Citrix has released its free XenServer 5.5 today
in a move that people in the know claim will help the outfit gain share in the
server virtualization software market.
This version of 5.5 has Active Directory
integration and has more features than rival's VMware's free hypervisor,
ESXi. XenServer 5.5 supports for SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 11 and Debian 5.0, as well as Red Hat, CentOS and Oracle 5.3. It also has
XenConvert, which allows managers to migrate virtual machines from VMware's
Virtual Machine Disk Format to the same Virtual Hard Disk format used by Citrix
and Redmond.
It also released Citrix Essentials 5.5 for XenServer and Hyper-V, which provides additional management capabilities. That will still cost you though. Its suggested price is $2,500 per server.