After bitter statements around Xen maturity of these last weeks from Red Hat, Novell and XenSource itself, the company finally launches its first commercial product based on the open source hypervisor: XenEnterprise 1.0.
The product adds commercial grade features and support to Xen 3.0 and XenSource built around it also a sales channel infrastructure, a technical certification program and a much discussed agreement with Microsoft.
In this first release XenEnterprise introduces following features:
- Simplified installation and physical to virtual (P2V) tools
- Support for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
- Multiple Xen hosts management
- Real-time monitoring of server and guest performance
- Administrative console for Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell operating systems
Despite Intel VT help at the moment the product doesn’t support Microsoft Windows virtual machines, which is expected to be introduced in Q4 2006, along with other guests operating systems support and extended P2V capabilities.
Check an introductory demo of management interface here.
XenSource bases its licensing model on host machine processors number, introducing annual and perpetual subscription options, with volume discounts.
It has to be verifed if customers will accept to pay for a product which still doesn’t offer support for all operating systems and which is already expected to change.
At the moment XenEnterprise seems to bet on extended managent support capabilites, but this further exacerbate competition considering threat from upcoming multi-virtualization-platforms management tools, like Enomalism, HyperVM or SWsoft, newest Linux distribution from Novell and Red Hat, and direct competitor Virtual Iron.
In any case it’s a kind of ironic the company offers a product called Xen-Enterprise and its CEO claims just before the commercial launch the underlying engine isn’t ready for datacenter deployments.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.