HP Teams Up with Citrix for Embedded Xen Hypervisors

Published: April 3, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As readers of IT Jungle's newsletters know very well, I have argued for years that a logical machine or virtual machine hypervisor should be as transparent to system administrators as the BIOS has been for the past two decades in the PC and, by extension, the X86 and X64 server world. You can get to it if you want to change some features or settings, but it is just there, underneath everything, virtualizing away.

Last fall, both VMware and XenSource, which is now owned by Citrix Systems, rushed out their embedded hypervisors, realizing like the rest of us that no one wants to cope with installing a hypervisor and not quite yet getting the idea that no one wants to pay for it, either. The server industry is tackling the integration problem first and not saying much about the bundling in for free of this feature.

A month ago, Hewlett-Packard outlined how it was going to support VMware's ESX Server 3i hypervisor, which fits on an internal USB port on ProLiant servers. Now, HP is talking about even tighter integration between the XenServer commercial-grade hypervisor from Citrix that is going to be embedded on ProLiant servers. The new embedded version of XenServer is available this week on new ProLiant servers and the embedded hypervisor can also be plugged into some 3.5 million ProLiant servers that have been shipped in the past year or so with the internal USB port that was delivered with expectation that embedded hypervisors would become normal in the industry. The existing ProLiant G5 Xeon-based servers, ProLiant G2 Opteron-based boxes, and c-Class blade servers all have these USB ports.

That is not what HP and Citrix mean by integration. The new XenServer HP Select Edition, which costs $249, is fully integrated with the Systems Insight Manager systems management tools that are available for ProLiant and Integrity servers, and is also plugged into the Integrated Lights Out (iLO) service processors on these servers. That means administrators use the same tools for managing virtual machines and the XenServer hypervisor as they use to manage physical servers. Significantly, HP has created a nifty little piece of code call the ProLiant Virtual Console, which is a graphical user interface that runs on the iLO service processor to create partitions, install guests, or remove them. There is also an upgrade path to the fuller Enterprise and Platinum versions of the XenServer stack, which have live migration, snapshotting, and other functions that make XenServer actually useful in the data center.

This is the same approach that HP took with the ESX Server 3i standard and enterprise editions for the embedded hypervisors on its ProLiants. And by the way, that embedded hypervisor is also available this week. No word on pricing for this feature, but the odds are that it is similar to the standard edition of the Xen offering.

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