Citrix XenServer Release Makes Enterprise-Class, Cloud-Proven Virtualization Free for Everyone
Citrix Systems, Inc, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today unveiled a groundbreaking new version ofCitrix XenServer– the company’s enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform – that will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment. While basic hypervisors have been free for years, most have had limited practical use in real world environments. With this new release, XenServer sets an entirely new standard for free virtualization with the addition of powerful new features like centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion. Dramatically lowering the entry price of virtualization also helps address today’s challenging economic climate by making enterprise-class virtualization far more accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of budget.
Now in production in more than 5,000 enterprise datacenters worldwide, XenServer is a key component of theCitrix Delivery Center™product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that helps customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” XenServer is powered by the same Xen virtualization engine that runs most every independent cloud today, including the largest single virtualization deployment in the world. With more than 75 percent of corporate servers worldwide still not virtualized**, today’s announcement helps accelerate the adoption of virtualization by bringing the simplicity, scale and economics of the cloud to enterprise datacenter for the first time ever.
“Free hypervisors with limited functionality have been around for a long time. We see this move as substantially different because it offers a competitive, enterprise-ready virtual infrastructure platform with full centralized management, live motion and support for unlimited virtual machines and servers – with no strings attached,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This is a very positive move that has the potential to accelerate the adoption of virtualization for enterprise customers of all sizes and make it easier for external cloud providers to add full Windows support to their existing Linux offerings. Anyone who dismissed XenServer in the past as a legitimate player in enterprise virtualization clearly owes it to themselves to take a look at this offering.”
Enterprise-Class, Cloud-Proven Virtualization
The new Citrix XenServer release provides customers with a robust, scalable, feature-rich virtualization platform that is exceptionally powerful, yet incredibly easy to learn and use. Core features of XenServer include the following:
“This move is all about accelerating the adoption of virtualization by tearing down the barriers of cost and complexity that have been in place for far too long,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization Management Division, Citrix. “The faster we can help customers virtualize the millions of servers that remain unvirtualized today, the sooner they can start adding significant value on top, transforming static datacenters into dynamic delivery centers where every application, desktop and server workload is delivered as an on-demand service.”
Good for All Types of Customers
With the new free XenServer release, corporate customers now have everything they need to deploy and centrally manage full enterprise-class virtualization on any number of servers with no upfront costs – especially significant during difficult economic times. As a result, customers who are new to virtualization can now begin realizing all of its efficiencies and cost savings sooner, upgrading to more advanced virtualization management features when and if they need them down the road. Customers who have already made an investment in more expensive virtualization platforms in the past, now have a proven enterprise-class alternative to consider when it comes time to upgrade or expand their existing deployments.
The new free XenServer release is also great news for cloud providers, the vast majority of whom use the open source Xen hypervisor today as a core component of their platforms. By upgrading to the full XenServer product, these cloud vendors not only gain a far richer virtual infrastructure platform at no cost, they also get instant native support for Windows guests in addition to the Linux guests they offer today. This will also make it easier for Linux OS vendors who currently include Xen in their products to move to the full XenServer, giving their customers far more value and focusing their development efforts on adding differentiated services on top of the virtualization platform.
“The Xen virtualization engine has been a key component of SoftLayer’s cloud computing strategy, providing the performance scalability and track record we have needed to achieve our vision of using virtualization to transform the datacenter,” said Nathan Day, CTO, SoftLayer. “With this move today by Citrix, we can gain even further leverage using the full power of XenServer in our next-generation cloud computing platform with more efficiency and richer functionality than ever before. XenServer, as part of the Citrix Cloud Center (C3) platform, is really leading the way in the emerging cloud segment by helping its customers and partners navigate the rapidly-evolving technology.”
As a result of this move, XenServer will also now be included as a core feature of Citrix XenApp, the company’s flagship application virtualization product line. Adding XenServer as the base platform under XenApp increases flexibility and helps customers consolidate the number of physical servers in production with virtually no overhead. More than one million servers in enterprise datacenters today are running XenApp.
