Citrix Takes XenServer Open Source

The world of fully open-sourced virtualized infrastructure is getting a new entrant today. Citrix is making the latest XenServer 6.2 release available under the GNU GPL v2 open source license.

The core Xen hypervisor technology has been open source since day one, but the overall server virtualization technology has not been.

XenServer's roots go back nearly 7 years to August of 2006 when XenSource released its XenEnterprise product. XenSource was acquired by Citrix in August of 2007 for $500 million, and XenEnterprise got folded into what is now known as XenServer.

The new XenServer 6.2 release is being announced today under an open source license, which is part of Citrix's recent ongoing momentum towards being more open. Citrix moved its cloud.com technology to the Apache Software Foundation in April of 2012. The resulting Apache CloudStack project recently released its first major milestone as a top-level Apache project with the CloudStack 4.1 release earlier this month.