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Citrix XenServer 6.2 goes open source

Free at Last!

Article from ADMIN 17/2013

By Holger Gantikow

In June, Citrix released the latest version of XenServer Enterprise as open source software. The manufacturer hopes to benefit from input from the community, attract more customers for its desktop virtualization solution, and improve its market position.

Open source – finally and fully! The most interesting thing about the announcement [1] of the new XenServer version 6.2 is not a technical feature from the usual list of improvements: Citrix has released XenServer, its commercial product built around the open source Xen hypervisor, as free software. This bombshell make the manufacturer's previous Free, Advanced, Enterprise, and Platinum editions obsolete. For customers, there is only a single, free version that can do much more than the legacy Free Edition.

Taken Apart and Reassembled

Shortly after the release of the source code, the community began to decouple the components that define Citrix XenServer from the underlying Red Hat derivative operating system. The stated goal is to offer a XenServer core metapackage for as many Linux distributions as possible.

As the box "Xen, Libvirt, and Ceph" shows, this work has already been done for CentOS 6.4, and other distributions will follow. The concept for xenserver-core envisions three layers (Figure 1). In the near future, many prebuilt appliances will probably emerge that provide specially adapted images in the form of ISO image files. (Figure 2).