[NTLUG:Discuss] Big Changes in Commercial Server Virtualization Landscape

[Fred Hensley]

Howdy gang,

First, major kudos to Ralph for his Virtualbox presentation last week.  
I was impressed by what that system can do.

In this hot server virtualization market, for those who haven't already 
noticed, it appears that the folks at Xen (Citrix) have just upped 
their  proverbial anty by freely releasing the full version Xen 
enterprise competitor to Vmware ESX. A fairly good summary article link 
follows:

http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html

With this huge change, I can't help but wonder how the Xen product group 
will survive and thrive given only revenues from sales of advanced tools 
and technical support contracts.  How will Vmware respond to this 
change, and how this might affect the open source community? Perhaps 
this just might pressure the folks at VMware to also offer more for 
free, creating a potential win-win situation for loyal Vmware users.

So,,, whadaya all think? Is this a good thing?  Bad thing?  Does it even 
really matter?  Buehler?  Anyone?  Buehler?  :)

-Fred H.-