17 ms·

Xenserver 7.3: Changes to the Free Edition

65 points by unholythree 9y ago

blinkingled 9y ago
Xenserver in my experience at least the free edition is not as polished or stable as ESXi or even regular libvirt/KVM. I experimented with the 7.2 Free edition and right from the installation not succeeding at first to many other things not working as expected it was not a very good experience. The management client UI is also Windows only I think and it's very sub par. Given the new changes I wonder anyone would have any reason to run xenserver free edition. There's always ESXi, HyperV and good ole KVM (which maybe an issue if you run Windows server as a VM.)
- nvr219 9y ago
  I love ESXi. Simply rock solid.
  - blinkingled 9y ago
    Yep, all my rack servers run ESXi and except for the once in a blue moon patch I don't remember having to mess with them. And with the HTML5 UI starting to mature enough it's a sweet deal. My other choice is client HyperV from W10 on my workstations - too many updates but other than that pretty good to run supported VMs - suspend/resume to kill noise and domain joined machines mean headless management!
- viraptor 9y ago
  I don't live in the windows world, so I'm curious - why is win on KVM an issue?
  - blinkingled 9y ago
    Windows server is an issue not the client SKUs. Reason is it requires Microsoft signed WHQL drivers so the Red Hat/ Fedora provided ones don't work.
  - Neeek 9y ago
    Possibly licensing? Not sure though, I run my gaming VM at home with hardware passthrough and basically no issues (except fairly slow disk i/o, maybe that is the issue?). I think KVM is simply stronger when it comes to resource management with its VMs also running the linux kernel, it doesn't get as much freedom to balance load across your windows VMs. EDIT: The correct answer was posted by blinkingled before I finished typing this up hahah, read their post instead of this one :)
- jameskegel 9y ago
  I agree; every day we stray further from the fundamentals. Xen, and to a lesser extent Docker, and other tools, do help beautify some of the underlying technologies and processes that may have come before them, but that does not make the usability sacrifice justified in situations like these. I'm afraid I don't have a holistic answer, in this instance, that satisfies the requirement that the developers eat and be clothed, and that the users have an unimpeded work flow. Maybe it's a moral solution needed between all users, of all payment tiers, to agree not to abuse the intent of the permissive nature of the free-tier user agreement. It will be interesting seeing how this plays out.
ineedasername 9y ago
I don't see a problem with them charging for these features. What I don't like is it appears to have been part of a longer term bait and switch strategy designed to hook users that might otherwise have chosen OSS, with gradual feature removal as the stick used to beat locked in users into paying.
- jarym 9y ago
  It’s just as likely that they originally hoped their model would result in enough conversion to paying customers that they could keep funding development but that things didn’t work out as they’d expected. I would never assume the ‘bait and switch’ tactic unless it was a Microsoft or Oracle product.
  - ineedasername 9y ago
    Maybe you haven't had the pleasure of dealing with Citrix as a vendor then, or have been extremely fortunate in that relationship. I myself would grant them no such pass. But I would hesitate to place even Microsoft into the vile sphere of desolation and malice occupied by Oracle, though admitedly my experience with MS has been limited to their bog standard products and licensing.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheDauthi 9y ago
      Microsoft can be bad, but I think Oracle is run on pure spite. According to legend (I wasn't actually there - this is secondhand, so do take with a grain of salt), they tried to convince a company I worked with previously that they needed an additional license for the server that processed backups. No Oracle client or server installed; the logs were pushed via ssh. When they balked, Oracle tried to increase the price two more times. It was apparently great motivation to move to MySQL. Maybe that was just one particularly bad rep, but I don't think I've gone through a single year of my career without hearing something absurd about them.
jsmthrowaway 9y ago
If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes. Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harden-our-KVM-hypervisor-at-Google-Cloud-security-in-plaintext.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_based_hypervisor_to_make_its_cloud_go_faster/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_... https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/ https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-som... https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)
- lykr0n 9y ago
  oVirt 4.2 just came out and it looks great! (OpenSource of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization)
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    oVirt is great, but if you’re doing single node deployments in a homelab ESXi is my first recommendation. oVirt can’t put the only host available in a cluster in maintenance mode, just like vCenter - so it’s an exercise in frustration trying to update anything without it freaking out. But if you’ve got multiple hosts oVirt is great.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  I always prefer KVM in the limited VPS needs I have. It always seems a lot more flexible and less expensive to have a single larger instance in which I can nest my own VMs and spin up as needed. Of course Docker might obviate the requirement for nestability, but I havent used Docker much, and have a certain comfort level with pre build VMs Ive created for various stock purposes.
PeterisP 9y ago
This is a major issue - even if the current set of features in the free version are sufficient for a particular project, this action means that we can't rely on long-term goodwill of them staying that way, so any future-proof project should use something that's more free.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  Precisely. Lacking that goodwill, any potential user would be ill advised to begin using the free version. Current free users would be ill advised to continue with no guarantee of bug & security fixes, because near as I can tell these changes weren't obvious from prior product roadmaps.
muxator 9y ago
For those who want a TL;DR, these are the features that are going to be removed from the free edition: - Dynamic Memory Control - Xen Storage Motion - Active Directory Integration - Role Based Access Control - High Availability - GPU Pass-Through - Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery) - XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard - Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted) That's quite a list.
- tw04 9y ago
  *from the free edition ISOs that they provide free of charge. The code is still there on github for anyone to build for themselves.
  - plam503711 9y ago
    Which is not buildable "as is". Cf my other post here.
    - tw04 9y ago
      So we've got a company spending millions of dollars developing a piece of software, and then giving away all the source for free. And you think they should be forced to give you documentation on how to build it... why? I mean, seriously the entitlement is astounding to me. OF COURSE they're going to make it difficult to build on your own, that's part of the monetization strategy. If you don't want to pay for it, and you also don't want to spend the time figuring out how to build it on your own, don't use it. But to act as if they owe you something is... ridiculous.
      - michaelmrose 9y ago
        In the first place open source is a set of principals that is designed to inspire people to freely share with one another including the sweat of their brow in the form of direct contribution of work as opposed to cash. Trying to make that sharing onerous is a violation of those principals and its not entitlement to point this out. Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution. So imagine it takes 1 person who is paid 120k a year a few weeks to produce a viable solution and documentation. The cost of this solution is about 2k and scales to infinity people. In a universe where nobody communicates or collaborates I suppose you could imagine that everyone would pay 10k instead of paying 2k in labor for an officially supported solution perhaps in consideration for other value provided like tech support. The problem is that this fails to consider the fact that someone might actually donate this labor for free to everyone negating the benefit of this particular moat. It also creates a situation where someone might be inspired to put in the 2k worth of labor and charge 100 users $199 each and come out ahead. Its certain that a number of players have earned money selling some sort of value add on top of open source software but the value add really needs to be something that you have a competitive advantage at providing not something trivial like a difficult build process. You are defending nonsense.
candl 9y ago
This is very disappointing to hear. I have actually migrated two nodes from proxmox to xenserver + xenorchestra not that long ago. I have no need for a full blown HA environment with dedicated NAS. I didn't have hardware capable of running proxmox on zfs + zfs-sync for a two node setup. Xenserver + xenorchestra (with its continious replication feature for backups) fit the bill much better than proxmox for this use case.
the_common_man 9y ago
David makes an important clarification in the comments: "I think it's important to differentiate between the pricing of the product from Citrix, and the source code licensing model. XenServer (all editions) remains open source, with the ability for anyone to head over to Github and peruse the code, contribute patches, and so forth. What's changing is what features Citrix puts into the free edition that it builds, tests, and maintains; all of those are still open source, though."
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  What exactly would it mean to exclude features from an edition you provide the source for? Wouldn't anyone just be able to get a copy of the source and build the fully-featured edition anyways? How would these features even migrate - surely you could patch them back in to future version.
  - the_common_man 9y ago
    Right, that's the point. People who want it all for free and don't want to pay citrix anything are free to do so by compiling it from the source. This is 'unsupported' by citrix and you are free to do whatever you want. The binaries as provided by citrix come in 3 editions. These changes apply to those editions. These are 'supported' by citrix.
    - ivanbakel 9y ago
      Interesting to know - so you're paying for the support contract, but just indirectly? Makes me wonder if that gives Citrix an interest in opposing deterministic binaries.
    - jrochkind1 9y ago
      What license is the source distributed under? I think any licenses that are truly open source would allow anyone else to distribute binaries too, so people could get binaries from such a distribution rather than compile themselves. I guess there might be a reason compiling to distribute binaries would be a time-consuming pain? (Or compiling yourself, for that matter).
keepper 9y ago
What I find interesting is the aversion to paying for what is essential a product mostly used by businesses. I get the non-profit,school dilemma. and ideally, they do something about that. but they aren't closing the source of their system ( everything is remaining open source ). They are removing some value add that for the most part, only business users care about. ( to the binaries they provide, are they forced to give you free compile time and bandwidth too? ) For example, I myself have been guilty in previous companies of spending $1M in hardware, and have used the free version of xenserver ( 120 huge vm node deployment, hybrid cloud ), to great success, and Citrix as a company has gotten zero of that. So here I am, an user extremely happy with software that is being used to run a multi million dollar, profitable business, spending $8-15k per server, and giving zero to the company that made part of this deployment successful. I gave hundreds of thousands to dell ( and indirectly intel, ram manufacturers, etc ) I gave hundreds of thousands to Arista ( including support and software licenses ) but zero to Citrix, because they gave me such a great free product, i didn't need their support. License fees have certainly been out of whack with many of these companies ( per socket licensing for example ), but the fact remains, they are providing a business value, and should be compensated. ( and no, ovirt isn't quite there yet, vmware is, but that's even more expensive ). Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.
- ganoushoreilly 9y ago
  I think the majority of complaints will come from small firms that don't have budgets for expansive licensing. I work with a nonprofit that has multiple labs setup, we have AD integration, RBAC, and use GPU passthrough features in the lab. All of this is run on donated or EOL hardware. We take in $0 in cash funding and only accept hardware and volunteer time. For us it basically means we either (fail to upgrade) or look for alternatives. I think the modeling of being paid is fair and businesses should work towards paying something. Even then though, it's tough because licensing adds up. Some of the startups we mentor that are running XEN have very similar setups to the non profit. Many are running older EOL Dell servers with multisocket. One startup we work with has 5 servers in a rack, all purchased for under $1500. With the standard pricing agreement from Citrix, that would work out to $7,630 per year. This is all expected from a completely bootstrapped (pre-funding) startup. I think it's a bad faith move removing features, I understand pushing the support need, but that can be addressed in a different manner.
jerrac 9y ago
I have a project in the planning stages that needs gpu passthrough. What alternative should I use?
- tompic823 9y ago
  There are certainly more options, however from personal experience I can attest that ESXi’s free license supports GPU pass-through.
  - KiDD 9y ago
    They generally don't support consumer GPU cards for passthrough however...
gamedna 9y ago
Companies that give away core technology for "Free" are always plagued with the perceptive one way door that gets created. There is never a good way out of the situation for either party. The company got the benefit of building a client base with low barrier to entry, but then struggles to maintain profitability after their support/ops burden increases. On the other side, the customer bases profitability and business model was hinged on their ability to innovate to reduce their margins, and now are forced to drastically alter their business plans. The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point. Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.

65 points by unholythree 9y ago

Xenserver in my experience at least the free edition is not as polished or stable as ESXi or even regular libvirt/KVM. I experimented with the 7.2 Free edition and right from the installation not succeeding at first to many other things not working as expected it was not a very good experience. The management client UI is also Windows only I think and it's very sub par. Given the new changes I wonder anyone would have any reason to run xenserver free edition. There's always ESXi, HyperV and good ole KVM (which maybe an issue if you run Windows server as a VM.)

nvr219 9y ago
I love ESXi. Simply rock solid.
- blinkingled 9y ago
  Yep, all my rack servers run ESXi and except for the once in a blue moon patch I don't remember having to mess with them. And with the HTML5 UI starting to mature enough it's a sweet deal. My other choice is client HyperV from W10 on my workstations - too many updates but other than that pretty good to run supported VMs - suspend/resume to kill noise and domain joined machines mean headless management!
viraptor 9y ago
I don't live in the windows world, so I'm curious - why is win on KVM an issue?
- blinkingled 9y ago
  Windows server is an issue not the client SKUs. Reason is it requires Microsoft signed WHQL drivers so the Red Hat/ Fedora provided ones don't work.
- Neeek 9y ago
  Possibly licensing? Not sure though, I run my gaming VM at home with hardware passthrough and basically no issues (except fairly slow disk i/o, maybe that is the issue?). I think KVM is simply stronger when it comes to resource management with its VMs also running the linux kernel, it doesn't get as much freedom to balance load across your windows VMs. EDIT: The correct answer was posted by blinkingled before I finished typing this up hahah, read their post instead of this one :)
jameskegel 9y ago
I agree; every day we stray further from the fundamentals. Xen, and to a lesser extent Docker, and other tools, do help beautify some of the underlying technologies and processes that may have come before them, but that does not make the usability sacrifice justified in situations like these. I'm afraid I don't have a holistic answer, in this instance, that satisfies the requirement that the developers eat and be clothed, and that the users have an unimpeded work flow. Maybe it's a moral solution needed between all users, of all payment tiers, to agree not to abuse the intent of the permissive nature of the free-tier user agreement. It will be interesting seeing how this plays out.

ineedasername 9y ago

I don't see a problem with them charging for these features. What I don't like is it appears to have been part of a longer term bait and switch strategy designed to hook users that might otherwise have chosen OSS, with gradual feature removal as the stick used to beat locked in users into paying.

jarym 9y ago
It’s just as likely that they originally hoped their model would result in enough conversion to paying customers that they could keep funding development but that things didn’t work out as they’d expected. I would never assume the ‘bait and switch’ tactic unless it was a Microsoft or Oracle product.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  Maybe you haven't had the pleasure of dealing with Citrix as a vendor then, or have been extremely fortunate in that relationship. I myself would grant them no such pass. But I would hesitate to place even Microsoft into the vile sphere of desolation and malice occupied by Oracle, though admitedly my experience with MS has been limited to their bog standard products and licensing.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheDauthi 9y ago
    Microsoft can be bad, but I think Oracle is run on pure spite. According to legend (I wasn't actually there - this is secondhand, so do take with a grain of salt), they tried to convince a company I worked with previously that they needed an additional license for the server that processed backups. No Oracle client or server installed; the logs were pushed via ssh. When they balked, Oracle tried to increase the price two more times. It was apparently great motivation to move to MySQL. Maybe that was just one particularly bad rep, but I don't think I've gone through a single year of my career without hearing something absurd about them.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago

If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes. Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harden-our-KVM-hypervisor-at-Google-Cloud-security-in-plaintext.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_based_hypervisor_to_make_its_cloud_go_faster/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_... https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/ https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-som... https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)

lykr0n 9y ago
oVirt 4.2 just came out and it looks great! (OpenSource of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization)
- snuxoll 9y ago
  oVirt is great, but if you’re doing single node deployments in a homelab ESXi is my first recommendation. oVirt can’t put the only host available in a cluster in maintenance mode, just like vCenter - so it’s an exercise in frustration trying to update anything without it freaking out. But if you’ve got multiple hosts oVirt is great.
ineedasername 9y ago
I always prefer KVM in the limited VPS needs I have. It always seems a lot more flexible and less expensive to have a single larger instance in which I can nest my own VMs and spin up as needed. Of course Docker might obviate the requirement for nestability, but I havent used Docker much, and have a certain comfort level with pre build VMs Ive created for various stock purposes.

PeterisP 9y ago

This is a major issue - even if the current set of features in the free version are sufficient for a particular project, this action means that we can't rely on long-term goodwill of them staying that way, so any future-proof project should use something that's more free.

ineedasername 9y ago
Precisely. Lacking that goodwill, any potential user would be ill advised to begin using the free version. Current free users would be ill advised to continue with no guarantee of bug & security fixes, because near as I can tell these changes weren't obvious from prior product roadmaps.

muxator 9y ago

For those who want a TL;DR, these are the features that are going to be removed from the free edition: - Dynamic Memory Control - Xen Storage Motion - Active Directory Integration - Role Based Access Control - High Availability - GPU Pass-Through - Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery) - XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard - Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted) That's quite a list.

tw04 9y ago
*from the free edition ISOs that they provide free of charge. The code is still there on github for anyone to build for themselves.
- plam503711 9y ago
  Which is not buildable "as is". Cf my other post here.
  - tw04 9y ago
    So we've got a company spending millions of dollars developing a piece of software, and then giving away all the source for free. And you think they should be forced to give you documentation on how to build it... why? I mean, seriously the entitlement is astounding to me. OF COURSE they're going to make it difficult to build on your own, that's part of the monetization strategy. If you don't want to pay for it, and you also don't want to spend the time figuring out how to build it on your own, don't use it. But to act as if they owe you something is... ridiculous.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      In the first place open source is a set of principals that is designed to inspire people to freely share with one another including the sweat of their brow in the form of direct contribution of work as opposed to cash. Trying to make that sharing onerous is a violation of those principals and its not entitlement to point this out. Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution. So imagine it takes 1 person who is paid 120k a year a few weeks to produce a viable solution and documentation. The cost of this solution is about 2k and scales to infinity people. In a universe where nobody communicates or collaborates I suppose you could imagine that everyone would pay 10k instead of paying 2k in labor for an officially supported solution perhaps in consideration for other value provided like tech support. The problem is that this fails to consider the fact that someone might actually donate this labor for free to everyone negating the benefit of this particular moat. It also creates a situation where someone might be inspired to put in the 2k worth of labor and charge 100 users $199 each and come out ahead. Its certain that a number of players have earned money selling some sort of value add on top of open source software but the value add really needs to be something that you have a competitive advantage at providing not something trivial like a difficult build process. You are defending nonsense.

candl 9y ago

This is very disappointing to hear. I have actually migrated two nodes from proxmox to xenserver + xenorchestra not that long ago. I have no need for a full blown HA environment with dedicated NAS. I didn't have hardware capable of running proxmox on zfs + zfs-sync for a two node setup. Xenserver + xenorchestra (with its continious replication feature for backups) fit the bill much better than proxmox for this use case.

the_common_man 9y ago

David makes an important clarification in the comments: "I think it's important to differentiate between the pricing of the product from Citrix, and the source code licensing model. XenServer (all editions) remains open source, with the ability for anyone to head over to Github and peruse the code, contribute patches, and so forth. What's changing is what features Citrix puts into the free edition that it builds, tests, and maintains; all of those are still open source, though."

ivanbakel 9y ago
What exactly would it mean to exclude features from an edition you provide the source for? Wouldn't anyone just be able to get a copy of the source and build the fully-featured edition anyways? How would these features even migrate - surely you could patch them back in to future version.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  Right, that's the point. People who want it all for free and don't want to pay citrix anything are free to do so by compiling it from the source. This is 'unsupported' by citrix and you are free to do whatever you want. The binaries as provided by citrix come in 3 editions. These changes apply to those editions. These are 'supported' by citrix.
  - ivanbakel 9y ago
    Interesting to know - so you're paying for the support contract, but just indirectly? Makes me wonder if that gives Citrix an interest in opposing deterministic binaries.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    What license is the source distributed under? I think any licenses that are truly open source would allow anyone else to distribute binaries too, so people could get binaries from such a distribution rather than compile themselves. I guess there might be a reason compiling to distribute binaries would be a time-consuming pain? (Or compiling yourself, for that matter).

keepper 9y ago

What I find interesting is the aversion to paying for what is essential a product mostly used by businesses. I get the non-profit,school dilemma. and ideally, they do something about that. but they aren't closing the source of their system ( everything is remaining open source ). They are removing some value add that for the most part, only business users care about. ( to the binaries they provide, are they forced to give you free compile time and bandwidth too? ) For example, I myself have been guilty in previous companies of spending $1M in hardware, and have used the free version of xenserver ( 120 huge vm node deployment, hybrid cloud ), to great success, and Citrix as a company has gotten zero of that. So here I am, an user extremely happy with software that is being used to run a multi million dollar, profitable business, spending $8-15k per server, and giving zero to the company that made part of this deployment successful. I gave hundreds of thousands to dell ( and indirectly intel, ram manufacturers, etc ) I gave hundreds of thousands to Arista ( including support and software licenses ) but zero to Citrix, because they gave me such a great free product, i didn't need their support. License fees have certainly been out of whack with many of these companies ( per socket licensing for example ), but the fact remains, they are providing a business value, and should be compensated. ( and no, ovirt isn't quite there yet, vmware is, but that's even more expensive ). Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.

ganoushoreilly 9y ago
I think the majority of complaints will come from small firms that don't have budgets for expansive licensing. I work with a nonprofit that has multiple labs setup, we have AD integration, RBAC, and use GPU passthrough features in the lab. All of this is run on donated or EOL hardware. We take in $0 in cash funding and only accept hardware and volunteer time. For us it basically means we either (fail to upgrade) or look for alternatives. I think the modeling of being paid is fair and businesses should work towards paying something. Even then though, it's tough because licensing adds up. Some of the startups we mentor that are running XEN have very similar setups to the non profit. Many are running older EOL Dell servers with multisocket. One startup we work with has 5 servers in a rack, all purchased for under $1500. With the standard pricing agreement from Citrix, that would work out to $7,630 per year. This is all expected from a completely bootstrapped (pre-funding) startup. I think it's a bad faith move removing features, I understand pushing the support need, but that can be addressed in a different manner.

jerrac 9y ago

I have a project in the planning stages that needs gpu passthrough. What alternative should I use?

tompic823 9y ago
There are certainly more options, however from personal experience I can attest that ESXi’s free license supports GPU pass-through.
- KiDD 9y ago
  They generally don't support consumer GPU cards for passthrough however...

gamedna 9y ago

Companies that give away core technology for "Free" are always plagued with the perceptive one way door that gets created. There is never a good way out of the situation for either party. The company got the benefit of building a client base with low barrier to entry, but then struggles to maintain profitability after their support/ops burden increases. On the other side, the customer bases profitability and business model was hinged on their ability to innovate to reduce their margins, and now are forced to drastically alter their business plans. The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point. Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.