It's official: Citrix aims to blow up enterprise virtualization pricing
Citrix officially launched a free version of its XenServer and Essentials virtualization software in a move that is designed to take aim at VMware. Separately, Citrix extended its long-running partnership with Microsoft to cover virtualization.
The news was expected given slides of Citrix's presentation surfaced last week. Citrix made the official announcements on Monday covering XenServer, Essentials and the Microsoft partnership.
Citrix realized some time ago that hypervisor technology was quickly becoming a commodity and they wanted to capitalize on that fact. People simply expected that technology would be freely available. They also realized that this commodization process would pit the Xen community against VMware, Microsoft and the KVM community.
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.
And the money slide:
Also see: Citrix to offer free XenServer; Takes shot at VMware
The Red Hat and Microsoft pact: A nice win for mixed source shops; Frenemies vs VMware