Posts
XENSERVER 7.3: CHANGES TO
THE FREE EDITION
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
David Cottingham
follow us on twitter
Server Virtualization , Citrix
Today we're pleased to announce the release of
XenServer 7.3 , which includes a raft of new
features and improvements. Whilst you can
read all about exactly what's in that release
over on the release announcement blog, I
wanted to provide clarity on the changes we're
making to the Free Edition of XenServer as part
of the release.
As many of you will be aware, XenServer is
available in three editions: Free, Standard, and
Enterprise. All of them are installed from the
same ISO, and all are equally open source. The
Standard edition is almost identical to the Free
edition in terms of feature set, but includes
commercial support and an extended period of
hotfix availability from Citrix, whilst the
Enterprise edition enables a variety of
additional features.
Having carefully considered what features are
in each edition, we've taken the decision to
move some features out of the Free edition,
and into Standard.
The full list of features being moved is:
Dynamic Memory Control
Xen Storage Motion
Active Directory Integration
Role Based Access Control
High Availability
GPU Pass-Through
Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery)
XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts
(existing larger pools will continue to work, but
no new host joins will be permitted)
This will therefore make the Standard edition
substantially different to the Free edition. No
features are moving from Free to Enterprise.
You can find all of the details in the full
XenServer 7.3 feature matrix .
I suspect many readers will be asking "why?".
We have thousands of customers who trust
XenServer to host their workloads, and we
need to make sure we can invest in the
product for them. Of the many thousands of
customers using the Free edition, we hope that
those using it for large deployments (and likely
to be using the features above) will consider
purchasing a subscription to enable access not
just to the features above, but also the patch/
hotfix stream for each release for an extended
period ( roughly 7 months from release versus
3 months for Free users), access to Long Term
Service Releases (up to 10 years of
maintenance) and support services from Citrix.
I realise that this news will be difficult for
people who make use of the Free edition of
XenServer in larger environments. We have
looked carefully at how the revised Free
edition compares to other free virtualisation
platforms on the market, and concluded that
even with this change, XenServer's free feature
set is still great for small deployments or home
labs. Evidently Citrix will continue to add
functionality to all three editions in the future:
as you can see from 7.3 release notes, there is
plenty going on.
As usual, you can get in touch with me via the
comments function below, or on Twitter. I'll
endeavour to reply as soon as practical!
THE FREE EDITION
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
David Cottingham
follow us on twitter
Server Virtualization , Citrix
Today we're pleased to announce the release of
XenServer 7.3 , which includes a raft of new
features and improvements. Whilst you can
read all about exactly what's in that release
over on the release announcement blog, I
wanted to provide clarity on the changes we're
making to the Free Edition of XenServer as part
of the release.
As many of you will be aware, XenServer is
available in three editions: Free, Standard, and
Enterprise. All of them are installed from the
same ISO, and all are equally open source. The
Standard edition is almost identical to the Free
edition in terms of feature set, but includes
commercial support and an extended period of
hotfix availability from Citrix, whilst the
Enterprise edition enables a variety of
additional features.
Having carefully considered what features are
in each edition, we've taken the decision to
move some features out of the Free edition,
and into Standard.
The full list of features being moved is:
Dynamic Memory Control
Xen Storage Motion
Active Directory Integration
Role Based Access Control
High Availability
GPU Pass-Through
Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery)
XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts
(existing larger pools will continue to work, but
no new host joins will be permitted)
This will therefore make the Standard edition
substantially different to the Free edition. No
features are moving from Free to Enterprise.
You can find all of the details in the full
XenServer 7.3 feature matrix .
I suspect many readers will be asking "why?".
We have thousands of customers who trust
XenServer to host their workloads, and we
need to make sure we can invest in the
product for them. Of the many thousands of
customers using the Free edition, we hope that
those using it for large deployments (and likely
to be using the features above) will consider
purchasing a subscription to enable access not
just to the features above, but also the patch/
hotfix stream for each release for an extended
period ( roughly 7 months from release versus
3 months for Free users), access to Long Term
Service Releases (up to 10 years of
maintenance) and support services from Citrix.
I realise that this news will be difficult for
people who make use of the Free edition of
XenServer in larger environments. We have
looked carefully at how the revised Free
edition compares to other free virtualisation
platforms on the market, and concluded that
even with this change, XenServer's free feature
set is still great for small deployments or home
labs. Evidently Citrix will continue to add
functionality to all three editions in the future:
as you can see from 7.3 release notes, there is
plenty going on.
As usual, you can get in touch with me via the
comments function below, or on Twitter. I'll
endeavour to reply as soon as practical!
No comments:
Post a Comment