XenServer virtualization to go free today
March 25 is the day Citrix their promised to release XenServer with the Essentials virtualization management suite for free.
As of 8:30am EDT their download page still points to a different version. Hopefully that will change in a few hours.
VMware paved the way a few years ago by releasing VMWare Server for free, followed later the higher performance ESXi hypervisor kernel. Microsoft has their own “free” hypervisor HyperV, but this offering from Citrix blows all of those away.
XenServer with Essentials provides VMotion-like live migration of running VMs for load balancing and high availability, shared storage management, and centralized management of VM image. Apparently it can provision both virtual and physical servers by booting either from images served over the network.
Xen has been popular for a while with newer virtual private server hosting providers like SliceHost and GoGrid , and is the hypervisor used by “cloud computing” providers, most notably Amazon EC2.
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