Citrix joins the embedded hypervisor crowd

A while back VMware announced their 3i product, essentially embedding the ESX kernel onto a flash drive and having a server boot from that. The idea is that you don't need to deal with the installation of the hypervisor software so you can focus on just getting your guest OS sessions up and running.

Citrix has joined in that effort this week, announcing a deal with HP to market the Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition. The HP Proliant servers will come with XenServer Select, which is the base level version of the Citrix virtualization platform. Customers will be able to "easily" upgrade to the full version of the XenServer platform as well.

Citrix still trails VMware in overall functionality and number of OEM vendors, but this is a big step in closing the gap.

And as long as you're reading about virtualization here, I should note that Hyper-V from Microsoft hit the RC stage this week, meaning it is still on time to be 6 months late.