15. XenServer 5. 6 – Edition Offerings Feature XenServer Enterprise Edition Platinum Edition Unlimited VMs, unlimited memory, unlimited CPUs XenMotion live migration & Multi-server management P2V, V2V Conversions & OVF Support Active Directory integration VM Disk Snapshot and Revert (disk) High availability Provisioning services – virtual servers Live Memory Snapshot Dynamic Memory Control Role Based Administration & Audit Trail Integrated StorageLink – Advanced Storage Mgmt. Automated Workload Balancing, Power Management StorageLink Site Recovery Self-Service Portal Provisioning services – physical servers Lab management Stage Management
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Editor's Notes
We’ve been hard at work on our latest release, codenamed “Midnight Ride” for the past 12 months This release includes platform enhancements as well as management enhancements On the platform, we’ve increased our supported memory and processor limits by 2x We’ve touched up our XenCenter administrative console to make systems easier to manage We’ve made XenServer an even better platform for Citrix XenDesktop, the market leading system for virtualization on the desktop Finally, we’ll be putting XenServer through Common Criteria certification, and I’m sure that hose of you in government or high security environments will be pleased to hear that. We expect to complete this process later in 2010 With XenServer Enterprise Edition, we’ve added some new management functionality, including role-based administration & audit trails. We’ve enhanced the snapshot functionality and workload balancing. And we’ve enhanced the flexibility of environment by supporting Flex Migration, which enables resource pools to have different generation servers. In the Platinum edition, we’ve added Site Recovery, which enables recovery of an entire virtual machine infrastructure to a secondary DR site, and self-service portal functionality so that VM users and administrators don’t need to be provided access to xencenter
We’ve also created a new Advanced Edition at a more accessible price point. In this addition we’ve included a new feature called dynamic memory control for increased VM density. We’ve also included features like HA in this edition which used to be in the Enterprise edition.
In XenServer 5.6 we have introduced a whole new way to manage snapshots. [Reveal] We now have the ability to revert to older snapshots through the use of the checkpoint feature. We have also introduced a new snapshot mode called snapshot with disk and memory. This type of snapshot captures not only the disk state but also the memory state at the time of the snapshot. The major use cases would be to create a disposable backup of a VM that contains applications running. It could also be for testing purposes, say, to install patches and then revert if anything goes wrong. It can also be a quick way to create different configurations from a template. Finally, the XenCenter GUI has been enhanced for easier management of snapshots and to support the checkpoint feature.
Schedule pool policy based on time of day needs When starting guests, an option to “Start on optimal server” is available, and XenServer chooses the most appropriate server based on policy Users have the ability to over-ride policy, or specify guests or hosts that are excluded from policy (eg high-demand applications)
Though not a feature per se, it’s important to note that XenServer 5.6 moves to a new licensing system. We’ve ceased using the legacy file-based system for XenServer Advanced/Ent/Plat , and are now using the Citrix Licensing Server. The key point is that licensing is much more tightly enforced than before. So if you are considering an upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6, make sure you have all the licenses you need available to you in your mycitrix.com account. You can run the Citrix Licensing server on a Windows VM, and customers often co-locate services such as Workload Balancing and StorageLink on the same VM. We do also plan to release a Linux virtual appliance, though this is not part of the beta. Note that for Free XS, we’ll still use the legacy file-based approach which is very simple and does not require a license server / VM.