Server Virtualization – No More Excuses

Posted on March 03, 2009 in Opinion tagged with , ,

At VMWorld Europe, Citrix announced that their popular virtualization platform, XenServer, would be offered free. Virtualization is quickly becoming standard practice at the enterprise level, and for those who don’t currently virtualize, being able to do so for free really helps the process.

XenServer is different Desktop Virtualization software, such as Sun’s VirtualBox or VMWare’s Workstation, in that it is a true hypervisor. It runs a stripped down version of CentOS Linux which emulates hardware at a very low level. Desktop Virtualization software usually requires a full OS, such as Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux, in order to run.

You might expect a vendor to cripple their free offering, but Citrix has done well – they left plenty of the great features intact. For example; XenMotion is a feature that allows you to move a VM from server to server without interruption of service (NOTE: Requires shared storage – e.g. SaN). A more detailed list of features can be seen here.

To use XenServer, you’ll need dedicated hardware. Simply download and burn the ISO, boot to it and follow the prompts. Then, install XenCenter – the software that you’ll use to manage the pool, on your workstation.

More information can be had at Citrix.