Citrix on Monday announced that its enterprise-ready XenServer application is now available at no charge, a move the company hopes will help boost adoption of its open-source virtualisation platform.
The company said in February that it planned to make the software — which includes a bare-metal hypervisor, plus features such as live migration, support for shared storage, centralised multi-server management and conversion tools — available for free after Microsoft made a similar move with its Hyper-V hypervisor in October.
The battle to dominate the virtualisation market is mainly a three-way fight between Citrix, Microsoft and the market leader VMware, which also offers a free hypervisor in the shape of ESXi.
The free version of XenServer is now available for free download in 50 countries.
Citrix Essentials for XenServer offers additional XenServer functionality at a cost.