The blog..

Hey folks,

Today Citrix made the beta for XenServer 5.5 available through www.mycitrix.com. The Beta involves several new features and taken from the release notes i will try to share a few of my experiences with the beta.

I had a chance to look at the previous Beta and thats where i have my personal experiences from. I will of course update with more recent information if I find things have changed dramatically.

The main improvements from a headline perspective is:

• Improved Backup and Snapshot support 
  This allows you to take snapshot of virtual machines both through CLI as before but also through XenCenter which is the management GUI
  • I Personally like the fact that Snapshots were taken to the XenCenter, but i must admit i was hoping to have a take snapshot/revert to snapshot sort of thing like we have seen in VMware. The way snapshots are integrated in the GUI now are more of a take snapshot/create new machine from snapshot.
• Active directory integration for the management of your XenServers.
  • Great integration, just what we needed to use the same sort of management structure as we have today in many organization, Support, Admins, devs etc.
• Workload Balancing
  • Workload balancing helps to optimize the placement of VM’s and assist with balancing of workloads within a pool. This feature is based on the Workload Balancing Server which is a component you can download alongside the beta. The way i see this it is a step in the right direction for a DRS solution like the one VMware offers.
• Integration with StorageLink services
  • This is done using the “xe” CLI and gives access to advanced storage management capabilities via the Citrix StorageLink service. Another component to download and configure with the XenServer beta. I have not had a chance to play with this personally as the storage in my Home Lab is not supported.
• Improved OS Support
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
  • Novell SLES 11
  • Debian Lenny

My experiences from a Performance and stability point of view in my Home Lab has been that XenServer runs excellent and the updates which have been made from an administrator point of view are spot on, i still have requests but i will keep an eye on the XenServer and let you all know as the features arise.

I find XenServer a strong candidate for Server Virtualization projects in cases where there is no specific need for the features added by VMware, like

• DRS, Workload Balancing will provide some of this
• Fault Tolerance, which is available in vSphere 4, and as Addon for XenServer through Marathon,
• Integrated features for Deployment of Servers, Citrix focuses on Provisioning Server which is in almost all their product lines.
• Cisco Nexus 1000v, the virtual switch Cisco and VMware now provides.. we could hope to see the support extended to XenServer.

When it comes to Server or Desktop virtualization i find that both Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX has something to offer, each in there own price-range to match the needs of the customer.

Rene Vester