
Xenserver 7.3: Changes to the Free Edition - unholythree
https://xenserver.org/blog/entry/xenserver-7-3-changes-to-the-free-edition.html
======
keepper
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.

~~~
tw04
>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.

Totally respect where you're coming from - but at some point isn't that kind
of their problem? It's not your job to monetize it for them.

I respect them making this move, however I think they had better options. Part
of their problem is it's _TOUGH_ to go from giving something away to
monetizing. At the same time the people like you who were making a profit off
of it probably will begrudgingly pay for the upgrade.

I think they should've gone the Redhat route - where they only release source
to patches between releases. If you _REALLY_ want to apply the code and build
the new binaries yourself, so be it. If you find value in them writing and
providing the patches - pay for it.

There is no perfect answer, but I think the people calling for their heads are
being a bit silly. I have no doubt the two options were: make this change, or
kill the project entirely. ESPECIALLY in the face of Amazon moving away from
Xen - I would imagine there was some back-end funding going on there.

~~~
keepper
Oh of course, but I'm a big believer in social contracts. What can I say :)

-

Citrix used to have XCP ( Xen Cloud Platform ), as a way of OSS the core
functionality away from the paid functionality. They moved to one build in the
possibly naive thought that making licensing a feature of a support contract,
would enforce a social contract of "hey, why not pay these guys".

That did not work.

I think AWS moving away from XEN is a bit moot. While AWS did contribute back
_some_ to XEN, they mostly forked it for their use case. They are doing the
same with KVM. Citrix has been by enlarge, the majority contributor to XEN.

------
PeterisP
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
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.

------
ineedasername
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
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
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.

~~~
TheDauthi
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.

~~~
ineedasername
My story with the big O stems from one of their ERP systems. It got pretty
tangled, but here's the 2-minute version:

A contract was signed and during early implementation Oracle EOL'ed a
significant module with a replacement that was _planned_ but did not _exist_.
Followed by attempts to charge us for their development of the replacement
which, again, had been a pre-paid module in their off-the-shelf ERP. Already
paid for.

That didn't fly, but later the replacement lacked key features: A web-facing
portion collected information. We demo, it works, we ask where data processing
folks view it in the forms app... crickets. Conversation ensues:

O: _" It's in the database"_

Me: Sure, but where do users view it when collating the other information?

O: _" Well, a dba can get to it"_

Me: Okay, but when we go live, will it show up as a another tab in a form
or...?

O: _" We've completed our build of this feature"_

Me: Hold on, collecting & processing this data is a critical and contractually
itemized deliverable. You have developed half of that deliverable.

O: _" We've completed out build of this feature"_

I was probably fortunate that my CIO was there, and took over at that point. A
few weeks later, Oracle walked off the job. There had been delays in a modules
I wasn't involved with, and Oracle wanted more money. It was a fixed-price
contract, and we wouldn't re-open negotiation on a signed contract already
multiple milestones in on its payment schedule. Oracle walked. Literally gone,
no word, no message, just dozens of people that were there on Tuesday, gone on
Wednesday. That's Oracle.

~~~
TheDauthi
Interesting that you mention their ERP systems. One of the projects I'm
working with right now has been considering integrating with one, as well.
Last week, our CTO put together a big list of pros and cons between the
different possible integrations for discussion. The top of the list of cons
was "Oracle owns them".

------
jsmthrowaway
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-
harde...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harden-our-
KVM-hypervisor-at-Google-Cloud-security-in-plaintext.html)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_based_hypervisor_to_make_its_cloud_go_faster/)

[https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-
som...](https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/)

[https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/](https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/)
(Cmd+F KVM)

~~~
elcritch
Which Linux distro do you recommend for running KVM? Additionally, SmartOS has
good support for running KVM virtual machines [1]. It gives good solid
stability and integration with ZFS, not sure of the performance though vs
Linux. The main downside of SmartOS is somewhat sporadic hardware support
(broadcom nic's out, intel nic's in). I prefer SmartOS now where I can, but
knowing which Linux distro is useful especially for GPU support.

1: [https://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-
and...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and-more)

~~~
Nullabillity
I recently moved my homelab to NixOS, since it lets me use the same system to
manage the hosts and the guests declaratively.

I wrote up my approach at [1], in case you're curious.

1:
[https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Virtualization_in_NixOS](https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Virtualization_in_NixOS)

~~~
elcritch
Interesting approach! When/if you update a KVM instance, does it recreate it?

~~~
Nullabillity
No, the contents of the instances are managed by a separate NixOps network,
since it would be wasteful to send the full image (~1GB) for each instance
each time a package is updated.

The purpose of the base image is to preinstall something that's ready for
NixOps to "take over" with whatever I actually want to run on the VM.

------
muxator
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
*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
Which is not buildable "as is". Cf my other post here.

~~~
tw04
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
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.

~~~
tw04
>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.

Really? Because that's exactly what Redhat does and they've been continually
held up as the shining example of "open source works!" for several decades
now...

~~~
michaelmrose
You buy support. Centos exists because building redhat from source isn't hard.

------
blinkingled
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.)

~~~
viraptor
I don't live in the windows world, so I'm curious - why is win on KVM an
issue?

~~~
blinkingled
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.

------
the_common_man
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
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
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.

~~~
eggsome
Ok, but the problem is nobody seems to have the interest in recompiling it for
the community (think CentOS).

A few months ago they started charging for patches and someone asked in the
XenServer forums here:

[https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/390349-open-source-
fork...](https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/390349-open-source-fork-of-
xenserver/)

~~~
exikyut
When and how (frequently) do the security patches get folded into the source
tree?

------
candl
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.

------
gamedna
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.

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

~~~
tompic823
There are certainly more options, however from personal experience I can
attest that ESXi’s free license supports GPU pass-through.

~~~
KiDD
They generally don't support consumer GPU cards for passthrough however...

