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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."
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.
You're describing the practice of using virtualization to host multiple dedicated-purpose "appliances." I use this approach myself; I've got a Debian VPS doing proxy work, another couple of nodes for static HTML serving, another for dynamic apps, one that just serves as an XHTML validation server, etc.
Hardware is cheap these days, and virtualization makes the clean separation of appliances on a single managed box very easy to accomplish. The benefits I get include improved security (difference services run on partitioned hosts) and ease of management (upgrading one application doesn't break others).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
While you're at it, download ESXi to be fair. VMware Server is no comparison with the Enterprise products and comparing it against XenServer would be unfair at best.
Now, in counterpoint, you DO have to pay for the advanced features of ESXi that are free in XenServer, but at least you'll have a fair comparison to work with.
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.
This was never true; I'm not sure where you heard it.
very well, actually. I use to host a slew of paravirtualized debian 'machines', alongside a couple of Windows 'machines'.
Xen Server is a nice product - it has good support for Linux and for Windows, and it's fast. I have had trouble setting up a DC under VMWare Server 1.x and 2 when using Linux as the host OS, but no such issues with Xen Server. No clock skew problems, fast networking, easy SAN support, etc.
I had managed to get the tightwads where I work to approve a budget for Xen Server this year (I'm using Xen Express), but now it looks like I'll get to use that money for something else.
Virtualization CAN save money on hardware, cooling, rack space, etc. You have a single multi purpose server. That means that virtualization may not meet your needs. However, take into account the areas where I work, which include a data center that is thousands of square feet (No, this is not a hosting site for web servers, though I have worked for a hosting facility).
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. Set the thresholds and hardware differences to your liking. However, if each unit was a physical box, even a 1U you would have a lot more rack space required, perhaps multiple node clusters for each, for availability. In a virtual environment, you are pooling physical machines, so at worst, you are overusing capacity beyond your original spec, but the machines should still be available as much as the OS allows.
Your scenario doesn't have any availability for downtime. In mine, if Physical box 11 needs a firwmware patch, I migrate VMs to the other machines and then take P11 offline. I patch it, and rotate in low priority machines to ensure it works as needed. What do you do when you have to go down to the physical machine to patch firmware/bios? You lose all your applications, right?
Virtualizing has overhead on it's own, plus the overhead of running 4 separate kernels, and 4 seperate copies of all the userland shared libs...
Running everything on a single OS image, when correctly configured, gives a pretty significant performance benefit.
Virtualization is more heavily used in the windows world, where it is common practice to have a complete install for a single purpose because a lot of apps don't play well together.
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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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