Citrix Set to Announce an Open-Source vCloud on VMware's Turf

Word is trickling out that Citrix plans to announce on Monday, at the kickoff of the VMworld conference, an open-source version of VMware's vCloud called the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) that's virtual machine agnostic, non-proprietary, and significantly less expensive than vSphere 4 -- all with the promise of no vendor lock-in.

The Xen Cloud Platform will supposedly surround the Xen hypervisor with a complete runtime virtual infrastructure platform that virtualizes all server, storage, and network resources. In addition, it will be completely virtual machine agnostic, in contrast with VMware's vSphere platform which currently runs exclusively on its own infrastructure.

In an interview on Friday, Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix's Virtualization and Management Division, hinted at "substantial contributions" to come from Oracle, HP, and Novell.

I can hardly wait until Monday. It's sure to be an interesting week in San Francisco, particularly if you're at the VMworld conference.