Evidently Citrix (acting as a proxy for its pal Microsoft?) has found that free works and gets it traction in the marketplace because it's going out with a free version of its Essentials management widgetry for Hyper-V after making its XenServer hypervisor free four or five months ago to egg Essentials along.

A reported 100,000 XenServer downloads later and it's plastered free signs on an Essentials Express version.

Granted it's only good for managing two Hyper-V servers - not XenServers, by the way - but isn't that kinda Citrix' "catch ‘em while they're young" sweet spot? However, it would seem to create another pricing problem for VMware.

Anyway, to manage three or more Hyper-V servers will cost either $1,500 or $3,000 a server depending on whether it's the Enterprise Edition or the Platinum Edition.

Express will automate pre-packaged VM creation and test live apps pre-production. Post-production it'll handle dynamic workload balancing. It also includes Citrix' key StorageLink technology good for a single Fibre Channel or ISCSI storage array and such functions as deduplication and thin provisioning to shrink storage needs by 50%-90%.

Citrix says that "Traditionally. The overwhelming majority of server virtualization implementations have aggregated VMs into a single file system, preventing a large percentage of applications from being virtualized due to inadequate performance and stability. With Essentials for Hyper-V, customers can take advantage of the storage systems they already have."

Citrix and Microsoft are also planning to let Microsoft's Systems Center Configuration Manager manage XenApp-created virtualized applications.

In the first half of next year, applications virtualized by Microsoft's Application Virtualization (App-V), née Softricity, will be distributed to any device by Citrix Receiver and Dazzle, the Citrix virtualized application storefront, will be integrated into App-V.

The pair also plans to integration XenDesktop into Microsoft's virtual desktop infrastructure licenses to appeal to joint customers.