT system when it finally decided to get out of its long time stealth mode.

This week at the VMworld 2011 conference, Citrix was parading its CloudStack 2.2.10, which carries the certification from its rival VMWare ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and VSphere 5.0 server.

Cloud.com previously supported VMWare hypervisors, KVM and Xen hypervisors. But since Ulander is now VP of product marketing at the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, they are now to support Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor before the end of the fourth quarter this year.

Citrix also announced earlier that CloudStack 2.2.10 will now have control over the Oracle VM 2.X variants of the Xen hypervisor and will simultaneously support Oracle VM 3.0 hypervisor. These two product releases are expected to be out in the market anytime in October this year.

Cloudstack 2.2.10 will significantly do some modifications by including some provisions that will support bare-metal servers that will manage the current applications on them. CloudStack will also support x86-based PC’s with IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface.

CloudStack with its new open source framework hopes to attract more users to switch to their product. This is a marketing strategy to take advantage over its rival Eucalyptus that offers only a subset of the codes instead of having it in open stack, which frustrates most of its users because of the technical limits.

Citrix Systems plays a dual relationship with VMware as it becomes an adversary and a partner at the same time. The cloud framework has them both competing for the cloud features but, should also work together for the ESXi support.

Pricing may also be another issue because CloudStack offers a $995 per physical machine that can support several cores and hypervisors. This pricing is only one sixth of the price of its competitors.

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