Citrix to release XenServer for free next week
At least three things seem true in the virtualization industry:
- It doesn’t matter how many times a vendor repeats that free stuff doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solution, it will end up offering a free hypervisor
- It doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder
- It doesn’t matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call
Today is one of those days when the three rules above are true at the same time: Stephen Vaughn-Nichols unveiled on his personal blog the news that next week (Feb 23), during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference, Citrix will give away for free its XenServer hypervisor.
Vaughn-Nichols doesn’t refer to a scaled down version of XenServer. He’s reporting that the Enterprise Edition with all its features will become free (but not open source).
To compensate the lost revenue Citrix will release a new management package called Citrix Essentials, available in two editions, priced between $1,500 and $5,000 per server, one for XenServer and one for Microsoft Hyper-V.
This last version will be available as part of a renewed partnership with Microsoft, dubbed Project Encore.
Project Encore will also imply that System Center (possibly the entire product family and not just the Virtual Machine Manager) will manage XenServer.
The description Vaughn-Nichols provides sounds like a full overlap of the two virtualization offerings, so it will need some official clarification to exactly understand the strategy here.
Anyway it’s a state of fact that every major virtualization vendor on the market now has a free, unlocked hypervisor.
This means two things:
- the battleground is officially shifted to virtual data center automation/orchestration
- the cost of entry for upcoming hypervisor providers (Parallels, Sun) is becoming huge
Who said “strict embargo” ?
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 30th, 2012
Today Amazon announced the availability, with no additional charge, of VM Export, the counterpart of VM Import, that allows the export EC2 instances to costumers on-premise infrastructures.
This new features…
May 30th, 2012
Yesterday the Fedora Project announced the general availability of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution.
In the rich set of new…
May 29th, 2012
Last week Quest Software announced the availability of vRanger 5.4 its backup, replication and recovery solution for VMware.
The main feature of this new release is the plug-and-play integration with…
May 28th, 2012
Last week VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standar 5.0 with a particular emphasis on the introduction of new automation features like on-click auto-deployment of capacity reservations, automated risk…
May 24th, 2012
Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.
Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress