Since Broadcom took over market leader VMware, the virtualization market has been in flux: Not every VMware customer is happy with the drastic changes in the VMware product range and licensing. With XenServer 8, Citrix is sending a revived virtualization classic into the race: The technical basis, the Xen hypervisor, is one of the oldest virtualization technologies in the x86 world alongside VMware; version 1.0 appeared over 20 years ago.
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The XenServer isn't really new either: XenServer 8 is the successor to Citrix Hypervisor 8.2, which in turn replaced XenServer 7.1 in 2021. Behind this is the company XenServer, the virtualization offshoot of Citrix, which, like Citrix, has been part of the Cloud Software Group since 2022.
The XenServer 8 is available in three versions: The free trial edition is limited to three hosts, but otherwise has hardly any restrictions compared to the paid versions. The Standard Edition offers the essential virtualization features on any number of hosts, including moving running VMs without interruption and management via the Windows GUI XenCenter. The Premium Edition has several additional features such as dynamic workload distribution, GPU virtualization and a tool that migrates vSphere installations to XenServer.
Standard and Premium Editions are licensed per socket. Customers currently using Citrix Hypervisor can receive free XenServer licenses for the duration of their contract.
Note on our own behalf: Our live webinar Reconstruction at VMware: Strategies and alternatives for users shows the options of VMware customers and gives an overview of alternatives to vSphere, vSAN, NSX and the security products, the Aria Suite, Horizon and Tanzu.
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