XenSource have announced a couple of new commercial offerings to go along with their Xen Enterprise release. While Xen itself is opensource, XenSource have decided to make commercial packages offering a GUI management console, more advanced management APIs, and perhaps most importantly, PV drivers for Windows guests.
The full suite of products now looks like:
- Xen Enterprise. Unlimited guests, multi OS. Pricing starts at $498 US for a dual-socket system
- Xen Server. 8 Windows guests, 8 GB of ram. $99 US annual subscription, dual-socket system only
- Xen Express. 4 guests, multi OS, 4 GB of ram. Free.
All of these products, including the free version, have the PV drivers for windows. There is also a seamless upgrade path between the products, so you can do a test deployment with Xen Express, then purchase Xen Server or Xen Enterprise as you need.
There are some differences other than those listed above. Xen Express will not allow multi-host management. The other two products will – this means you can log into multiple servers from the same console at the same time, and get holistic view of your virtualised servers. Also, while XenSource has yet to release any HA/DR, Live migration or integrated backup plugins, it is unlikely that these will be able to run on Xen Express.
http://www.xensource.com/
One reply on “XenSource release Xen Server, Xen Express”
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