At VMWorld Europe, Citrix announced that their popular virtualization platform, XenServer, would be offered free. Virtualization is quickly becoming standard practice at the enterprise level, and for those who don’t currently virtualize, being able to do so for free really helps the process.
XenServer is different Desktop Virtualization software, such as Sun’s VirtualBox or VMWare’s Workstation, in that it is a true hypervisor. It runs a stripped down version of CentOS Linux which emulates hardware at a very low level. Desktop Virtualization software usually requires a full OS, such as Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux, in order to run.
You might expect a vendor to cripple their free offering, but Citrix has done well – they left plenty of the great features intact. For example; XenMotion is a feature that allows you to move a VM from server to server without interruption of service (NOTE: Requires shared storage – e.g. SaN). A more detailed list of features can be seen here.
To use XenServer, you’ll need dedicated hardware. Simply download and burn the ISO, boot to it and follow the prompts. Then, install XenCenter – the software that you’ll use to manage the pool, on your workstation.
More information can be had at Citrix.
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2 comments:
Very biased towards Citrix, perhaps compare advantages of using XenServer over VMWare ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. Many of the features, VMWare has had for years.
The post focuses on the release of an enterprise level Type 1 Hypervisor being available for no cost.
But I agree, I'll come up with a better comparison of ESX vs XenServer - but to be honest, I'm more experienced with the Citrix offering, so I dont know how objective I can be.
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