Simon Crosby - the Citrix CTO said in a Search Storage article - http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/contents/25176-Open-source-hypervisors-pose-challenge-to-VMware

"Another difference, according to Crosby, is that Virtual Iron's raw disk access method is block-based; XenServer can offer either 'file-backed' or 'block-backed' access. 'Because we own the hypervisor, we can do much more integration and development around it—Virtual Iron is just a consumer of it,' he said."

Wow. First - that is a false and ridiculous statement. We have been a substantial contributor to the Xen project and not just a consumer. Virtual Iron was the first Xen provider to ship 32 & 64-bit OS support, first Xen provider to ship LiveMigration, etc.

The market is in for a rude awakening with Citrix in regards to server virtualization. They don't have a viable server virtualization product. Instead they have cobbled together solutions from the ecosystem to make up for their deficiencies but it is impractical, expensive and adds complexity. They should stick to desktop - which is where they are strong.

Any discussions around file systems is just posturing on his part- of course we could integrate with a file system if it made sense to our market. I have spent years in the storage and file system arena and know that space extremely well and he is speaking out of school.

But that isn't even the biggest issue with Simon's statement. The Xen open source project is exactly that - an open source project. Citrix doesn't own the Xen hypervisor - the entire community does.

It is appalling that Simon would say what he did - it is irresponsible, false and antithetical to the whole open source philosophy.