Citrix gives away XenServer & Enterprise Tools for Free!
A quick note before I head to bed tonight, Citrix has decided to give away its OSS XenSource virtualisation platform for free…
If you’re reading this, you already know the news: XenServer, our enterprise virtual infrastructure platform is now free (including resource pooling and live relo), and we have announced Citrix Essentials for XenServer, and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as our virtualization management portfolio that offers a rich set of automated functions that drive the compatible virtualization layers beneath – the free Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, and the free XenServer Enterprise virtual infrastructure platform from Citrix. Finally, and most importanly, we announced a powerful go-to-market roadmap with Microsoft.
The eqivalent of Citrix’s XenMotion – which can migrate a live virtual machine to any other XenServer host running in the same resource pool without downtime – in the VMWare world is a pretty $4-6K investment. Not a bad move considering VMWare is about to do its VMWorld Europe 2009 show soon.
From the product site, a direct comparison:
| Features included at no cost | Citrix XenServer | VMware ESXi |
| Bare-metal hypervisor | 64-bit | 32-bit |
| Max virtual CPUs | 8 | 4 |
| Windows® and Linux guests |  |
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| Unlimited servers, VMs, memory |  |
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| P2V & V2V conversion | |
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| Shared SAN and NAS storage | |
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| Centralized multi-server management | |
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| Resilient distributed management architecture | |
|
| Live motion | |
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| Shared VM template library | |
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| Centralized configuration management | |
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| Virtual infrastructure patch management | |
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| Intelligent initial VM placement | |
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| Intelligent server maintenance mode | |
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| Fine-grained CPU resource controls | |
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| Hot-swappable disks and NICs | |
Virualization.info has an interesting look at the move and what it may mean. Otherwise, go grab your copy.
Direct download links appear below:
Base Installer [296Mb] (MD5)
Linux Guest Support Installer [245Mb] (MD5)
XenCenter for Windows [6Mb] (MD5)
Enjoy!
