In July VMware attempted to win those Virtual Iron customers left in the cold by Oracle with an aggressive discount program.

Now it seems that VMware has to defend against a similar move from Citrix, which launches today the Open Door program.

The rules are simple:

The Project Open Door promotion will be effective worldwide from October 1 – March 31, 2010. Customers who decommission five or more VMware vSphere 4 or VI3 servers and replace them with XenServer or Hyper-V plus the Citrix Essentials solution, receive the following:

  • A free five incident support pack (5 by 8 hours) for every five servers converted
  • A voucher for six hours of online training for every five servers converted
  • Free migration tools for seamlessly transferring virtual machines from VMware to XenServer or Hyper-V