Over the last few weeks Citrix published a growing number of hints about the public appearance of its free client hypervisor XenClient (formerly Project Independence) next week at its Synergy Conference in San Francisco.
Despite the availability of breakout sessions and hands-on-lab about XenClient anyway, it wasn’t clear if the client hypervisor would be available to the general public.
The final confirmation about this comes from Simon Crosby, CTO of Datacenter & Cloud division, who just wrote on his corporate blog:
…Now that XenClient "Stewie" is getting ready for exposure to a larger set of users, the power management is excellent – there is some secret sauce at work that I can’t disclose yet – and the only limitation for multi-VM use is the boot time. There are still quite a few user experience quirks such as limited multi-monitor support and knowing how to get printing to work, but the system is very usable. My initial user experience issues, such as scheduler interaction that messed up Microsoft OCS and Skype performance, and having to figure out how to get my 3G USB device supported and manually insert the driver, have mostly been addressed. Support for sleep states, power management, and feedback on useability have helped enormously. Along the way, we have learned painfully just how hard a job it is to build a client-side type 1 hypervisor, and reminded that we still have a way to go.
It’s not clear anyway if Citrix will release the GA of XenClient or just a public beta.
A restricted number of partners so far accessed the private beta, while the company confirmed delayed about product availability earlier this year.
virtualization.info received a hint that this first release of XenClient may support Apple MacBook Pro laptops.