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Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platform Now Free
Pedro writes "Citrix announced today that they are giving away their Xen OSS based virtualization platform XenServer with all the goodies included for free. The big highlights are XenMotion, which lets you move VMs from box to box without downtime, and multi server management. The same stuff in VMware land is $5k. They plan to sell new products for XenServer and also the same stuff on Microsoft's virtualization technology called Hyper-V. It will be interesting to see what VMware does. The announcement comes the day before VMware's big user event VMworld."
I like the marketing for this The enterprise-class features you need at none of the cost. I'm thinking this is a pretty big deal.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Instead of browsers being the new os, is some sort of hyper visor system the New OS, with sub-oses running. How about virtualization of cool embedded products?
Think Deeply.
does it run Linux?
I've been waiting several months (through multiple missed release milestones) for Sun to get a xVM Server general release out. I'm still running a bunch of VPS nodes under VMware Server in the meantime, and I'll probably be in the ground before Sun's product is released.
It's really a shame, considering how much I like xVM VirtualBox.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Here's the link: Get it while it's hot.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works. Their stuff is solid, and it works in mixed environments real well. Unless they've made some major improvements, Xen has the problem of being only good at Linux on Linux. If you run Linux servers, and want Linux guests, it's great. However it is not good at Windows as a guest, and of course can't run on it at all. While I've never used Hyper-V, I'm sure it is the same for Windows.
However VMWare isn't a problem like that. You can run VMWare on Windows or on Linux (or Mac for that matter). On either platform, it'll run pretty much anything as a guest OS and run it well. Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc all work great and they've got native tools for most platforms.
That's really valuable to us. We aren't interested in playing around with what OSes we can and can't run on our virtual servers. We aren't interested in fiddling and tweaking to make shit work. We want to install it and go.
There's also a whole bunch of other tools/features VMWare has that are really slick, but the OS support is a big one. Unless Xen gets good at supporting Windows as a guest, and by good I mean no problems, high speed, native tools, etc, it just doesn't compare. Same deal with Hyper-V. It may be the best thing ever for Windows on Windows, but if it's Linux support isn't equally good, then I don't see it as threatening VMWare.
Last I checked, Xen is still limited to VMs=number of cores, which Virtual Infrastructure is not... Correct me if i'm wrong.
given the huge size of some vmware consolidations, Xenserver isn't much of an option to many people.
It seems the only way to administer XenServer is from Windows - is this correct?
A major issue with virtualization in the enterprise is certification by various enterprise software vendors. If your entire platform stack (hardware, Virtualization, OS, etc.) (can you believe we actually have platform stacks now? Geez...) isn't certified, you just give them an excuse to not support you. VMWare has made some solid inroads here, but the last time I saw Xen on the list of certified platforms for something I was integrating was, oh, I'd say never. Not to say such apps don't exist, but they certainly aren't anywhere near what one would call ubiquitous. For many companies, paying the ridiculous price of VMWare is worth it for this reason alone.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
In another move to counter VMware's lead, Citrix will offer its XenServer software free starting in April. One or two high-end features from that product, including the high-availability features, will be moved to Citrix Essentials for XenServer, but many of the existing capabilities will be available for no charge, said Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer each will be priced at US$1,500 to $5,000 per server, depending on the features selected, Crosby said.
Enlightenment? It's just a flush in the pan.
Well, sounds like suicide is the cheap and easy option for you, good buddy. Good luck with that! We Americans wish you nothing but the very best!
1) Requires new hardware. VT is only available on newer Intel processors. So if you have an older server, and many people do, it isn't suitable for that purpose. That will become a non-issue eventually but at this time there are still lots of servers that aren't.
2) In my experience with toying with it, it still has problems with Windows like occasional random crashes and such. VMWare seems as solid as if you are running on real hardware, Xen seems to have additional problems.
Again, it comes down to the "It just works," thing. If you have the hardware that can support it and are willing to tool around and maybe deal with problems, ok then. However if you don't want to do that, then VMWare is what you want.
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They want you to use it and depend on it so you buy support and additional product. In my opinion, if you're running an enterprise virtualization platform for critical tasks, you'd be an idiot to do it without a support contract.
So if you need support anyway, how much of a difference is this vs. buying VMware with support?
I'm not buying that they "tend to win" in a head-to-head with VMware. Sorry. The market numbers (and the fact that they're now giving it away) doesn't really support that. To compete, I suspect they were discounting to the point where they were giving it away when they really wanted to make a sale to a particular account.
Once you buy VMware, support isn't expensive, so the ongoing cost isn't that bad. The installed base isn't going to evaporate, any more than OpenOffice has managed to get rid of Microsoft Office.
This does make the Oracle and Novell versions of Xen look a little pointless, though.
VMWare ESXi server was free with no support and has more than enough functionality for the average user.
There's always a catch, isn't there?
At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.
I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I sincerely hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are guys!). There was a balanced 2 minute comparison of Hyper-v, XenServer, and VMware over at the 360 blog here.
For the VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V fanboys (are there any Hyper-V fanboys yet?), calm down and take a tip from that blog:
"Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it."
For those of us who are out of date, what is XenServer USED for?
I understand VMs, I've tinkered with them a bit but I don't understand XenServers practical application.
Can someone give a usage scenario?
One of the selling points of Unix has always been the ability to have multiple user accounts with security policies that prevent them from interacting badly. The problem, of course, is that security holes are relatively frequent. In particular, local security holes, i.e. exploits in any code that ever runs setuid, are quite frequent. That they're so frequent that people don't trust OS security at all, to the point of running separate apps in separate virtual machines, seems like a pretty conclusive determination that OS security policies have failed.
I can't help but think that one alternate route that would've ended up more efficient would be to give in and write more core software using some variety of language not vulnerable to quite as many buffer overflows and stack-smashing attacks. Doesn't have to be some big paradigm switch like using Ocaml; a C-with-some-safety dialect like Cyclone would be fine. Besides inertia, one of the main arguments against was that it adds overhead compared to straight C. But the fact that people are willing to accept a much larger amount of overhead via virtual machines to get more solid guarantees of security that the OS is frankly failing to provide is some indication that the overhead-for-security tradeoff is something people really do want.
There are some advantages to using virtual machines regardless, such as ability to migrate apps separately. But we're using them here in some cases where multiple users on the same OS really would have been the best setup, except for the fact that we don't trust Linux to be free of local-root exploits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We recently did a re-evaluation of our virtualization tech, and VMware won out over Xen. The simple reason: VMware can run Windows on machines that don't have hardware VT. Sure, if we wanted to immediately replace every single server with a new one containing a new cpu, that'd be different, but in this economy you don't really want to throw away perfectly good hardware that still runs VMware at a very nice speed. Xen requires hardware VT, or you aren't running Windows guests, period. VMware doesn't care; it uses hardware VT if you have it, or it does software virtualization otherwise.
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Not this time. At least not by you.
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works.
Just don't try to uninstall it. I have a box that I had been using since 2002 completely melt down after I uninstalled a copy of VMWare. It required a full nuke and pave to rebuild the OS...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Imagine taking into account environments where you need testing, development, pre production, staging and production. Rather than put them on a single machine (Highly unlikely) you can instead buy a small farm of machines, say 20 boxes for multiple applications/environments and then have them pooled into units and use virtual servers of varying priority and power levels. Your staging should have near production capabilities, your dev box, maybe not.
This is why I like Solaris zones. You don't even need a separate /usr et al., as most of the OS binary code is by default shared via a R/O lofs mount. Patching only has to be be done on the 'host' OS image as well.
It also doesn't need any special hardware: any system that runs Solaris 10 will do (SPARC or x86): HP, Dell, IBM, Sun machines are certified to run it. You can even run Solaris 10 as a VMware guest, and then run zones with-in that guest.
(Yeah, I'm a fanboy.)
I'm not sure that I totally agree with that.
What is a properly designed cluster of virtual machines? There is no reason that the daemons in the cluster cannot communicate/interact at extremely (read local) speeds. There is no reason that the various levels of hardware abstraction cannot be varied to different levels of virtualization.
One could easily imagine using a "storage" management v-appliance through a "database" management v-appliance, connected to a series of "HTTP server" v-appliances.
The "overhead" you speak of, that of OS security; there's no particular reason that it would be more efficient to build that into your OS; instead, the coarseness of putting it in a virtualization hypervisor may make the code more elegant, perhaps even with less overhead.
However, there is a way in which I agree with you; we need smarter OS's to interact with the hypervisor better. Take *out* the security stuff that's currently in there. That security model is broken, as the past 20 years of taught us. Heck, the unix-y approach, which empirically appears to be the correct one, is based upon simplifying your applications into separate sections as much as possible; and that's an endorsement for the virtualization model.
The issue is stripping out the crap in Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, or whatever operating system you are using. And by crap, I mean everything which is not relevant to the functions of that particular v-application.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, however, in that I don't *really* know which model has overall better $$ of hardware efficiency. If I were going to bet on it, though, I'd bet on the virtualized model with well-written v-applications.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
What about the poor bastards like me who paid for Xen? I wonder if they are planning a refund program, or just a life lesson "Tough Shit" program!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
ESXi is free (although most of the 'advanced' features aren't)
There is no reason that the daemons in the cluster cannot communicate/interact at extremely (read local) speeds.
On VMware ESX, if one VM sends via its network card to another VM running on the same host server, it ends up as a memcpy by the hypervisor. Although a context switch is involved, this is still much faster than any physical network interface, but gives you the security of separate machines.
Vmware really have to watch out for not becoming the new Novel. Novel used to be the best product in its own category, "it just worked", it had excellent support, etc. all the great things people are saying about Vmware. At the same time, Novel was also pretty expensive - just like Vmware. We all know what happened. I think Vmware is truly the best vm product available today, but the price gap has become basically intolerable for the mass market. Vmware is facing competition not only from other software companies, but also from the rapidly declining hardware prices.
VT has been around for 3 years in servers. If your servers don't support it, then they are probably going out of hw maint and need to be replaced. A $1600 Dell server has 8GB RAM and quad-core today. How much is a VMware license? Er... buy a new server.
I love to see VMware bigots commenting on other technologies when they haven't looked at them in a few years. Xen has run arbitrary OSes since v3.2. VirtualBox does too.
I'd love to use VMware/ESX/ESXi, but it wouldn't install on my hardware. It didn't recognize my disks! VMware Server is a POS and **heavy** compared to VirtualBox. Xen runs even faster, IME. I have had issues with Xen kernels not booting. Usually it is due to kernel module dependencies not being released for a few weeks. Besides that it has been rock solid and running 24/7.
You do have test systems where you try things out before taking them into production, right?
Citrix XenServer is built on CentOS. CentOS is built on Redhat. Redhat are dropping Xen like a hot potato and moving to KVM. Guess who's upstream support just went byebye?
I recommend that you need to seriously consider why you are doing it. If you are doing it for hardware savings, you have totally missed the concept of virtualization, which is savings through abstraction. If your site is so small that it can all fit on one server, perhaps virtualization is not for you. However, it still may be for you if you want the hardware availability features (the fact you can take a physical host down and keep everything running on the other, with ZERO downtime). These are the values of virtualization, and they are HUGE especially when you get into larger sites.
Now, Xen vs VMware... VMware does just work, and it is damn stable. And it is damn fast. If you have ever benchmarked VMware Server against Xen, throw your results away, go download ESXi (free) and try it again.
In my testing, with SPECint/fp results (we are an associate member of SPEC), AMD is around 5% overhead and Intel is around 10% overhead. With I/O, you run 10-15% FASTER in a VM than on the exact same physical system, period.
I'm just a lowly developer, not an admin, but where I work we have seen that trying to use more than 1 cpu in a vm actually degrades performance with vmware. Does any product have a solution for this?
So, actually, they rejiggered the product line to mesh with Microsoft's offering, they're working to integrate with Microsoft's management platform, etc.
Isn't this the sort of thing that Novell got beaten up for around here? Basically, they're teaming up with Microsoft because neither one of them can touch VMware.
We might get lucky, VMWare might feel the squeeze by this move and make some more of their "tools" free. They already have the server version for free, as well now they have the ESX version for free.
I will be watching this one closely.
"However, there is a way in which I agree with you; we need smarter OS's to interact with the hypervisor better."
What you're describing is paravirtualization, which is already supported using Xen (maybe other hypervisors as well). Quite a few operating systems can be made aware of the fact that their being virtualized and operate efficiently with the hypervisor. What we'll see now is more and more services appearing OUTSIDE the guest. For example, imagine a hypervisor that implemented firewalling or antivirus services for all the guests it's running.
Given that Amazon's EC2 uses Xen to run it's entire environment linux and windows machines and the fact that it works so well.. that gives a lot of credibility to the Xen platform which will certainly make it easier for companies to 'jump in' to Xen IMO.
My current client has physical servers for everything. Three tiers, as well: dev, staging, and production. As you might guess, dev and prod get the most use--staging, not so much.
They could easily virtualize all of their staging servers, and run them on one physical host as-needed (they don't do staging builds that often, and it's not like every project needs to stage at once.
They also have some special purpose machines that rarely get used, but when the client needs 'em, they really need 'em. In the group I work with alone, they probably have about 30-40 unnecessary physical servers, and they are running out of datacenter space.
If I had my way, they would retire all of those non-24/7 servers and convert them to Amazon Machine Images. Then, when they want to stage a build, they spin up an AMI, stage the build on it, then terminate the instance. Total cost: $0.10. Hell, their staging servers cost that much every few hours, and all they do is idle their CPUs 98% of the time.
What a waste.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I can do incredibly stupid things to my virtual boxen knowing that I can just roll back to a snapshot and smile.
body massage!
I wasn't going to spill the beans on an "unsupported" "feature" though. ;-)
Not spilling the beans, eh? My friend, you are in massive violation of the Slashdot TOS. Don't tell me, your cat clicked through?