Citrix Storms the Beach

Citrix hopes to shake things up here in Cannes by announcing a free version of XenServer, available in late March. The company claims the free product will include management features, resource sharing, and live virtual machine migration, making it the latest run at giant VMware's Virtual Infrastructure suite. 

The vendor also announced Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, a suite of enterprise-targeted management components for lab automation, dynamic provisioning and storage integration, all blessed by Microsoft in an alliance release.

Details are sketchy, but Citrix is obviously seeking to tap into the economic constraints it expects buyers to face in 2009. A free enterprise-class server virtualization platform might be the teaser hesitant buyers need to keep virtualizing in a tough year. And, the vendor hopes, it could lay the foundation for upselling advanced management in the future, when budgets loosen.

I'll let you know what I think of this competitive attack later in the week: I'm sitting down with all three vendors here at VMworld. This flurry of competitive news is sure to make some waves, and with that I promise to drop the nautical metaphors for good!