Citrix Offers Free XenServer

BOSTON -- Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today unveiled a groundbreaking new version of Citrix XenServer™ – the company’s enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform – that will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment. While basic hypervisors have been free for years, most have had limited practical use in real world environments. With this new release, XenServer sets an entirely new standard for free virtualization with the addition of powerful new features like centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion. Dramatically lowering the entry price of virtualization also helps address today’s challenging economic climate by making enterprise-class virtualization far more accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of budget.

Now in production in more than 5,000 enterprise datacenters worldwide, XenServer is a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that helps customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” XenServer is powered by the same Xen® virtualization engine that runs most every independent cloud today, including the largest single virtualization deployment in the world. With more than 75 percent of corporate servers worldwide still not virtualized1, today’s announcement helps accelerate the adoption of virtualization by bringing the simplicity, scale and economics of the cloud to enterprise datacenter for the first time ever.

“Free hypervisors with limited functionality have been around for a long time. We see this move as substantially different because it offers a competitive, enterprise-ready virtual infrastructure platform with full centralized management, live motion and support for unlimited virtual machines and servers – with no strings attached,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This is a very positive move that has the potential to accelerate the adoption of virtualization for enterprise customers of all sizes and make it easier for external cloud providers to add full Windows support to their existing Linux offerings. Anyone who dismissed XenServer in the past as a legitimate player in enterprise virtualization clearly owes it to themselves to take a look at this offering.”

Citrix Systems Inc.