Citrix XenServer is Now Free, Ouch VMWare!

I just discovered a Server Virutalization offer I had to share with my readers!

I’m pulling together a proposal for one of my clients since their server leases are almost up.  The leased servers are very old and on their last legs, and the buy out is some inflated full market value price.  Needless to say, they’re going to get new servers.  The fact that they’ll need to get new servers, introduces opportunites to improve their overall managment and server strategy.  Today it’s one server per function, based on their utilization and actual needs it’s consolidation time.

I want to propose moving them over to a virtualized environment, especially if they were finally going to get servers from this century.  By moving to 64bit servers having multiple faster processors with multiple cores, a front side bus faster than 400MHz and 8-16GB of memory, Server Virtualization finally becomes feasable.  Now I personally run VMware on my windows desktop, XenWorks on my SUSE server and VirtualBox on my Mac, so if it’s not obvious I’m a fan of virtualization.

The problem has always been that the technologies that make server virtualization so amazingly cool, have had a high inital price point.  Now when working for an enterprise the price is very reasonable since you look at the overall ROI / TCO based on servers / clients deployed, consolidation numbers, man hours saved, etc.  In my past I’ve evaluated and deployed virtualization in the enterprise and reaped the rewards.  As for the small to medium business (SMB), they are left with limited choices, lower performance options and poor managment solutions.

So in hopes of finding an affordable and feature rich solution, I’ve been researching the latest Server Virtualization technologies out there.  It’s also been a year since I deployed a VMWare ESX solution, and as you know a year in technology may as well be measured in dog years.  I’ve also been more focused on enterprise solutions so I needed to learn more about the SMB options.

When I was looking at the latest Server Virutualization offerings out there from Microsoft, VMWare, Sun and Citrix, I ran across an article saying that Citrix was undercutting VMWare by giving away thier hypervisor and management software.  As an added bonus this is part of a partnership with Microsoft so it’s compatible with their Hyper-V packages.  Free? Seriously?  What’s the catch?

After reading up on the Xenserver solution, it looks like Citrix is just trying to steal market share for now in hopes of selling their higher end offerings and additional management options.  That’s perfect, keep the lower end solution that meets the SMB’s needs Free, get your market share and the enterprise customer that wants the high end features pay for them.

Looks like I’m going to have to carefully consider suggesting Citrix XenServer / XenCenter for my client.  They are a small company (<$15M Annual Revenue) that have been impacted by the current economic conditions, just like everyone else.  By being able to suggest a Server Upgrade and Virtualization Strategy that would save them thousands in software costs is going to be hard to beat.  Sure they have to pay for the deployment, but with a server upgrade / migration already coming and the long term benefits of being able to manage their virtual environment (living in a data center) remotely, simplify backups / disaster recovery and reduce system down time, it’s a no brainer.

I may migrate my home server over to XenServer and move the SUSE in to a VM session.  Now I’ll need to see if there’s an easy way to migrate from VMWare to XenServer as well.

What do you think about the Citrix offering?  Will you consider Server Virtualization now that it’s free?