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."

Comments

Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

VT changed the game. Nowadays Xen (and others like Sun's VirtualBox) runs Windows just fine.

It's sad to notice that both VMWare and Citrix are neglecting building non-Windows management clients by the way :(

Re:Is Virtualization the New OS?

[palegray.net]

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).

Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried

[Kent Recal]

So, VMWare gives you free support for their paid product but citrix charges you for support on their free product? Boggles the mind.

We are currently doing a similar head-to-head and so far it seems that for the ESX license costs alone we can hire two full-time admins and buy plenty of support from citrix when needed. YMMV.

Re:Is Virtualization the New OS?

[spazimodo]

I can't speak to what happened in your particular scenario, but yes, staff, power cooling, etc. are big drivers for virtualization. I've seen multiple racks of servers condensed down into two servers and a SAN running in about 20U. You can get to everything remotely (out-of-band) without needing an IP-KVM and can restart hung servers without needing an IP/Serial PDU.

Setup time for new servers is orders of magnitude faster. fill out a couple screens in a click-and-drool GUI and you have a new server up and running.

Redundancy and reliability are also quite a bit better. While you're right a catastrophic failure of physical server hardware will bring down the VMs hosted on that server, they can immediately be powered on again on one of the other physical hosts. (Of course if you use local storage with virtual servers, you're playing with fire and will get burned eventually) Virtualization also makes it reasonable to cluster services for HA since you don't need 100% more hardware for failover. VMotion or XenMotion (which I haven't yet tried) will let you move running VMs off a physical box you suspect of failing or need to service which is damn handy, though I don't know that it's worth the price VMWare charges in most cases.

Virtualization means NOT needing to buy new hardware since the hardware becomes a commodity, run it till it fails and then replace it. You get out of proactive replacement cycles and expensive 7x24x4 support contracts. When you need more capacity, you just add another node and redistribute your VMs rather than having to deal with the headache of migrating an overutilized server to new hardware.