Back in February this year Citrix made a major announcement to give its XenSever technology for free (XenCenter, XenMotion, Resource Pools and Basic Storage Management), which was a bold move to make when you consider they paid $500M for the technology in 2007. So where would they recoup their investment? Well this is being done through support and enhanced management platforms for XenServer (Essentials).
So Citrix are trying to drive XenSever deep into enterprises with a free offering but have just last week announced they are giving away a free version of Essentials for Hyper-V. So could drive customers away from XenServer to Hyper-V R2 when officially released in October 2009.
Called Express Edition, this version is limited to two Hyper-V nodes and a single storage array, the features are blow, I wonder where all this free software is going to end?
