This is huge news. It’s not official yet, just a blog post about rumours. If it’s true then it will shake up the market. Citrix will offer their full blown product, XenServer, for free. You’ll have to pay (a sizeable sum) for their Essentials management product. Citrix will offer management for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center will offer support for Xen. Check out the story for full details.
We’ve seen that MS is adding the essential Live/Quick migration functionality to the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. I wonder if they’ll make it manageable using System Center? That’ll help compete against Xen. I’ve tried to manage Hyper-V Server 2008 with VMM (agent keep crashing) and with OpsMgr (the agent refuses to install because it’s an unknown operating system).
Credit: Dave Bisson.