Citrix, Microsoft Plan to Step in VMworld Europe Spotlight
February 18th, 2009 | 
Author: Alessandro Perilli is reporting on virtulization.info that Citrix will temporarily steal the VMworld Europe 2009 spotlight next week with an announcement that the fully featured hypervisor, XenServer 5 Enterprise Edition, will be available for free. Alessandro apparently got this scoop from Stephen Vaughn-Nichols who blogged on his practical-tech.com site about next week’s surprise announcement.
This news now makes XenServer 5 the second no cost virtualization platform with live migration abilities. Microsoft announced their free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta will also include their Live Migration feature back in mid January.
Another interesting detail of this expected announcement is that Microsoft’s SCVMM will now be able to manage XenServer 5, and Citrix will introduce Citrix Essentials with capabilities to manage Hyper-V. This cross management collaboration will make for some very interesting multi vendor virtual datacenter possibilities.
Here’s some more info from the practical-tech.com post about Citrix Essentials:
“This new line, Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, will make running multiple virtualization systems and machines much easier. Among other features, Citrix claims that it will automate the VM (virtual machine) lifecycle to simplify and streamline workload creation and delivery. It will also make virtualization more scalable by provisioning virtual and physical servers from single, master images to lower costs and reduce VM sprawl and more agile by simplifying storage set-up, configuration and operations in the virtualized data-center. For these programs, Citrix will charge from $1,500 to $5,000 per server.”
With lifecycle management features for both Microsoft and Citrix VMs, both companies appear to be closing the gap that VMware has had to date in virtual infrastructure automation. Vaughn-Nicols also indicates that other virtualization competition may be joining Citrix and Microsoft with this new management suite as well:
“It’s also expected that at least one of the two major Linux companies, Novell or Red Hat, will announce their support for the new XenServer and Citrix Essentials for XenServer. It is not known, however, which of the companies will be making this jump.”
Of course, I’m guessing VMware will have some pretty interesting announcements to make themselves next week. Stay tuned to the VMwareUnderground!
Posted in 
Tags: 
Pingback: Free Citrix XenServer includes XenCenter, XenMotion, Resource Pools and Storage Management | VM /ETC