Jay Lyman at LinuxInsider writes: "There have been many changes in the market and technology since Citrix (Nasdaq: CTXS) acquired XenSource and a major stewardship stake in the Xen open source hypervisor four years ago.
Red Hat's (NYSE: RHT) 2008 Qumranet acquisition and subsequent push behind the Linux-integrated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor has added to the disruption. One thing, though, remains the same: the intense competition among these open source hypervisors in the enterprise market.
Hypervisors have maintained their relevance in the market thanks mainly to their significance to server and datacenter virtualization and cloud computing. Given open source software's significance to cloud computing, open source hypervisor players KVM and Xen are particularly relevant.