Citrix says it's back as a mainstream server virtualization player that won't send scary bills

Citrix says it has returned to the mainstream server virtualization market with the release of XenServer 9. The hypervisor was a contender in the early 2010s but struggled to compete with VMware and Microsoft. By 2014, analyst firm Gartner suggested Citrix had stopped trying to compete for workloads other than its own desktop virtualization and network security products. Citrix kept the product alive without much fanfare for years and rebranded it Citrix Hypervisor. After a pair of private equity firms acquired Citrix in 2022 and folded it into an outfit called Cloud Software Group (CSG), XenServer became the name of both the product and a CSG business unit that announced its intention to return to the mainstream virtualization market. XenServer didn't do much as a standalone entity other than to create a trial three-host version of its product to show off its smarts and tease more profound offerings. Last week, XenServer used its LinkedIn presence to reveal that XenServer is "back under the Citrix umbrella." The Register's virtualization desk understands that was effectively an announcement that XenServer as a business unit is no more. On July 1, Citrix released XenServer 9. A statement about the release sent to The Reg opens with the assertion that the software "is built for organizations actively reassessing their virtualization strategy under cost pressure." That's code for people considering an alternative to VMware. "While cost is often the initial driver for evaluation, long-term platform decisions are ultimately determined by operational impact," Citrix added. "XenServer 9 is designed to reduce that burden by simplifying lifecycle management, upgrades, and ongoing system maintenance." There's a more detailed summary of changes here that lists the "core enhancements" in the new release as improved performance on NUMA hosts, support for secure boot, a new OS for the control domain, and use of the recently released open source Xen 4.21 hypervisor. Supported guest OSes include Windows 10 and 11, Windows Server back to 2016, RHEL, SUSE, Debian, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu. Gooroom 2 – a Linux distribution developed by South Korea's Ministry of Science and Technology – also makes the list. Citrix says the new release supports "any workload" and "also enhances operational alignment in Citrix DaaS environments." That sounds a lot like the same stance Citrix took in the mid-2010s – and it's trying to make a virtue of the fact. "XenServer 9 is a pragmatic response to the pressure infrastructure teams are facing today," Citrix proclaims. "It reflects a market reality in which cost, operational simplicity, and stability are tightly interconnected requirements that must be addressed together." "In this context, platforms are no longer defined by feature breadth, but by their ability to deliver predictable economics and operational stability over time." Those "predictable economics" derive in part from Citrix including an entitlement to use XenServer in several of its licenses. Those licenses, however, are typically bundles of many products – including some that users don't always use or want – and can involve big price hikes. Citrix justifies its licensing as simpler than buying individual products, and claims bundles mean customers get better value and easier operations. VMware uses the same arguments, and that hasn't always gone down well with customers. Michael Warrilow, an independent analyst who specializes in server virtualization, told The Register buyers are wary of Citrix's licenses, and won't forgive its long neglect of XenServer. "XenServer is a viable hypervisor, but Citrix has been missing in action in server virtualization for years," Warrilow said, adding that he would only recommend XenServer for users who intend to persevere with Citrix's desktop virtualization products. The analyst argued that forks like Xen Orchestra represent more interesting and significant virtualization platforms. Speaking of which, version 6.6 of Xen Orchestra dropped on Tuesday, bringing scoped storage and network admin roles in the REST API, automatic snapshots before updates, and more work to smooth VM migrations between different hypervisors. ®