Citrix XenServer 6.2 has recently been released with a big new feature, its now open source. All the tasty features you know of the enterprise class hypervisor are now free (as in beer) but Citrix will still be offering paid for support options for customers who require it.
The release also ties in with a new site XenServer.org which will host the binaries, documentation, support forums etc. Now its no secret that Microsoft and Citrix’s hypervisors have been playing second fiddle to VMware due to some missing features but with the addition of a few extra features within the last couple of releases XenServer is now on-par with VMware for many enterprise requirements. These features include:
High Availability, XenMotion & XenStorageMotion (which allows you to move a live virtual machine from one node to another without downtime)
Site Recovery (which allows you to easily configure site to site disaster recovery)
Intellicache (which is for XenDesktop and allows the usage of host local storage to offload common VDI image data to reduce SAN IOPS load)
Many other features are included which make XenServer a serious cosideration point for a hypervisor or VDI project.
Head over to XenServer.org for more details or to download and get stuck into the open source goodness!!
Author: Dale Scriven
