XenServer is Now Open Source : Create Virtual Machines for Free

XenServer allows you to create and manage virtual machines within one or more physical nodes, it is now fully open source like prior to acquisition by Citrix. XenServer is again back to the basics and dusts off heir open source root of origin. In conjunction with the release of the new version 6.2, Citrix Systems makes XenServer and all its extensions available to all, distinguishing between free solution and commercial solution is on the basis of paid subscription of technical support. XenServer and XenCenter, are now being released under a mix of various licenses (GPL, BAS and Citrix license) depending on the component.

XenServer, virtual machines and XenServer components

XenServer has always been associated with the commercial name that Citrix has added to its hypervisor based on Xen, which ten years ago was released for the first time managed by the University of Cambridge and XenSource Inc., prior to acquisition of Citrix which took place in October 2007. The objective of these is to enable the solution chosen to follow the same XenServer commercial success of Xen in the public cloud, private cloud within the XenServer, with an eye also to the public clouds. In this way, Citrix want to position themselves as a viable alternative to Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and KVM. The cloud provider, usually very sensitive to the costs of supporting the hypervisor on which they base their infrastructure (we mentioned them in Virtualization Software for Server, Workstation and Desktop), may well embrace a truly professional product, complete in functionality offered, with almost ridiculously low or no cost, unlike other commercial solutions.

XenServer marks the beginning of a new era

The best advertising reliability of the product is made by the customers. It is not a case that can be cited about sounding names : for example, the Xen hypervisor is used by Amazon Web Services EC2 for the service, while RackSpace uses the commercial variant of XenServer for its public cloud. With the free one, all will be able to contribute to the code of XenServer and add features, Citrix hopes to build the same luck of Xen around the product, offering the support separately.

In fact, customers who choose to rely on XenServer, will forget for ever the difficulty of choosing between the basic versions – Enterprise and Platinum, instead will use XenServer 6.2 freely with only one type of consideration – a simple annual subscription support amounting $ 500 a year.

Nothing more. In fact, with XenServer, now the rest like XenCenter is also open source, with which one can work in full freedom. With this freedom, one issue is placed concerning the safety profiles and updates. Corrections can be made by hand, but if you want to use the features built into XenCenter to make these changes, you must activate a support contract for a fee. The open source version of XenServer is therefore distinct from the paid version for the maintenance and product support, including in the only commercial edition.

XenServer 6.2, therefore, marks the beginning of a new era for the hypervisor from Citrix, introducing many other novelties. Besides the availability of an open source virtualization platform for all users, the new version has a licensing based on CPU socket. Also note how this move now allows XenServer to use freely even on the many dedicated servers already own to create other virtual machines inside them – XenServer is obviously a more developed and mature than many others and offers so many possibilities to who already has need to use virtual servers for your business.

Github repo : https://github.com/xenserver