XenSource
More info
- Creator
- Ian Pratt et al.
- Type
- Software company
- Owner
- Citrix (from 2007)
The startup meant to commercialise the Xen hypervisor, which became Citrix's answer to VMware instead.
Xen started as a research project at the University of Cambridge, and the researchers behind it, led by Ian Pratt, formed XenSource to sell support and packaged products. For a few years Xen was the default open hypervisor; Amazon built the early generations of EC2 on it.
Citrix bought the company in 2007 for around $500 million and turned it into XenServer. Meanwhile KVM landed in the Linux kernel and quietly took over as the default choice. The Xen project itself moved to the Linux Foundation in 2013 and lives on, not least inside Qubes OS.