VMware announced the release of VMware Server 2 last week. Which is a free (as in beer, not freedom) follow-up (for free offerings) to their VMware Player that was released two years ago this December. This is an interesting turn of events as the VMware Server was a premium offer and now looks to be available for no licensing fees. I wonder if there decision had anything to do with upstart open source Xensource (which was acquired by Citrix) offering a free and open source virtualization server, Xen.
In all fairness to VMware, Xensource has a long way to go to match the capabilities of VMware products which got their initial foothold in testing labs and have quickly become a popular solution for server consolidation. From my experience though people tell me that they are using VMware primarily for testing or Windows server consolidation.
The other notablething about the free VMware virtualization offers are that while VMware offers a free version for download they don’t offer an open source version of their products.
Can the ability to see the code and lack of limitation on redistribution give Xensource the advantage they need to close the gap between themselves and VMware? I think this will be one technology sector to prove the theorem that flexibility not cost is the differentiating factor for open source software. Otherwise, we might as well bring back shareware.
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