With the release of XenServer 8, which is essentially Citrix Hypervisor under a new name, XenServer is once again drawing attention. It wants to poach customers from VMware with a price-per-socket model.

How is XenServer still doing? The company announces the launch of XenServer 8, more than a year after its spinoff from Citrix. XenServer actually releases the former Citrix Hypervisor in a new guise. The core functionality for running, managing, and moving virtual machines remains, with some modern GPU virtualization features and better support for Windows 10, 11, and Windows Server 2022.

XenServer 8 will be available in three formulas. The free trial is limited to three hosts. For the Standard and Premium paid subscriptions, XenServer charges a price per socket model instead of a price per core. This means that your license costs will not increase if you choose powerful chips with many computing cores. With seemingly more interesting pricing formulas, XenServer wants to quickly establish itself as a “newcomer” in the consolidated hypervisor market.

Looking for customers

The company is initially focusing on companies that previously used Citrix Hypervisor. Problem: XenServer itself doesn’t know how many customers it already has. “Today we cannot identify which customers are using Citrix Hypervisor. This is because the current licensing mechanism only confirms the existence of a required Citrix DaaS license – the license is not actually verified,” XenServer admitted in a LinkedIn post.

The question is whether XenServer’s offering is sufficient. Newcomers in the hypervisor market cannot really make a big impact for the time being. The growing “malaise” of VMware customers presents the company with an interesting opportunity that it is clearly willing to capitulate to.

XenServer 8 includes a migration tool for switching from VMware and the trial edition seems to be an interesting alternative to Broadcom’s discontinued VMware ESXi. But it’s not just XenServer that’s trying to attract dissatisfied VMware customers.