Last week, Microsoft annointed long-time partner Citrix Systems as the provider of management tools for virtualized Windows server environments using its Hyper-V hypervisor. But Citrix needed help closing the deal. It landed its own partnership with VMLogix, grabbing some of the key pieces that are actually worth money to customers.

Citrix made waves just ahead of the VMworld Europe show hosted by rival VMware by giving away most of the management functionality used to charge for with its XenServer Enterprise. This upped the freebie ante in an aggressive way - to an extent that VMware will not mimic until it absolutely has to, simply because there is too much money to be made by VMware selling its management tools.

While technically equivalent or superior to VMware's ESX Server in some respects, XenServer has the disadvantage of not being the default standard for virtualizing Windows servers - a position that VMware holds and has worked very hard to build. Citrix had to do something dramatic to try to knock VMware down a peg. And it was a very smart move to give away a whole bunch of management tools as part of a new XenServer bundle, with specific versions tailored for either the XenServer or Hyper-V hypervisors. Plus, it got Microsoft to throw its weight behind the tools and strategy.