Citrix launches a free version of XenServer and Citrix Essentials

The folks over at Citrix have really been busy. I found a number press releases from them in my inbox this morning. The releases discussed:

• Citrix's 20-year partnership with Microsoft
• Project Encore — Citrix Essentials™ for Microsoft® Hyper-V™ and Citrix Essentials™ for XenServer™ a management layer allowing those using a combination of Microsoft's Hyper-V and Xen to use a unified management layer. Citrix's goal is to 1) help customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructure and 2) create a gateway into Microsoft-environment
• A new version of Citrix® XenServer™, the company’s virtualization platform that is used in small, medium, large and cloud environments, will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment.

Here's what Citrix is saying about Citrix Essentials

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced Citrix Essentials™ for XenServer™ and Hyper-V™, a new product line that adds a rich set of advanced management and automation capabilities to the Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms. The new solution helps customers transform virtualized datacenters into more dynamic “delivery centers” with capabilities like lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration and seamless integration with leading storage systems.

Citrix Essentials provides an ideal complement for customers using the enterprise-class, cloud-proven Citrix® XenServer™ virtualization platform, which is now being offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment.

The Citrix Essentials product line also extends the enterprise management capabilities of Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, helping customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures within a Microsoft environment.

This combination enables broad interoperability that makes it easier for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous virtualization environments throughout the full application lifecycle, from lab and testing to production.

What Citrix is saying about the free edition of XenServer

Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today unveiled a groundbreaking new version of Citrix® XenServer™ – the company’s enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform – that will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment. While basic hypervisors have been free for years, most have had limited practical use in real world environments. With this new release, XenServer sets an entirely new standard for free virtualization with the addition of powerful new features like centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion. Dramatically lowering the entry price of virtualization also helps address today’s challenging economic climate by making enterprise-class virtualization far more accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of budget.

Now in production in more than 5,000 enterprise datacenters worldwide, XenServer is a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that helps customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” XenServer is powered by the same Xen® virtualization engine that runs most every independent cloud today, including the largest single virtualization deployment in the world. With more than 75 percent of corporate servers worldwide still not virtualized1, today’s announcement helps accelerate the adoption of virtualization by bringing the simplicity, scale and economics of the cloud to enterprise datacenter for the first time ever.

Snapshot analysis

So, the folks over at Citrix decided to do two things: 1) lead the charge towards offering full production-class hypervisors available freely and 2) develop a cross-platform, independent management layer that would allow the entire virtualized environment to be orchestrated and managed using a single set of tools.

As organizations come to see all levels of virtualization technology (see Sorting out the different layers of virtualization for more information on the Kusnetzky Group model of virtualization technology), the competition at each layer will be intense. At this point, KG is tracking over 130 companies who are offering virtualization technology. Citrix has been working to create a competitive edge that will serve to put them into a different class of supplier.

Citrix is trying to cover the entire water front. Citrix is one of the very few suppliers that either has products or partnerships to supply products at every level of the model

Citrix is trying to cover all platforms. Citrix's technology (and technology from its partners) supports every industry standard environent that has some level of penetration into the market. Regardless of whether an organization is using Windows, UNIX, Linux or some interesting combination of these environments, Citrix has 'em covered

I see this as a powerful announcement that, in conjunction with Citrix's entire portfolio of products, services and partnerships, will serve to set Citrix apart from the crowd.