Search the Community

Citrix have just announced a new version of their free Xen Server, version 5.5 The bullet points: * Consolidated Backup allows third-party backup vendors to interface directly with XenServer to provide full and incremental, in-guest, file and image backups of virtual machines. The new consolidated backup capabilities in XenServer also provide customers with the ability to execute full GUI-based snapshots directly from the XenCenter central management console. * Enhanced Conversion Tools make it easy to convert virtual machines created in the VMDK format (commonly used by VMware) into the VHD format (commonly used by Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V). The new XenConvert tools also make it easy to seamlessly convert between any of the common open virtualization format packages, including OVF (open virtualization format), OVA (open virtual appliance) and XVA (XenServer virtual appliance). * Enhanced Search enables customers to view and manage XenServer environments by a range of criteria including VM name, resource pool, location, server, storage repository, snapshot time, and network name – all from a single location. It also provides the ability to create custom views or folders. * Active Directory Integration makes it easy for customers to use their AD credentials to mange XenServer hosts as well as log and audit user activity. * Expanded Guest Support adds SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, Debian 5.0 and RedHat/CentOS/Oracle 5.3 to a growing list of supported guests that includes virtually every version of the Windows and Linux operating systems. The beta, as well as a 30-day trial version of Citrix Essentials, is available at Citrix Systems » Citrix XenServer: Efficient Virtual Server Software. The beta version of the new Citrix XenServer 5.5 is also available today and can be downloaded free of charge from Citrix Systems » Products » -- XenServer/Essentials » XenServer. The 5.5 version of both product lines will be generally available June 19. Linky: Citrix Systems » Citrix Upgrades Server Virtualization Product Lines for XenServer and Hyper-V

Hi all, I've been playing with Xen, VMware ESX and Hyper-V for a little while and I was just wondering if there seems to be a consensus of which is most popular in a school environment? If you are using one of these virtualisation technologies in a school/education system or are likely to soon, would you mind voting in the poll to show your preference? If you look at threads like this one then you can see a huge use of VMware in more enterprise-level setups, and certainly everything I've read and seen would suggest VMware ESX is the most powerful virtualisation technology out there. However, here are my personal experiences with the three technologies: Hyper-V - Disappointing, far more complex to set up than it needs to be, and only supports Windows (and SUSE Enterprise) guest VMs. Even in it's Core form, I personally find Server 2008 to be much more work to configure and manage than setting up a ESX or Xen host. If you want to do things properly then you need SCVMM (and a MS SQL server). Costs are good as it will be mostly 'free' for those who have MS volume licensing. Xen - I considered Xen to be the underdog as it hasn't got the large deployments of VMware or the big name of Microsoft behind it, but so far it has really impressed me. It is so unbelievably easy to set up and use, the XenCenter console take two minutes to install and configure, and there's no dependence on a central management server or SQL database to control your setup. Does anyone know where the pool config is stored with Xen - presumably it's replicated across the hosts? VMware ESX - I really wanted to love this product, but so far it hasn't impressed me that much. Maybe vSphere will be better? The ESX Hardware Compatibility List seems pickier than Xen (not a problem if you're buying new servers, but it was a real pain to have to buy new NICs to fit in brand new Dell desktops for testing), it requires a dedicated VCenter Server that needs an SQL database (you can't really virtualise this box so does it not become a single point of failure?), and seems far more awkward to set up than Xen. My Xen setup was as simple as building a couple of hosts (five minute each), installing XenCenter (two minutes), configure a LUN on a SAN (two minutes), create a Pool on XenCenter, add the hosts and a Storage Repository from the SAN (five minutes), tick High Availability (two seconds) and I've got a failover-level setup... With Hyper-V and ESX doing this seems a lot more complicated, or is it just me? Many thanks, Chris

I'm going to do the 2008 R2 update on our domain controllers at some point. I've been playing with hyper-V and virtualized some of our other servers. Is it a good idea to virtualize a domain controller? Any disadvantages?

ive got a fresh install of fedora 11 and ive installed the virtual management stuff in F11, i then installed XEN and went to set it as the default boot entry in grub, but it hasnt created any grub entries. Can anyone paste the grub entries from a machine running Xen on Fedora?

Installing Ubuntu on Citrix XenServer is fine; but to get better performance it should be running paravirtualised (PV) instead of hardware virtualised (HVM - the default). Ubuntu isn't natively supported, so it needs a bit of manual work to achieve it. I've put together a page on our wiki that details the steps needed to get it up and running in PV mode and get the XenServer tools installed (and running at start-up!). Ubuntu 10.04 LTS paravirtualised on Citrix XenServer [bishop Barrington IT Wiki] If you spot any mistakes please correct me. Enjoy.

Hey, Currently looking at getting rid of an end of year surplus by taking Sun up on their "buy one get one free" server off, and half price SAN offer to both update our server hardware and to virtualise as many of our physical servers as possible. The hardware we're looking at using is 4 x Sun Fire X4150 servers and a Sun 7110 SAN. The software we're currently looking at using Citrix XenServer Enterprise (or XenServer Essentials Enterprise when they eventually release it) for the HA, live motion, and workload balancing features that it would give us. Each of the servers and the SAN comes with 4 x gigabit ethernet ports (lights out management is a separate port), but after talking to Dell they seem to recommend at least 6 and preferably 8 network ports per server when using iSCSI + virtualisation. For anyone that is using an iSCSI SAN and virtualised servers how many physical network ports do you have, and how have you set them up? Is the Dell recommendation correct, or is it overkill compared to the 4-ports that I already have? Cheers, John