XenSource Introduces XenServer Family of Products

XenSource, Inc. announced today a comprehensive family of server virtualization products supported and maintained by the company leading the evolution of Xen.

In addition to the already announced XenEnterprise solution (which the company describes as the market’s first enterprise-grade commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows and Linux guests), new additions to the family include XenServer, for Windows standard server environments, and XenExpress, a free production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization.

All three products are available now, and they each share the same architecture, delivering bare-metal performance and facilitating easy migration and upgrades.

• XenEnterprise – (Pricing starts at $488 for an annual subscription license per dual socket server, and $750 perpetual license per dual socket server) – Designed for the heterogeneous environment of enterprises, XenEnterprise delivers the performance, open source innovation, unified architecture and broad hardware support of the Xen hypervisor for x86 server virtualization of multiple operating systems, including Windows and Linux. XenEnterprise emphasizes ease of use, and simple deployment of the Xen hypervisor and guest virtual servers. It also provides the ability to install and manage multiple guests on the same server, with no imposed limit to concurrent virtual machines; network storage support; and resource controls for CPU, memory, net and disk. XenEnterprise offers integrated support for Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters from Emulex and QLogic. XenEnterprise will include additional features such as live migration, 64-bit support, high availability/failover and concurrent shared storage support in the first half of 2007.
• XenServer – (Pricing is $99 for an annual subscription for a dual socket license) – Designed for Windows standard server environments, XenServer gives IT professionals a high performance, easy to use virtualization platform for Windows now. The platform runs Windows virtual machines on bare metal x86 systems with Intel VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization assist. Key features include Windows compatible guests, up to eight concurrent virtual machines, multi-host management console, network storage support and resource controls for CPU, memory, networking and disk I/O.
• XenExpress – (Pricing is free) – Ideal for developers and technology enthusiasts, XenExpress is a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. XenExpress offers all of the performance and features of XenEnterprise, while enabling users to manage one server at a time. XenExpress can be freely downloaded today from the XenSource website and includes a license for a single server and four concurrent virtual machines. XenExpress supports both Windows and Linux guests. Additionally, because of the common, unified architecture, XenExpress can be easily upgraded to XenServer or XenEnterprise with a simple license key.