Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platform Now Free 259
Pedro writes "Citrix announced today that they are giving away their Xen OSS based virtualization platform XenServer with all the goodies included for free. The big highlights are XenMotion, which lets you move VMs from box to box without downtime, and multi server management. The same stuff in VMware land is $5k. They plan to sell new products for XenServer and also the same stuff on Microsoft's virtualization technology called Hyper-V. It will be interesting to see what VMware does. The announcement comes the day before VMware's big user event VMworld."
heh (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the marketing for this The enterprise-class features you need at none of the cost. [postclickmarketing.com] I'm thinking this is a pretty big deal.
Certification games (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing to think about is actual support... as in picking up a phone and calling someone when something breaks.
Sure, with a good admin that's rarely a problem... but that 1% of the time you actually need it, you're 100% glad you've got it!
I've managed VM farms since ESX 1... now I have a rather nice ESX 3.5 farm I manage. We've recently gone into an head-to-head between Xen and VMware running Xenapp servers. You know what? We're still buying VMware. Make of that what you will.
Personally I find the Xen product interesting, but still fundamentally missing the "mainframe-ish-ness" of VMware, even out of the box. I love the fact that I reboot my VM hosts only when I patch them, and even then I haven't lost a guest since ESX 3.0 (as in, it went down unexpectedly). I also love the fact that it's well-supported with a fantastic range of third-party products that make my job easier. I also love the fact that the one time we actually needed someone on the other end of the phone, I was able to get one of the developer leads of ESX on the phone with only about 15 minutes of troubleshooting with lower support and have him help us sort through the issues (which ended up being a bug, BTW).
When I was trying to do the Xen test, I got no support from Citrix since they wanted to charge me for the call (VMware didn't), and even when I had a problem I told them that it was a serious issue that would impact this head-to-head they told me I needed to give them a credit card number before I could get anyone to even listen to the problem. So much for support.
Disclaimer: I'm a firm believer in using the "best tool for the job", whether it's free software or commercial. The simple fact is that in my job, commercial software often wins out despite the cost because companies want someone to look to when things go wrong and are willing to pay for the privilege.
Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Interesting)
So, VMWare gives you free support for their paid product but citrix charges you for support on their free product? Boggles the mind.
We are currently doing a similar head-to-head and so far it seems that for the ESX license costs alone we can hire two full-time admins and buy plenty of support from citrix when needed. YMMV.
the security part is sort of an indictment of OSs (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the selling points of Unix has always been the ability to have multiple user accounts with security policies that prevent them from interacting badly. The problem, of course, is that security holes are relatively frequent. In particular, local security holes, i.e. exploits in any code that ever runs setuid, are quite frequent. That they're so frequent that people don't trust OS security at all, to the point of running separate apps in separate virtual machines, seems like a pretty conclusive determination that OS security policies have failed.
I can't help but think that one alternate route that would've ended up more efficient would be to give in and write more core software using some variety of language not vulnerable to quite as many buffer overflows and stack-smashing attacks. Doesn't have to be some big paradigm switch like using Ocaml; a C-with-some-safety dialect like Cyclone [thelanguage.org] would be fine. Besides inertia, one of the main arguments against was that it adds overhead compared to straight C. But the fact that people are willing to accept a much larger amount of overhead via virtual machines to get more solid guarantees of security that the OS is frankly failing to provide is some indication that the overhead-for-security tradeoff is something people really do want.
There are some advantages to using virtual machines regardless, such as ability to migrate apps separately. But we're using them here in some cases where multiple users on the same OS really would have been the best setup, except for the fact that we don't trust Linux to be free of local-root exploits.
(yes):Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:2, Interesting)
I recommend that you need to seriously consider why you are doing it. If you are doing it for hardware savings, you have totally missed the concept of virtualization, which is savings through abstraction. If your site is so small that it can all fit on one server, perhaps virtualization is not for you. However, it still may be for you if you want the hardware availability features (the fact you can take a physical host down and keep everything running on the other, with ZERO downtime). These are the values of virtualization, and they are HUGE especially when you get into larger sites.
Now, Xen vs VMware... VMware does just work, and it is damn stable. And it is damn fast. If you have ever benchmarked VMware Server against Xen, throw your results away, go download ESXi (free) and try it again.
In my testing, with SPECint/fp results (we are an associate member of SPEC), AMD is around 5% overhead and Intel is around 10% overhead. With I/O, you run 10-15% FASTER in a VM than on the exact same physical system, period.
Re:Still no Windows without hardware VT (Score:3, Interesting)