XenServer 6.0 NewsChristian FerberSystems Engineer Datacenter & CloudServer Virtualization

E-Mail: christian.ferber@eu.citrix.com

Citrix XenServer

• Free XenServer Impact

• 450,000+ downloads

• 75,000+ unique organizations

• > 50% of Fortune 500 run XenServer

• Proven with leading vendors technology

• Entrusted by demanding organizations to run the

most mission critical apps

• Optimized to run XenDesktop deployments

• Used by the largest clouds

• Validated by market thought leaders

Best virtualizationplatform

“XenServer 5.5 now meets 100% of our

enterprise requirements”

-Burton Group, 2009

“Look closely at Citrix as an alternative to

VMware. [Citrix] offers many of the same

features as VMware with more flexibility and a

lower price.”-Info-Tech Research Group, 2011

Magic Quadrant “Leader" –noted for features

and price/performance”

-Gartner, 2011

Why Customers Virtualize with XenServer?

• 10 minutes to Xen• 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

• Enables you to optimize resources with zero-downtime to users.

• Industry-leading server virtualization, free!• Extends your server consolidation savings into

capital equipment, space, power and cooling costs• Per server pricing for premium editions

Affordable3

Performance2

Ease of Use1

XenServer in „Leaders“ Quadrant

Many Organizations Leverage Multiple Hypervisors

1% 3%7%

31%58%

How many server virtualizationvendors are you using?

5 4 3 2 1

41%

32%

9%

9%

4% 5%

What pair of vendorsare you using?

VMware/Citrix

VMware/Microsoft

VMware/Oracle

Microsoft/Oracle

Oracle/Red Hat

Microsoft/Red Hat

Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N = 71

XenServerBase Enhancements

• Installation, upgrade and management of a XenServerenvironment has been drastically simplified• Integrated StorageLink

• Workload Balancing Virtual Appliance

• Integrated Site Recovery

• vApps

• Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard

• Simplified Installer

Simplicity & Ease of Use

• Fully automated upgrades (after pre-checks)• Requires HTTP, NFS or FTP

share

• Semi-automated upgrades• CD or PXE

Rolling Pool Upgrade

• 16 vCPU per VM

• 128Gb Memory per VM

• 1TB Physical RAM support

• XenCenter now parallelizes XenAPI operations

Performance & Scale Improvements

• 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

New guest support

XenServer Networking

• 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,...

Distributed Virtual Switch

XenServer Availability & Recovery

Remote VM guest storage

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device Drivers

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device Drivers

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device Drivers

Live Migration

Remote VM Guest Storage

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device Drivers

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device Drivers

Bare Metal Hardware

Xen Hypervisor

XenTool Stack

Device DriversDo not

restart

Protected

ProtectedProtected

High Availability

• Heartbeat disk can now be on NFS

• Previously supported block based disk types were Hardware HBA & iSCSI

NFS Support for HA Feature

Disaster Recovery Architecture

XenServer

Pool A

Storage A Storage B

Data Replication

by Storage

XenServer

Pool B

VM

1

VM

2

VM

nVM

1

VM

2

VM

n

XenServer Disaster Recovery

in case of failure of Site A

• 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

Virtual Appliance Introduction (vApp)

• 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

VM Protection & Recovery

Platinum Advanced

XenServerManagement

• 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)

Support for SCVMM and SCOM

SCVMM Screenshots

StorageLink – Intelligent Storage Management

Fast cloning

Snapshots

Deduplication

Recovery

...

Data Communication

Management

Communication

XenServer(s)

Workload Balancing

• 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

Workload Balancing Virtual Appliance

XenServerfor XenDesktop

• >50% of XenDesktop deployments run on XenServer

• XenServer Enterprise included in XenDesktop

• XenServer reduces server and storage cost massively

XenServer – Best platform for XenDesktop

XenServer

XenDesktop

Windows 7

IntelliCacheTM

XenServer

1

Storage

Windows 7

n

50% lower central storage cost

by IntelliCacheTM

Best support for HDX 3D desktops

by GPU Pass-Thru

More desktops per server

by Dynamic Memory Control

and more …

R/W Cache

at runtime

IntelliCacheTM in action

NFS Shared Storage

Intellicache

Read Cache

XenServer Host

Base Disk

Clones per VM

Pooled

Desktops

Intellicache IOPS Reduction

792.75

0.79 10.04

887.57

1.85 1.79

1680.32

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

NFS Shared (No IntelliCache) - 110 Desktops Local SAS - 30 desktops Local SSD - 100 desktops

IOP

S -

NF

S O

pera

tio

ns

Max Read IOPS Max Write IOPS Max IOPS Combined

XD5/XS 5.6 FP1 Performance Comparisons Maximum Read/Write IOPS load on shared storage

Shared desktops provisioned MCS with and without IntelliCache

• 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

GPU Pass-through Support

Without GPU pass-through, each user requires their own Blade PC

Benefits of GPU Pass-through

With GPU pass-through, hardwarecosts are cut up to 75%

GPU cards

XenServer Host

Enterprise

Platinum

FreeXenServer

XenServer

Premium

Editions

• Automated VM Protection and Recovery

• Distributed Virtual Switching

• Mixed Resource Pools by CPU Masking

• Dynamic Memory Control

• High Availability

• Performance Reporting and Alerting

Citrix XenServer 6.0 Family

• GPU Pass-Thru

• Monitoring Pack for SystemCenter Operations Manager

• Workload Balancing incl. Power Management

• StorageLinkTM Advanced Storage Management

• IntelliCacheTM for XenDesktop Storage Optimization

• Role-based Administration

• Live Memory Snapshots

• Provisioning Services for Virtual Servers

• Web Management Console with delegated Administration

• Site Recovery

• Provisioning Services for Physical Servers

Advanced

• Management Integration with SystemCenter Virtual Machine Manager

• SAN Boot Multipathing Support

• Active Directory Integration

• Storage Snapshots

• No socket restriction

• XenCenter Management incl. shared storage and XenMotionTM

included in

XenDesktopfor XenDesktop related

workloads

Includes also

Provisioning for

physical

desktops

Enterprise

Platinum

Free

XenServer

XenServer

Premium

Editions

Citrix XenServer Product Family

Advancedincluded in

XenDesktopfor XenDesktop related workloads

1 License per

physical

XenServer

1 License per

XenDesktop

User

License Model

1

License Model

2