Citrix to Give Away XenServer: Will It Work? I’m Skeptical.
As reported by Practical Technology yesterday, Citrix has announced that it will be giving away XenServer (the hypervisor portion of their acquired Xen solution) for free. Very similar to the VMware model, they will continue to charge for management and advanced features as add-ons to the XenServer platform but the core virtualization technology will be available for free. Will this have any impact in their market share or their stake in the virtual data center? I’m skeptical for a number of reasons:
- Free doesn’t always mean better, and usually it’s the exact opposite. I’m reluctant to think that enterprise customers and mission-critical cloud providers will take the free route solely to save money. Maybe that’s more likely this year than last but I’m still not sold it will make that much of an impact, especially since this won’t be an OSS offering ala XenSource. They’re also competing up-stream against VMware’s ESXi and Hyper-V, both of which have value-add above and beyond the hypervisor. For Citrix to make this move work they’re going to have to prove that they have the same type of value-add with XenServer that the other two big players offer. And free doesn’t count as value where your mission critical apps are concerned.
- They’re relying heavily on management solutions to bring in the money for XenServer customers. We all know you can’t deploy a truly reliable virtualization solution without having management. In practice free deployments of XenServer will be few and far between, instead they will be bundled with some management solution. But which one? If MS System Center will manage both Hyper-V and XenServer, then we’re back to that value-add question for MS shops. If I’ve already deployed MS SCOM/SCVMM then what’s the value in deploying a Citrix solution instead of Hyper-V — which is also integrated into my server platform? VMware shops will stick with VMware because they’re the only company that has an end-to-end solution today. So is management the golden ticket for Citrix?
- They’re announcing a new partnership with Microsoft. Excluding their existing partnership (whether that partnership has benefitted Citrix is a decently debatable topic so let’s gloss over those particulars for now) — Has a partnership with Microsoft between competing companies ever worked out for the non-Microsoft partner? Yes, MS is an excellent partner resource for technologies that don’t compete, but really, this partnership (and the ability to manage XenServer) will drastically benefit Microsoft by extending their heterogeneous virtual management solutions with Systems Center. I don’t see it going the other way for Citrix. Again, we’re going back to the value for a complete solution and who offers the most value here: Microsoft or Citrix? My vote is very strongly printed in the Microsoft column.
Maybe this will work in Citrix’s favor by at least getting XenServer in more hands to play with, and maybe their technology value will bubble to the top. But how many times have we watched a better technology (assuming XenServer is better) go by the wayside because they didn’t offer enough business value? In this case, I question whether a free XenServer offers any business value above and beyond what Hyper-V or VMware ESXi already offer.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.
I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I only hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are).
Citrix are advertising Free Xen on google as of now, and apparently I can even get free deployment advice from these guys: 360is [ed: Link Removed].
Anyone recommend a good free hardware supplier?
Whats next? Free electricity? If only solar was viable in the UK…damn
AG
February 20th, 2009 at 6:35 am
AG,
Huh? ESXi is free as in free beer and fully supported by VMware and a lot of other folks. I’ve not even needed official VMware support thanks to the VM Communities. The stuff just works. I use it every day as do a lot of us. Give it a try.
As for Citrix, I agree with the article “partnering” with Microsoft is really just one more sign that citrix/xen is in a slow death spiral. Look at the good it did for SUN, or Novell, or 10 other now barely alive if not quite dead companies. VMware was the only Virt vendor to not have layoffs for a reason. Like BMW they will never be the cheapest, but quality holds value over time.
-P
February 20th, 2009 at 9:29 am
The primary issues I have with XenServer and Hyper-V, is that they require additional virtualization extensions on the processor to support running Windows.
VMware ESXi doesn’t require this.
I guess this would be good for Linux only SMB’s?
February 20th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
We looked at the entire landscape for over a year before going with vmware. The software cost is nearly irrelevant when moddeling tco/roi with all the bolts included. Considering Microsoft or citrix certified staff don’t want to gamble on hyper v or zen in production vs Vmware the free argument dwindles further. Were not messing around when faced with zero down time goals for 6,000+ users.
Even more so, in tough times, it doesn’t take but about a 10% efficiency loss to a product to completely eat the software savings of free or cheap up, and then be stuck with other issues. Like the other guy said, Vmware just works, it’s what there focused on, and like apple, bmw, etc…it may not be free, or inexpensive, but you clearly get what you pay for.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
XenServer is as good if not better than VMware now (Ease of use, setup, robust functionality, real world). Additionally, this isn’t just a free hypervisor - Its a free management stack (Virtual Center-FREE, Live Migration-FREE, Resource Pooling-FREE). Anyone who is on here knocking it probably has not tried it. And they probably have not tried it because they have a vested interest in VMware. Educate yourself - Citrix XenServer [ed: Link Removed]
See it and try it for yourself and draw your own conclusions - I did, and I for one will be making the switch to XenServer in the next few months. It didn’t take long for it to make it this far, I’m curious to see where it will be next year and beyond.