Citrix adds Hypervisor Cloud to bring more and faster updates
- Reference: 1659678308
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/08/05/citrix_hypervisor_cloud/
- Source link:
The Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud release stream is not designed to replace Citrix Hypervisor's Long Term Service releases, the last of which [1]emerged in June 2020 .
Instead, the cloudy stream adds a cloud-based Hypervisor Management service that can deploy new features of Citrix Hypervisor to on-prem hosts without the need to download and install upgrades. Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud uses version 4.13.4 of the open source Xen hypervisor, which is currently at version 4.16.
[2]
Citrix hasn't indicated how often updates will flow, or the kind of additions it thinks will be so valuable that its customers will move to Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud. But with a couple of versions of Xen to catch up on, one reason easy updates will be appreciated is apparent.
[3]
[4]
The company has [5]stated that a cloudy hypervisor is needed because hybrid work is here to stay and organizations that offer it using the Citrix stack therefore need the tools to run a secure hybrid cloud.
[6]Teradici re-emerges as 'HP Anyware' to replace ZCentral Remote Boost
[7]Citrix research: Bosses and workers don't see eye to eye over hybrid work
[8]Citrix spreads its Desktop as a Service across Google and Azure clouds
It's hard to argue against that.
But Citrix may also find it hard to excite users. Way back in 2014 it [9]effectively quit the market for a general purpose hypervisor capable of powering a private or hybrid cloud. The company kept its hypervisor on the books and recommended it as the best environment in which to run its Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops products – and even made it free for those users – but many Citrix customers prefer to run the company's products on competitors' virtualization stacks.
Maybe Citrix has something else up its sleeve to make Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud more attractive. Or perhaps it will just help the company fling some FUD in the direction of VMware – which is set to be acquired by Broadcom and make a rapid shift to subscriptions.
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VMware has [11]declined to detail the price of its newly announced subscriptions, and Broadcom has a history of hiking prices that has made some VMware customers nervous.
Broadcom has already [12]acknowledged that some VMware customers are nervous about the deal. Citrix now has a product it can use to escalate that anxiety.
To which VMware could rightly offer a riposte that Citrix's own future is uncertain. It has been taken private and will merge with Tibco – a company whose activities are not an obvious fit. The combined Citrix/Tibco will be run by Tom Krause, the former head of Broadcom Software, who drove the VMware/Broadcom deal and [13]championed Broadcom's strategy of sloughing off smaller customers and focusing only on larger users. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/26/citrix_hypervisor_new_lts_release/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YuzqSVzD-6dkP@N84DcDKAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuzqSVzD-6dkP@N84DcDKAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YuzqSVzD-6dkP@N84DcDKAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2022/08/02/the-power-of-citrix-hypervisor-is-coming-to-the-cloud/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/teradici_now_hp_anyware/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/08/work_rebalanced/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/citrix_daas_google_azure/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/08/docker_schmocker_huawei_is_the_new_virtualisation_challenger/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuzqSVzD-6dkP@N84DcDKAAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/29/vsphere_plus_prices_not_public/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/19/vmware_president_sumit_dhawan_interview/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: They got this wrong
I partly agree with you but I think Citrix have always struggled with a direction, strategically. Back in the dial-up days they were, as you say, the company to give users access to applications remotely and for a while they were the only ones in the market.
Since then the move to hosted web apps / the shift to cloud has really hurt their market share.
NetScalers were a huge win for them but even there, competitors have caught up and passed them in many regards.
When they bought-without-buying (never did understand why they did it that way) Xen, they really could have made an impact in the virtualisation world but they never seemed to understand how to do it - I found everything in Citrix XenServer to be counterintuitive and clunky at best.
I did love their brief dalliance into a type-1 client hypervisor, XenClient, which at the time did fill a need I had for easy desktop virtualisation but then they dropped it suddenly (and to be fair it was always going to be a niche product). Interestingly, purely out of curiosity, I just had a play with OpenXT - it's basically the open sourced version of it - and it feels like stepping back in time a decade.
For three decades the question hung over Citrix of "when will Microsoft buy them". That has since morphed into "why would they?"
They got this wrong
Disclaimer: despite the fact I used to work for Citrix, and hate them so much I need counselling, I can acknowledge the worth and usefulness of their products.
I don’t understand how Citrix could have gone so badly during covid and associated lockdowns, and the rise of extensive remote working. For a company whose bread and butter is remote working products, associated security and the like should have absolutely cleaned up. Now look at them. Seems like they are hoping Broadcom/VMware stuff things up worse than what they did and that the customers who migrated to VMware Horizon come back when Vmware decide they aren’t big enough to be customers anymore.