Xen Server 5 In Depth

What’s New in XenServer 5.0 In Depth

XenServer 5.0 Highlights

Enhanced Availability (HA, DR)

Enhanced XenCenter Interface

P2V and broader guest OS support

Enhanced storage integration

Increased performance & scalability

Enhanced Availability (HA, DR)

Enhanced XenCenter Interface

P2V and broader guest OS support

Enhanced storage integration

Increased performance & scalability

XenServer 5.0 Enhanced Availability

High Availability

Automatically restart VMs upon host server failure

Easily administered within XenCenter

Reports failover capacity

Improved Disaster Recovery

Scheduled backup of VM metadata

VM metadata stored on SR as disk

Easy to configure

NIC Bonding

Active/Active NIC Bonding

Configurable from XenCenter

XenServer 5.0 Enhanced XenCenter Interface

XenCenter GUI

More GUI, less CLI

Improved Performance Monitoring

Alerting

Sorting, Searching & Tagging

More GUI, less CLI

Management Interface Configuration

Dedicated Storage Network setup

NIC Bonding setup

Fibre Channel SR setup

Improved Performance Monitoring

Historical Data

Data is server-side and is replicated within pool

Customizable graphs

Easy navigation in timeline with slider

Life-cycle management information for VMs visible

Alerting

Instant alerting in for CPU, Network and Disk usage

Available on host and VM level

Optional e-mail alerting

Configurable

Thresholds

Duration

Alerting interval

Sorting, Searching & Tagging

Find VMs fast with Instant Search

Built-in searches

Search criteria fully customizable

Save custom searches for reuse

Tag servers for easy access from Tag Cloud

XenServer 5.0 P2V and broader guest OS support

XenConvert

Basic Windows P2V included with all editions

Convert existing Windows machines to VHD or XVA format

Broader Guest OS Support

Windows

Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and x64)

Linux

SUSE 9 SP4 32-bit

SUSE 10 SP1, SP2 64-bit (install via ISO or CD)

RHEL 4.7 32-bit

RHEL 5.2 32-bit/64-bit (including graphical installation)

CentOS 5.2 32-bit/64-bit

XenServer 5.0 Enhanced storage integration

Support for Dell EqualLogic

Supports fast-cloning

Disk snapshotting support

LUN-per-VDI Support

Disk Snapshots

Quiesced disk snapshots for backup/recovery of Windows VM

Available for NetApp and Dell EqualLogic SRs

Manually or scripted from CLI

FC and Multipath I/O

Fibre Channel SR setup in XenCenter

FC and iSCSI multipath support in XenCenter

Broader Storage Support

Support for 8GB FC HBA’s from Qlogic and Emulex

More certified Storage components on the HCL

XenServer 5.0 Increased performance & scalability

Enhanced VM performance

Further improved XenApp performance

Updated Paravirtualization Drivers in Citrix Tools

Windows Server 2008 “enlightenments”

XenServer Host Performance

Now using Xen Hypervisor 3.2

Control Domain performance tuning

Updated enterprise hardware drivers

Resource Pool scalability tweaks

VHD-based performance tuning

XenServer 5.0 Miscellaneous

Console Text Based Menu

Easy configuration of Host available from console

Appears by default on physical console

Start manually by typing xsconsole

Other Improvements

VM PXE boot improvements

Improved support for Altiris and Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

XenServer/XenCenter Automatic Update Checking

XenServer SSL Certificate verification

RDP Console Connection

User-friendly Boot Process

XenServer 5.0 Upgrade Process

XenServer 4.1 -> 5.0 Upgrade Pool Master Pool Member Pool Member Shared Storage

XenServer 4.1 -> 5.0 Upgrade Pool Master Pool Member Shared Storage

XenServer 4.1 -> 5.0 Upgrade Pool Member Pool Master Shared Storage

XenServer 4.1 -> 5.0 Upgrade Pool Member Pool Master Pool Member Shared Storage

XenServer 5.0 Platinum Edition

What’s New in Provisioning Server 5.0

Provisioning Server Version Comparison Feature Version 4.5 Version 5.0 Console Interface Proprietary UI, runs on host MMC Snap-in based Database Jet DB MS SQL Server (SQL Server Express ships with product) Admin User Access Control Controlled by host system login access only Role-based Administration with Active Directory integration Deployment Partitioning Limited. Device groups only. Hierarchical (Farms, Sites, Device Collections). Tied to role-based Admin rights API Limited functionality (SOAP & CLI) Full functionality (SOAP & CLI) Virtual Disk Format Proprietary Microsoft VHD Operating System Support (PVS Hosts) Win 2k3 (32-bit) Win 2k3 (32 & 64-bit)

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