XenServer 6.0 provides improved performance, scalability, and ease of use. Key enhancements include support for 16 vCPUs and 128GB RAM per VM, 1TB physical RAM, rolling pool upgrades, and simplified installation. It also features high availability, live migration, disaster recovery with storage replication, and support for SCVMM and SCOM management. XenServer is optimized for XenDesktop deployments with features like IntelliCache for storage optimization and GPU pass-through for 3D graphics.

1. XenServer 6.0 News
Christian Ferber
Systems Engineer Datacenter & Cloud
Server Virtualization
E-Mail: christian.ferber@eu.citrix.com

2. Citrix XenServer
Best virtualization
• Free XenServer Impact platform
• 450,000+ downloads
• 75,000+ unique organizations
• > 50% of Fortune 500 run XenServer “XenServer 5.5 now meets 100% of our
enterprise requirements”
• Proven with leading vendors technology -BurtonGroup,2009
• Entrusted by demanding organizations to run the “Look closely at Citrix as an alternative to
most mission critical apps VMware. [Citrix] offers many of the same
• Optimized to run XenDesktop deployments features as VMware with more flexibility and a
lower price.”
• Used by the largest clouds -Info-TechResearchGroup,2011
Magic Quadrant “Leader" – noted for features
• Validated by market thought leaders and price/performance”
-Gartner,2011

3. Why Customers Virtualize with XenServer?
• 10 minutes to Xen
1 Ease of Use • No single points of failure
• Centrally manage hundreds of virtual servers
• Enterprise-class features such as live migration, disk
snap shots, high availability, dynamic memory control
2 Performance
• Enables you to optimize resources with zero-
downtime to users.
• Industry-leading server virtualization, free!
• Extends your server consolidation savings into
3 Affordable
capital equipment, space, power and cooling costs
• Per server pricing for premium editions

4. XenServer in „Leaders“ Quadrant

5. Many Organizations Leverage Multiple Hypervisors
How many server virtualization
vendors are you using?
5 4 3 2 1
1% 3%
7%
31%
58%
What pair of vendors
are you using?
4% 5%
9% VMware/Citrix
VMware/Microsoft
41% VMware/Oracle
9%
Microsoft/Oracle
Oracle/Red Hat
32%
Microsoft/Red Hat
Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N = 71

6. XenServer
Base Enhancements

7. Simplicity & Ease of Use
• Installation, upgrade and
management of a XenServer
environment has been
drastically simplified
• Integrated StorageLink
• Workload Balancing Virtual Appliance
• Integrated Site Recovery
• vApps
• Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
• Simplified Installer

8. Rolling Pool Upgrade
• Fully automated upgrades
(after pre-checks)
• Requires HTTP, NFS or FTP
share
• Semi-automated upgrades
• CD or PXE

9. Performance & Scale Improvements
• 16 vCPU per VM
• 128Gb Memory per VM
• 1TB Physical RAM support
• XenCenter now parallelizes
XenAPI operations

10. New guest support
• Updated Guest Support
• Debian Squeeze 6.0 64-bit
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.0 (32 and 64-bit)
• SLES 10 SP4 (32 and 64-bit)
• New Guest Support
• Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 (32 and 64-bit)
• Experimental Guest Support
• CentOS 6.0 (32 and
64-bit)
• Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat 10.10 (32 and 64-bit)
• Solaris 10

11. XenServer Networking

12. Distributed Virtual Switch
• Successor of Linux bridging
• Seamless integration
• Enables network switching between XenServer hosts
• Enhances networking flexibility also for service providers
• Controller available as appliance
• Support for VM port ACLs, QoS, Port Mirroring, Monitoring
using NetFlow,...

13. XenServer
Availability & Recovery

14. Live Migration
Device Drivers Device Drivers Device Drivers
XenTool Stack XenTool Stack XenTool Stack
Xen Hypervisor Xen Hypervisor Xen Hypervisor
Bare Metal Hardware Bare Metal Hardware Bare Metal Hardware
Remote VM guest storage

15. High Availability
Protected Protected
Device Drivers Device Drivers Device Drivers
Do not Protected
XenTool Stack restart XenTool Stack XenTool Stack
Xen Hypervisor Xen Hypervisor Xen Hypervisor
Bare Metal Hardware Bare Metal Hardware Bare Metal Hardware
Remote VM Guest Storage

16. NFS Support for HA Feature
• Heartbeat disk can now be on NFS
• Previously supported block based disk types were Hardware
HBA & iSCSI

17. Disaster Recovery Architecture
XenServer Disaster Recovery
in case of failure of Site A
VM VM VM VM VM VM
1 2 n 1 2 n
XenServer XenServer
Pool A Pool B
Data Replication
by Storage
Storage A Storage B

18. Virtual Appliance Introduction (vApp)
• Support for “vApps” or Virtual
Appliances
• OVF definition of Virtual Appliance
• vApp contains one or more
Virtual Machines
• Enables grouping of VM
which can be utilized by
• XenCenter
• Integrated Site Recovery
• Appliance Import and Export
• HA

19. VM Protection & Recovery
• Policy based snapshotting and archiving for VMs
• Separate scheduling options for snapshot and archive
• Assisted Policy Configuration
• Add multiple VMs to policy
• Search filter available
• VM can only belong to 1 policy
• XenCenter or CLI
Platinum Advanced

20. XenServer
Management

21. Support for SCVMM and SCOM
• XenServer 6.0 supports SCVMM
and SCOM
• Management of XenServer VMs via
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Operations Manager pack
for monitoring
• Support for various VM and host
operations and monitoring
• Certain Host/Pool management
operations still in XenCenter (e.g.
HA, DR)

22. SCVMM Screenshots

23. StorageLink – Intelligent Storage Management
XenServer(s)
Management
Communication
Fast cloning
Snapshots
Data Communication Deduplication
Recovery
...

24. Workload Balancing

25. Workload Balancing Virtual Appliance
• Ready-to-use WLB Virtual
Appliance replaces
Windows based WLB
installer
• Up and running with WLB
in minutes rather than
hours
• Small footprint, Linux
Virtual Appliance
• ~150Mb

26. XenServer
for XenDesktop

27. XenDesktop
XenServer – Best platform for XenDesktop
XenServer
• >50% of XenDesktop deployments run on XenServer
• XenServer Enterprise included in XenDesktop
• XenServer reduces server and storage cost massively
50% lower central storage cost
by IntelliCacheTM
Windows 7 Windows 7
Best support for HDX 3D desktops 1 n
by GPU Pass-Thru
More desktops per server
by Dynamic Memory Control IntelliCacheTM
Storage XenServer
and more …

28. IntelliCacheTM in action
XenServer Host
Pooled R/W Cache
at runtime
Desktops
Intellicache
Read Cache
NFS Shared Storage
Base Disk
Clones per VM

29. Intellicache IOPS Reduction
XD5/XS 5.6 FP1 Performance Comparisons
Maximum Read/Write IOPS load on shared storage
Shared desktops provisioned MCS with and without IntelliCache
1800
1680.32
1600
1400
1200
IOPS - NFS Operations
1000
887.57
800 792.75
600
400
200
0 1.85
0.79 10.04
1.79
NFS Shared (No IntelliCache) - 110 Desktops Local SAS - 30 desktops Local SSD - 100 desktops
Max Read IOPS Max Write IOPS Max IOPS Combined

30. GPU Pass-through Support
• Enables high-end graphics in
VDI deployments with HDX 3D
Pro
• Optimal CAD application
support with XenDesktop
• More powerful than
RemoteFX, virtual GPUs, or
other general purpose graphics
solutions

31. Benefits of GPU Pass-through
Without GPU pass-through, each With GPU pass-through, hardware
user requires their own Blade PC costs are cut up to 75%
GPU cards
XenServer Host

32. Citrix XenServer 6.0 Family
• Site Recovery
Platinum • Provisioning Services for Physical Servers
• GPU Pass-Thru
• Monitoring Pack for SystemCenter Operations Manager
• Workload Balancing incl. Power Management
• StorageLinkTM Advanced Storage Management
• IntelliCacheTM for XenDesktop Storage Optimization
Enterprise
• Role-based Administration
XenServer • Live Memory Snapshots Includes also
Premium • Provisioning Services for Virtual Servers Provisioning for
Editions • Web Management Console with delegated Administration physical
desktops
• Automated VM Protection and Recovery
• Distributed Virtual Switching included in
• Mixed Resource Pools by CPU Masking
Advanced XenDesktop
• Dynamic Memory Control
• High Availability for XenDesktop related
• Performance Reporting and Alerting workloads
• Management Integration with SystemCenter Virtual Machine Manager
• SAN Boot Multipathing Support
XenServer Free • Active Directory Integration
• Storage Snapshots
• No socket restriction
• XenCenter Management incl. shared storage and XenMotionTM

33. Citrix XenServer Product Family
License Model License Model
1 Platinum 2
Enterprise
1 License per XenServer
physical Premium
XenServer Editions
included in 1 License per
Advanced XenDesktop
XenDesktop
for XenDesktop related workloads User
Free
XenServer