A few hours ago, Enzo Russo, Head of Product Management XenServer at Cloud Software Group (the company resulting from the merger of Citrix and TIBCO completed in recent months), published a post on LinkedIn introducing the new website dedicated to XenServer (www.xenserver.com).
At the same time, he announced that the new Trial Edition of the XenServer 8 Public Preview will include all the features of the Enterprise edition, so you’ll be able to try the product’s full potential even before buying a license.
Replying to his post, I asked him whether the Trial will have a fixed validity period (e.g. 30 days) or whether it will instead be valid forever, obviously without entitling you to Cloud Software Group support; Enzo replied that decisions on this will be made after gauging market interest. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get the full product for free…it would be great for some lab environments, or to see it spread across the market again (after all, they need to regain ground…)!
As a virtualization enthusiast and Citrix specialist, I’m clearly happy that a solid product like XenServer is coming back to the market with new drive and some interesting new features, even though I think the years lost compared to the competition won’t be easy to make up.
By now all virtualization platforms, VMware first and foremost, but also NUTANIX and XCP-ng (which, like XenServer, derives from the open-source Xen project), have HTML5-based web consoles. XenServer, with its XenCenter console, is light-years behind in my opinion. Not being manageable from non-Windows machines is definitely a big limitation, but it also lacks many other features the competition has been offering for a long time; on the hyperconvergence front, VMware has vSAN, NUTANIX is hyperconverged by design, and even XCP-ng has its own solution for it; XenServer, on the other hand, is still stuck with approaches that are well established, yes, but old.
Watching Citrix leave XenServer in the drawer for years hasn’t helped its adoption…I really hope we can now start talking about it again and see it evolve into a more modern product that’s more appealing to customers!!