We all know the benefits of virtualization and its importance in current computing, and therefore surely you will know projects related to the subject such as VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, etc. Well, this time we are going to focus on the open source project Xen, a powerful virtualization project for Linux that allows us both full virtualization and paravirtualization making use of a Xen kernel that speeds up performance compared to full at cost to offer less possibilities in terms of the types of virtualized operating systems, since they should be Linux ...
Citrix is a company that is making great efforts to improve this product, specifically its paid version xenserver who acquired the project in August 2007 for no less than 500 million dollars. Only a few free versions have been released for end users, but XenServer is mostly a commercial version of the famous Xen project that in theory should bring a number of benefits to paying for it versus free. Well, we already know that Cirtix open sourced in 2013 with XenServer 6.2, but the new XenServer 7.3 update (with Free, Standard and Enterprise editions) has removed certain features available in the free version that you will not find in the other editions. On the one hand we have XenServer 7.3 Standard which is almost identical to the free version in most of its features, only with the revisions and support provided by Citrix. On the other hand we have the XenServer 7.3 Enterprise which in this case would have less functionalities than the previous ones.
It is true that in the Enterprise some features have been removed available in the free one but it is also true that other additional functionalities have been added. According to David Cottingham, the XenServer project manager at Citrix has said that this was because consideration was made to add some of the features of the free version to the standard, but it was not so on Enterprise.