Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS) has been watching its livelihood go up in smoke lately, as its remote administration solutions have run into a spirited challenge from virtualization software. EMC (NYSE: EMC) spinoff VMware (NYSE: VMW) and software giant Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) have made it easy to manage a once-sprawling data center on less hardware and with centralized administration platforms for scads of servers at a time.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, you better join 'em. Citrix just decided to buy privately held virtual server designer XenSource, to give the company a toehold in that new-wave management market. Xen is the virtual server of choice for Linux vendors like Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), so Citrix is basically buying into a product with a built-in ecosystem for support and promotion, as well as an active open-source developer community.