[Request - Product] Citrix XenServer Hypervisor

There's a lot of licensing support information at https://docs.xenserver.com/en-us/xenserver/8/faq-licensing

The legacy product matrix has dates for 7: https://www.citrix.com/support/product-lifecycle/legacy-product-matrix.html. Citrix Hypervisor also has a separate page at https://www.citrix.com/support/product-lifecycle/citrix-hypervisor.html which says:

Citrix Hypervisor adopted a new Servicing Options release strategy starting with XenServer 7.1. General guidance regarding lifecycle milestones for each release strategy is defined below.

https://www.xenserver.com/story clarifies some of the history, which is important to understand the relationship between various entities:

XenSource
XenServer
Citrix Hypervisor
Cloud.com
Citrix
Xen Project

graph LR
    subgraph CloudCom["Cloud.com"]
        XenSource
        Citrix
    end
    Citrix -- "published" --> Xenserver7
    Citrix -- "published" --> CH

    XenSource["XenSource"] -- "publishes" --> X8[Xenserver 8]

    style CH82 fill:springgreen
    style X8 fill:springgreen
    style Xenserver7 fill:tomato

    subgraph XS[XenServer]
        Xenserver7["XenServer 7"]
        X8["XenServer 8"]
        X8 <-- "aka" --> CH
        subgraph CH[Citrix Hypervisor]
            Citrix --supports --> CH82[8.2 LTSR]
        end
    end

    subgraph LF[Linux Foundation]
        VT[Vates Tech] --runs-->XCPNG
        XCPNG[XCP-ng]
        XP[Xen Project]
        XP--incubates-->XCPNG
        XP --releases-->Xen

    end
    XS--uses-->Xen

Wikipedia says that Citrix XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor are product names for the same thing:

Xen can be shipped in a dedicated virtualization platform, such as XCP-ng or XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor, and before that Citrix XenServer, and before that XenSource's XenEnterprise).

The Xen hypervisor is covered by the GNU General Public Licence, so all of these versions contain a core of free software with source code. However, many of them contain proprietary additions.

with the launch of 8.0, XenServer becomes Citrix Hypervisor. ^1 For customers on our Current Release (CR) track, we will support upgrading from XenServer 7.5 and 7.6. You can also upgrade from our LTSR release, but please keep in mind that will switch you from the LTSR track to the CR track.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/23/xenserver_socket_licences/

XenServer is a Citrix product the company acquired from XenSource in 2007 Citrix [...] started to concentrate on making XenServer the best environment for its own apps. its lack of focus on XenServer saw it forked as XCP-ng. Citrix eventually ditched the Xen name and went with Citrix Hypervisor. But since Citrix was absorbed into the Cloud Software Group (CSG), it has quietly revealed that XenServer has morphed into a member of the CSG – making it a standalone business instead of just a Citrix product.

The XCP-NG wikipedia page explains that better than the website:

XCP-ng can be compared to a Linux distribution,[23] but meant to run Xen out-of-the-box. It is a collection of components creating a coherent system that you can install on any x86 bare-metal server. It is based on multiple projects, like CentOS for user space packages, XAPI project for the API, Xen project for the hypervisor, Open vSwitch for the networking and so on. XCP-ng provides also extra packages that aren't available elsewhere, because non-existent or closed-sources in Citrix Hypervisor. As a fork of XenServer with an "upstream first" philosophy,[24] XCP-ng stays pretty close to the original Citrix project, and can be considered as a "friendly fork".[25]

Obviously, not all of this is important and needs to go in a Citrix Hypervisor page. But if we're looking at product lines, we will end up having separate pages for Citrix Hypervisor and XenServer. Limiting this issue to just the former.

endoflife-date / endoflife.date

[Request - Product] Citrix XenServer Hypervisor #5145