Free at Last, Free at Last, XenServer is Free at Last.

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You read that title correctly; XenServer is free. Free as in advice--since I've never seen any of this free beer of which the Open Source Community speaks so freely. And, yes, this is breaking news. Citrix made XenServer free as of Feb 23, 2009 12:01am EST. This exciting announcement is part of a move by Citrix to open its flagship XenServer to further adoption by Cloud vendors, corporations and developers.

Oh, but that's not all. It gets better. In fact, Citrix gets a Gold Star. Yes, that's right, they've partnered with Microsoft.

This time, it might not be so bad a thing.

Citrix is partnering with Microsoft in that Citrix is fully supporting Hyper-V in their new Essentials Management Suite. Essentials will manage both XenServer virtual machines and Hyper-V virtual machines. What's so great about that? With Citrix's new Essentials, you're able to move workloads and virtual machines between XenServer and Hyper-V seamlessly.

The positive fallout from this announcement is tremendous. It will drive new business to Cloud vendors, it will create new Cloud vendor businesses, it will make converting a physical infrastructure to a virtual one a lot cheaper--try to the tune of $5,000+ per server.

Who will be hurt by this? If you are whispering "VMware" to yourself, you're right. I forsee an upcoming counter announcement from VMware this week--watch for it here. Microsoft won't be hurt significantly by a free XenServer because Microsoft shops will embrace Hyper-V regardless of the competition's price.

No, I don't think current VMware customers will jump ship but certainly new converts or those who've been pondering virtualization will go with XenServer.

I think this is a good thing for Citrix and Microsoft. It will boost Citrix's new management application direction and help Microsoft's foray into virtualization.

Ok, VMware, your turn.

Dani AI

Generated

Nice summary by — Citrix did announce that XenServer would be made available for unlimited production use without charge (announcement made February 23, 2009), a deliberate play to lower the cost barrier for virtualization adoption. (rttnews.com)

Important clarification: the free offering included the core XenServer hypervisor and centralized management (including live migration/XenMotion and multi-node administration), but Citrix separated several higher‑value management and availability capabilities into a new Citrix Essentials product line (lab automation, dynamic provisioning, advanced storage integration and high availability). Those capabilities appear in XenCenter as purchasable, grayed‑out options and require the Essentials license to enable in production. (esj.com)

The Microsoft tie‑up (Project Encore) and the Citrix Essentials for Hyper‑V work were intended to let shops manage Hyper‑V and XenServer from the same toolset and to move/copy images between the platforms (StorageLink/Image Manager was specifically touted for XenServer<->Hyper‑V conversion and storage integration). That is the technical basis for the “move workloads between XenServer and Hyper‑V” capability mentioned above. ()

Practical next steps for anyone evaluating this change: run a small pilot first; verify hardware compatibility and CPU virtualization support; design shared storage if you need live migration; test P2V/V2V conversion and backup/restore; and decide up front whether you need Essentials (or third‑party tools) for HA, orchestration or advanced storage features — budget for support if this will run production workloads. These are the points that make “free” appealing, but not always a complete replacement for paid management and support.

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