Citrix, the producer of paravirtualization technology solution Xen hopes to attract the virtualization industry attention next week when the company is about to release for free XenServer Enterprise Edition. The virtualization software producer however will remove some features from the free software package and move them into Essentials for XenServer, an application positioned in price range $1,500 - $5,000 per server node.

Some features of the former Enterprise Edition which will note be included in the free XenServer edition include Workflow Studio orchestration (used for automating common tasks), and StorageLink. StorageLink is a set of storage integration modules which enable system administrators to provision virtual machine storage directly from the XenServer management console.

Workflow Studio and StorageLink will be added to Essentials for Hyper-V and XenServer.

According to popular media that covers virtualization industry - Virtualization.info at least "three things seem true in the virtualization industry".

The first one according to the media is that it does not matter how many times a vendor repeats that free software doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solutions. "It will end up offering a free hypervisor", says Virtualization.info.

Alessandro Perilli, founder of Virtualization.info suggests that "it doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder".

The third conclusion of Mr. Perilli is that it "does not matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call".

In an article titled "Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat or Novell gang up on VMware" Stephen Vaughn-Nichols said that Citrix will announce its free version of XenServer hypervisor during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference.

Citrix is expected to lose some revenue with the release of free XenServer. The company plans to compensate it from increased sales of the Citrix Essentials new management package called. As mentioned above it will be available in 2 editions, which will cost between $1,500 and $5,000 per server. One of them will be for XenServer, the other one for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Industry analysts have already commented that the free version of XenServer will appeal to small and medium-sized businesses, that starting out with virtualization.