Citrix XenServer Users

[CyberNerd]

Here is some marketting blurb for XEN:

The flagship is now RHEL 5 Advanced Platform, which is licenced for an unlimited number of virtual instances on an unlimited number of CPUs and sockets, so workloads can be moved around the data centre as needed. It also includes a clustered file system and logical volume management but costs the same as the more limited RHEL 4 Advanced Server release, the company said.

It seems it is only the Citrix version that is crippled, not other linuxes.

[wesleyw]

Citrix Xen Server has three versions Standard <£500, Enterprise<£1200 and Platinum <£2000
I believe enterprise has live migration available.

Citrixs Advanced Licenses cost under £135 each for schools however you don't get certain extras such as reporting and Resource Management, CPU and Virtual Memory optimisation (25% more users per server) that you get with enterprise, application streaming to fat-clients et cetera.


Wes

[sammy]

Hi Guys,

Wes is pretty much there with the prices although they are list rrp so you guys as education get a fair bit off. Also Wes is correct about the Live Migration too which is available from the Enterprise edition onwards....an excellent feature and Citrix call it XenMotion, in VMWARE its called VMotion, and Virtual Iron call it Live Migrate....just diff names...same thing.

Thank god its friday....i can smell the weekend.

[CyberNerd]

Wes is pretty much there with the prices although they are list rrp so you guys as education get a fair bit off. Also Wes is correct about the Live Migration too which is available from the Enterprise edition onwards....an excellent feature and Citrix call it XenMotion, in VMWARE its called VMotion, and Virtual Iron call it Live Migrate....just diff names...same thing.

Just for completeness, Redhat also call their feature ' live migration'
19.23.Configuring Virtual Machine Live Migration

It costs about £35 per server for educational, or free if you use centos.

[fafster]

What are the licensing costs for Xen virtualisation under RHEL?

[CyberNerd]

What are the licensing costs for Xen virtualisation under RHEL?

You need to buy the 'enterprise' version. It costs about £35 per server educational.
If you want clustering (which you probably will for HA) you need to get the 'advanced' version.
not sure about how much that costs, but it's free if you use centos.

[K.C.Leblanc]

Citrix Xen Server has three versions Standard <£500, Enterprise<£1200 and Platinum <£2000
I believe enterprise has live migration available.

Citrixs Advanced Licenses cost under £135 each for schools however you don't get certain extras such as reporting and Resource Management, CPU and Virtual Memory optimisation (25% more users per server) that you get with enterprise, application streaming to fat-clients et cetera.


Wes

Cheers, when you consider VMW makes you go for their most expensive package to get VMotion this looks like good value.

[armadillo]

Hi, does anybody know the cost of citrix on a blade server? as we've been quoed £23K, is that reasonable?

Tthanks in advance.

[sammy]

Hi Armadillo,

I can certainly check out the Citrix licensing for you and make sure its correct.

Let me know what you are trying to achieve.

[Ric_]

Hi, does anybody know the cost of citrix on a blade server? as we've been quoed £23K, is that reasonable?

Tthanks in advance.

Seems rather high but it depends what you are talking about...

If you are talking about XenServer (the server virtualisation product) then you should be paying about £1200 per blade.

If you are talking about XenApp (the thin-client-type product) you are talking £100-£120 per concurrent connection license.

Then there's XenDesktop (the desktop virtualisation product) but I'm unsure of the licensing costs for that.

[sammy]

Just to add to that....the Xendesktop is approx £110 ex vat per concurrent desktop, but you have to buy a minimum of 7 licenses....for education pricing that is.

[wesleyw]

Citrix really need to look at their pricing structure for most schools Power Term (£30-£40 per concurrent user) and SGD (£5250 Site License for up to 1000 concurrent users) will do everything that they would want or need.


Wes

[armadillo]

Hi Armadillo,

I can certainly check out the Citrix licensing for you and make sure its correct.

Let me know what you are trying to achieve.

HI Sam

We had somebody to help us plan our budget for ICT for the new building here at Arden School and this is what he recommended:

Blade Chassis System
SAN Storage Solution
4 x HP BL480 servers
Citrix server /services

It’s the Citrix which looks too expensive to afford. The question is as secondary school do we really need to spend so much on the servers when I know we could get a few powerful win 2008 servers with all redundancy features i.e. raid, dual power etc for less than half the price.

[Ric_]

It’s the Citrix which looks too expensive to afford. The question is as secondary school do we really need to spend so much on the servers when I know we could get a few powerful win 2008 servers with all redundancy features i.e. raid, dual power etc for less than half the price.

The other problem with the blades is that you are putting all your eggs in one basket - chassis goes pop and you have no servers left.

I'd recommend you have a look at the Sun kit too... they've just released some new storage solutions which look really sexy and from what I've heard they are very competitively priced.

You should maybe start a new thread and tell people what you are trying to achieve because you'll get some 'outside of the box' solutions and a good idea for what you need to be spending.

[wesleyw]

Sun's SGD product is very good and it can do pretty much all that a school could need.


Wes