Since we "set XenServer free" earlier this year, we've been watching the acceptance of free enterprise-class virtualization take off. We've talked about the numbers before -- but numbers only tell half the story.

It's been gratifying to see that not only are the number of companies downloading XenServer and activating it for ongoing production use growing, but the size and scope of the companies using the product has been expanding, as larger companies discover the savings they gain from using no-cost virtualization infrastructure software for every server, purchasing support to provide assurance, and adding Citrix Essentials for their business-critical workloads to provide the added benefits of high availability, dynamic provisioning and workload balancing, and StorageLink-powered integration of intelligent storage capabilities.

With the certification by the Burton Group of XenServer with Citrix Essentials as meeting 100 percent of the their required features for enterprise production, businesses of all sizes are seeing alternatives to huge virtualization expenditures. It's great to see XenServer showing a consistently greater share of those organizations around the world that they have choices.

Here's some more information.