It started when Citrix acquired XenSource. When Citrix' (and Microsoft's) intentions on how to use this technology became more clear, VMware decided that I needed to inform it's parthers on how they viewed the Citrix-XenSource deal:

" ...MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance...

...The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision...

...Microsoft's announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question "When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?" Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?...

...Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop...and Citrix is allowing it to happen...

...New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management...This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix's stated business model for virtualization - to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors...

...New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix's core business since ICA is Citrix's key differentiator and competes with RDP.."

After that it almost seemed like Citrix and VMware were letting the mud dry but then there was a blog entry by a VMware employee called  Mike DiPetrillo shared his thoughts on the acquistion of XenSource by Citrix and why he thought that Citrix made a very foolish decision in doing so: 

"OK. So the strategy is go and spend $500 million on a company that's losing money, switch all of your current successful products and branding over to the losing company, and then exit the market when your larger partner moves into the market. Is this the end of Citrix then? Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 closes the gap pretty nicely. Virtual Desktops are also taking large chunks of market share. Time will tell where Citrix ends up.

I guess you could also ask, is this the end of XenSource? Things in KVM land (another open source virtualization solution) are heating up again as Ubuntu has just included KVM over XenSource in their distribution. Between Citrix moving everyone from XenSource to Hyper-V later this year and Ubuntu starting the Linux vendor migration to KVM the future looks pretty bleak for XenSource.

And that's where we're at. I'm still scratching my head on why Citrix paid all of that money for XenSource. Time will tell if it's a smart move. In the mean time, if I were Simon Crosby I'd start cashing out some of my vested Citrix shares."

Bear in mind this is just the opinion of a VMware employee just sharing his thoughts on his personal blog. It however did find it's way to Citrix to strike a nerve at Simon Crosby, Citrix' Virtualization CTO and make him retort :

" I have a lot of respect for my friends at VMware, but I'd rather expect those such as Mike who are charged with gathering competitive information to spend less time breathing their own exhaust and more time working on the facts.  With nonsense like this being pushed into the VMware marketing machine as the result of "competitive research", who knows what may come next? 

Mike, I think you should write more "research" like this.  Spend a lot of time doing it.  Every time you or your colleagues begin to foam at the mouth, more of your channel partners come back home to Citrix, fed up with being treated shoddily and competed with,  and tired of the dogma that seems to be VMware's response to the powerful Microsoft Citrix partnership, its breadth of features, its loyal channel, and its solutions centric approach that values ecosystem partners. 

We know you don't get it.  That's fine.  Chin up, and do please keep writing."

Simon was probaly on a blogging role from there because the next he wrote the following short article in response to an article on a VMware blog (you'll never guess who's) that provide, amonst other things, the following enlightenments :

"...This is ridiculous, because if we didn't VMs would be crashing about our ears when we do live relocations.  Both in XenServer and in open source Xen, we require a match on CPU processor vendor, family and stepping before a migration can be performed. 

I'm beginning to understand why the VMware blog is called "A little truth...".  While I'm all for competitive intelligence in general, when the code is available in open source for everyone to review, it's just not possible to pull the wool over everyone's eyes like this.

And though I know this has hit the wires before, I keep hearing from VMware customers that are buying XenServer why they love the simplicity and robustness of our product and of Xen: The total number of patches shipped to date for XenServer: 0.  Total hot fixes and patches shipped last year for VMware VI3/ESX alone: 68*!* of which 17 were critical.  Silly me! Those were probably only "feature enhancements". 

I can understand that Vmware as well as Citrix are very passionate about their products and technologies but this exchange of mud a high velocity is something I'd expect to see at the Jerry Springer show, not by (high profile) members of technology multinationals. Or is that just me? What do you think?