Citrix give more of Xenserver away for free.

Citrix have recently made more features available in Xenserver, that really makes it a competitive option against the encumbant leader in Virtualisation, VMware. The features you can now get inside XenServer: 64-bit Bare-metal hypervisor,Max virtual CPUs 8, Windows® and Linux guests, Unlimited servers, P2V & V2V conversion, Shared SAN and NAS storage, Centralized multi-server management, Resilient distributed management architecture, Live motion, Shared VM template library, Centralized configuration management, Virtual infrastructure patch management, Intelligent initial VM placement, Intelligent server maintenance mode, Fine-grained CPU resource controls, Hot-swappable disks and NICs.

XenServer Features vs VMware ESXi

As other commentators have pointed out, this seems to be a serious push by Citrix to tackle VMware’s dominance iin the virtualisation area. As their chart shows, they are pitching XenServer against VMWare ESXi.

By offering the more advanced features they are really “putting it to” their main rivals VMware. The timing of the announcement, just before VMware’s VMworld event is of course not likely to be a coincidence.

The more advanced features are those that appeal to larger deployments and really does make XenServer even more interesting to those considering virtualisation of their data center.Where as previously VMware had a big advantage by being the big player and Xen merely trying to match them; Xen is now trying to offer considerably more than VMware is, for considerably less cost. This makes XenServer a contender for any serious project.

What VMware’s response will be may become apparent at VMworld, it will be interesting. As will be how both Citrix and VMware respond to the dual threats of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Linux’s KVM technologies. At the moment VMware has the advantage over all the rest, but how long that will last time will tell.