If you are like me running a 1280 x 1024 display resolution, you may have run into the issue of displaying a virtual machine console at 1024 x 768 display resolution inside XenCenter. Even when XenCenter is maximized I still have to use virtual and horizontal scroll bars when working on a virtual machine console. It's inconvenient to use. Here is the screen shot.

I found a solution today. After I hide the toolbar and adjust the width of the left column, the VM console can be used without relying on scroll bars.

Here is the screen shot.

To disable toolbar, go to View menu and uncheck ToolBar option.

Check out the new XenServer.
Here is the new community site.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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In the first part of this blog series we looked at specific details on Citrix Delivery Center and the Disaster Recovery demonstration for SAP NetWeaver. In this posting we will cover different High Availability solutions also demonstrated at SAP. In addition to this blog series, please refer the Reference Architecture document that provides all the technical details about Citrix and Marathon solutions implemented for SAP.

Getting back to High Availability, Citrix XenServer and Marathon Technologies everRun VM for XenServer provide solutions that covers a broad spectrum of High Availability requirements  ranging from maintenance to complete system-level fault tolerance. Given the breadth of High Availability solutions, IT administrators are bound to find a Citrix XenServer High Availability solution to meet their application availability needs.  

When looking for an HA solution, various factors such as application criticality and business impact must be considered before choosing a particular solution for an application. A more detailed report on determining availability requirements can be found here.  
In our Proof Of Concept environment at SAP, we showcased all levels of High Availability offered by XenServer and everRun VM. First let's look at the out-of-the-box High Availability solutions that XenServer alone delivers:

• XenMotion: XenMotion supports live migration of running virtual machines from one XenServer to another. The primary purpose of XenMotion is to prepare for planned server maintenance.  The end user will not experience any interruption in application performance in XenMotion.
• XenServer High Availability (HA) - Level 1: XenServer HA provides High Availability by automatically restarting failed virtual machines on a different XenServer host within the same resource pool.  The end user will experience an interruption in service as the virtual machine restarts.

In addition, Marathon Technologies everRun VM for XenServer provides High and Continuous Availability for critical virtual machines hosting business applications like SAP NetWeaver Portal:

• everRun VM for XenServer-- Level 2: Marathon Technologies everRun VM Level 2 delivers High Availability from component-level fault tolerance, eliminating downtime caused by I/O component failures and guaranteeing recovery from system failures. The solution identifies faulty I/O pathways before they become a problem and responds to a wide range of I/O and component failures. Active validation of all components on primary and secondary hosts ensures smooth recovery following any primary host component failure.  
• everRun VM for XenServer - Level 3: Marathon Technologies everRun VM Level 3 provides Continuous Availability from system-level fault tolerance, eliminating data loss, downtime and transaction loss. It offers all of the benefits of Level 2 and adds two important attributes:
  a.    Zero downtime, even with complete XenServer host failure.
  b.    Preservation of application and memory states during failure.

The following video features the Marathon everRun VM Level 3 High Availability solution demonstrated at SAP Co-Innovation Labs, Palo Alto. Again, for more technical details on the implementation, please take a look at the Reference Architecture.

The release of the free enterprise-ready XenServer virtualization infrastructure in February lowered the adoption barriers for a full managed platform, and the subsequent release of XenServer 5.5 last week has kicked the excitement up a notch.

One of the things we have noticed, though, is that some new XenServer users have had a difficult time navigating our web presence and finding all of the XenServer-specific information. The fact that we offer the compete Citrix Delivery Center solution, with powerful end-to-end delivery of all types of applications, offers a powerful set of capabilities -- but all that information can make it difficult when what you're trying to do is find all of the product information, news, and support resources for one product.

So we are now launching XenServer Central - a home on the web for all things XenServer.

You'll find everything there from pointers to product information and documentation to the latest press releases and articles to white papers to informational videos... even an easy way to follow our XenServer Army feed on Twitter (as well as other Twitter posts about XenServer).  

You'll even find some surprises, like our "How I Found Xen" contest rules.

Check it out, bookmark it, and stop back often.  It's the quickest and easiest way to stay up-to-date on all things XenServer.

We hear from many of you every day, in person, by email, by Twitter, in your own blogs -- and even some ways I can't think of -- I bet some testimonials have washed up on the beach in bottles! -- about how virtualizing your business, your lab, or your own services on Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials for XenServer have saved you money, made your environment more responsive, and simplified management.

Now we're going to put a little bit of our money where your mouth, or keyboard, is.

Let us know how you and your company have "attained Xen" -- and we'll choose a few of our favorites each month and give them a gift to thank them.  We'll pick anywhere from one to three of them each month and give the winner a gift credit of US$100 or equivalent at Amazon, iTunes, or a major online retailer in their local area. 

Send us anywhere from fifty to 500 words.  Be creative, be specific, and let others know what XenServer has done for you.  (If your creativity runs more to the visual, we'll also be announcing a video contest in the next month or two.)

Mail your entry to findxen@citrix.com. At the end of every month, the XenServer/Essentials marketing team will choose its favorites and we'll notify the winner (or winners) by the middle of the following month.

There's a catch, of course -- we ask for the rights to use your testimonial.  (See the fine print below for details.)  At a minimum, you'll need to tell us your name and email address, so we can contact you if you win. To be considered, you'll also need to specify your company, industry, and company size, as well as your job role.  If you only want us to use your job role, industry and company size, that's fine -- but if you give us permission to use your name and your company's, we'll double the prize to US$200 or equivalent. Whether you win or not, we retain the rights to use your testimonial under the terms you choose, either anonymous or named.

It's a small token of how we value your support. 

And now, the "fine print."

ELIGIBILITY

This Contest is open to individuals who have used Citrix XenServer or Citrix Essentials for XenServer. By submitting a testimonial entry, Contestants acknowledge that their entry may be showcased on the Citrix Web site, and may also be utilized in part or in full in media stories. Entries must be submitted by an individual who is at least 18 years of age.  Void where prohibited.

HOW TO ENTER

Contestants must mail their entry to findxen@citrix.com, and in 50 to 500 words, submit their entry explaining how using Citrix XenServer or Citrix Essentials for XenServer has benefited the Contestant or the company the Contestant works for. E-mail is the only medium to enter this contest and no other means of entrance will be accepted. All entries must be submitted in English. Contest timeframe is limited and can end at anytime, as deemed by Citrix.

SELECTION OF WINNER

Each entry will be judged by a Committee designated by the Citrix XenServer/Essentials Product Marketing team. Judging will be based on the unique perspective and interesting anecdotes Contestant provides in their testimonials about how Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials for XenServer have enhanced the Contestant's or Company's IT infrastructure. The decisions of the Committee will be final.

CONDITIONS OF PRIZE AWARD

The top one to three selected Contestants each month will be notified by e-mail that their testimonial has been selected; a gift credit for the desired online retailer will be delivered to their e-mail address.

Failure to comply with any term or condition in these Official Rules, or if prize is returned as non-deliverable, may result in prize forfeiture, in whole or in part, and selection of an alternate potential winner. Prizes will be shipped approximately 2 to 3 weeks after each month's Contest end. Citrix will post the names of the winners  after the prize is awarded, except where prohibited by law. Winners are responsible for any applicable federal, state, or local taxes.

COPYRIGHT AND PUBLICATION

All entries and submissions become the property of Citrix. Citrix will not return any entries. By submitting a Contest entry, a Contestant: (a) assigns to Citrix all copyrights and moral rights in and to the Contest entry arising under stature and common law, and all other rights derivative therefrom, (b) grants to Citrix permission to publish, copy, and disseminate all or part of the Contest entry; and (c) grants to Citrix permission to use the Contestant's name for advertising or promotional purposes all without any royalty, compensation or other consideration to Contestant, except where prohibited by law. Contestant agrees that e-mail shall satisfy any writing requirement which may apply to intellectual property waivers, transfers, and licenses.

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This contest is subject to all applicable federal, state, and local laws. Void where prohibited or restricted. Participation in the Contest constitutes Contestant's full and unconditional agreement to and acceptance of these Official Rules.

Citrix is not responsible for lost, late, stolen, delayed, damaged incomplete, illegible, misdirected, or unreceived e-mails and Contest entries; for failed, partial, or garbled computer transmissions; for technical failures of any kind related to the Web site or the administration of the contest; or for any technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer on-line systems, servers, access providers, computer equipment, or software. Citrix reserves the right to cancel, suspend, or modify the contest, if fraud, technical failures, viruses or bugs, beyond the reasonable control of Citrix, corrupt, impair or destroy the administration, security, fairness or integrity of the contest as determined by Citrix in their sole discretion without liability to any Contestant. Entries are subject to verification and will be declared invalid if they are illegible, forged, falsified, altered or tampered with in any way or if they violate any provision of these Official Rules.

As a condition of entering this contest, Contestant agrees that Citrix and affiliates, officers, directors, employees and agents shall not be liable for injury, loss or damage of any kind resulting from participating in this Contest or from the acceptance or use of any prize awarded. The exclusive warranty for any prize, if any, is from the manufacturer as set forth in the product documentation. All issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Official Rules, or the rights and obligations of Contestant and Citrix in connection with the contest, shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the State of Florida, U.S.A. without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules or provisions.

This past April, as Intel was releasing their new Xeon E5500 series processors, we showed you some remarkable test results demonstrating a solid 53% performance improvement between E5400 and E5500 based servers when running a virtualized DBHammer SQL Server 2008 workload [http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=65732872] 
We now wanted to move onto a workload representing the largest segment of the Citrix user community, XenApp. More specifically, XenApp 5.0 virtualized with the new XenServer 5.5. As we've seen in previous similar virtualization performance tests with XenApp on XenServer, when the XenApp guests are 32 bit (the majority of XenApp users still use use 32-bit applications), the opportunity for server consolidation can be significant. We wanted to see just how good the server consolidation opportunity is when an Intel Xeon E5500-based server is used as a XenServer host. In this case, we looked at how the server consolidation might look when going from 2.93 GHz Xeon X7350 physical XenApp servers to 2.93 GHz Xeon E5570 XenServer hosts.

For the purpose of this test, we ran the physical XenApp server with a single 32-bit workload (Windows 2003 SP2 with MS Office). It was given 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM, typical for this XenApp server workload. Using EdgeSight for Load Test (ESLT) version 3.5 we established a baseline of 25 seconds for users to login, run a standard MSOffice task script, and then logout (including network connect time). We added users until the threshold to run this sequence reached a latency of 30%, at which point the server was deemed to be at capacity. Using this configuration and test program, the maximum number of users was 47. This was a relatively small, single physical XenApp server, so 47 concurrent users was considered respectable.

Since we were testing with a Xeon E5570 server with dual quad core CPUs and 32 GB of RAM, we wanted to see how many users we could get onto a single host using multiple XenApp VMs, each with the same resource configuration as we used in the physical server test. We built 2 vCPU, 3.5 GB RAM XenApp virtual servers on the E5570 and ran two tests using the same ESLT workload. The difference between the 4 GB of RAM used in the physical server test and 3.5 in the virtual server test is due to the need for memory overhead when running multiple VMs. In the XenServer setup screen, we selected the option of running XenApp which automatically configured the VMs with the appropriate amount of shadow memory for XenApp workloads.

We also wanted to see the impact of hyperthreading to VM density per host as well as the number of concurrent users per VM. Intel describes hyperthreading as "delivering thread-level parallelism on each processor resulting in more efficient use of processor resources, higher processing throughput and improved performance." It would be interesting to see how many more concurrent XenApp users we could get with an upgrade to the E5570 and by virtualizing with XenServer 5.5 and then see how many more users we might get once hyperthreading was enabled. Would hyperthreading allow us to run twice as many VMs on a single host? To find out, we ran our first virtualized XenApp test with hyperthreading activated and then repeated the test again with it turned off. With hyperthreading, the first thing we noticed was that even though there were only 8 CPU cores on the E5570 host server, XenServer was able to see 16 vCPU cores as resources available to be assigned to VMs. As a result, we were able to successfully run a maximum of eight VMs, each with the necessary 2 vCPU cores, generating an average of 69.25 users per VM for a total of 554 users.

When we ran the second test, this time with hyperthreading turned off, and noticed that the number of users per VM increased slightly to 88. However, the maximum number of VMs was now only four, due to the fact that we now only had 8 vCPU cores to work with. As a result, the total number of users for the host was now only 352.



 

In the end, we discovered that while hyperthreading doubled the number of assignable vCPU resources, it didn't directly translate to a 2:1 increase in the number of users per VM. That's a reasonable trade-off, since hyperthreading effectively doubled the number of VMs that we could create with the same number of CPU cores. So, while were able to generate 6.5x the number of concurrent XenApp users onto a single Xeon E5570 host server without hyperthreading as compared to a single X7350 physical XenApp test server, the number of concurrent users increased to an incredible 10.8x with hyperthreading. That's a remarkable server consolidation opportunity for any 32-bit XenApp administrator. And while XenApp will virtualize very nicely with XenServer on that same dual quad core X7350 server, remember that the number of users per VM when using this test schema will be 47. Since hyperthreading isn't available on the X7350, the maximum number of VMs on the X7350 host would be 4 making the maximum number of concurrent users 188. Not bad, but nowhere near the 544 concurrent users we get on the E5570 with hyperthreading. That's an increase of 356 users, almost three times the number of concurrent XenApp users.

Pretty hard to ignore.  

As we've seen here, the promise of Intel's Nehalem technology is being realized in some very practical ways. As a result, the performance bar for XenApp, when virtualized with XenServer, is now higher than ever.

Cloud Networking is secure and robust

You can create a complete end-to-end network from one cloud network, running on XenServer, through a VPN to another network in a different cloud. All servers and hosts communicate securely over SSL VPN. Amazon Machine Images are secured by the Amazon infrastructure using security groups.

The proof of concept speaks for itself. Between the Softlayer cloud and the Amazon EC2 cloud is running a site-to-site SSL VPN using Vyatta. All of the images in this architecture are running on XenServer. This proof of concept gives rise to many networking architectures for cloud computing.

The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the Softlayer and Amazon EC2 clouds is there needs to be a secure network between the two for the transfer of data. The Vyatta AMI (Amazon Machine Image) can also function as a complete router, firewall and DNS cache. The Vyatta SSL VPN router provides security with scalability. Suppose I wanted to separate the Vyatta SSL VPN from a Vyatta OSPF router, I would just launch another instance of the Vyatta AMI.

As you can see from the network diagram and video, complete routing from the Softlayer cloud to the Amazon cloud network is seamless, without having to buy any proprietary hardware. In fact, it is very low cost compared to traditional network solutions. Virtualized networking is here, it is fast, secure and cheap.

A CloudBurst happens when Citrix Workflow Studio determines that one of the devices in the Softlayer Cloud has reached a high watermark. WFS then instructs the NetScaler VPX to start sending traffic to the Cloud - CloudBurst.

To get your own cloud, go here

Configurations used

Vyatta SSL VPN (V1) - Datacenter Configuration
Vyatta SSL VPN (V2) - Cloud Configuration
XenApp VPN Client - Cloud Configuration

Links for this solution

Vyatta for XenServer - go here
Amazon EC2 - go here
XenServer is Free! - go here
XenApp - go here
Workflow Studio - go here
XenApp VPN Client - go here
Dell Server - go here
IP Addresses - go here

Watch This

Read more news like this.

Its powerful AppExpert!

Cloud Networking is fast

You can create a complete end-to-end network from the datacenter to the cloud. All cloud servers communicate securely over SSL VPN.

Between the datacenter and the Amazon EC2 cloud is a site-to-site SSL VPN built with Vyatta. On the XenApp server in the cloud runs the Citrix Accelerator which connects back to the Citrix Branch Repeater/WANScaler at the datacenter, to accelerate data connections. The Citrix Accelerator makes cloud computing fast, Vyatta makes it secure.

The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the datacenter and Amazon EC2 cloud is there needs to be a secure network between the two for the transfer of data. The Vyatta AMI (Amazon Machine Image) can also function as a complete router and firewall. The Vyatta SSL VPN router provides security with scalability.

As you can see from the network diagram and video, complete routing from the datacenter to the Amazon cloud network is seamless. Data resides at the datacenter and is accessed, over the SSL VPN, by the Application running in XenApp. The remote user connects to XenApp, runs the application, and the application delivers the data to the remote user, quickly and securely.

To get your own cloud, go here.

Configurations used

Vyatta SSL VPN (V1) - Datacenter Configuration
Vyatta SSL VPN (V2) - Cloud Configuration
Windows VPN Client - Cloud Configuration

Links for this solution

Vyatta - go here
Amazon EC2 - go here
XenServer is Free! - go here
XenApp - go here
XenApp VPN Client - go here
Dell Server - go here
IP Addresses - go here

Watch This

Read more news like this.

Its powerful AppExpert!

VMware has released a series of KB articles outlining the requirements and best practices for installing vSphere, upgrading to vSphere, and upgrading ESX 3.0 virtual machines to ESX 4.0 hardware.  (Quoting them.)

So I'm guessing this should simplify the process, right? I know there were a few bumps in the update process for XenServer 5.0 Update 3 until we fleshed out the directions to be explicit about HA. Surely they've learned from this, and simplified their update process.

So let's see how they've focused on ease-of-use...

 4. If a SAN is connected to the ESX Server, detach the fiber before continuing with the upgrade.

 Walking from machine to machine in your data center pulling fiber connections, and reconnecting them after the upgrade?  Now that's automation.  That's ease-of-use.

Microsoft, Intel & Citrix: Dynamics of Enterprise Virtualization

An interactive discussion led by Doug Brown

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Attend this lively discussion with virtualization experts David Greschler, Iddo Kadim & Simon Crosby on the dynamics of enterprise virtualization. Register here.

Topics include:
• Virtualization in the enterprise & upcoming technologies
• Moving beyond consolidation & getting to Dynamic Datacenters
• Cloud computing & how does virtualization fit in
• Desktop Virtualization opportunities, barriers & adoption challenges

Date: Monday, June 22, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern; 10:00 AM Pacific

Don't miss this opportunity to hear perspectives on the current & future virtualization landscape and what this means for the enterprise.

Register here now.


Follow me on Twitter.

Citrix iForum Benelux 2009 is in Antwerp on June 9th and 10th. The Citrix Benelux team put together a little promo video for the event and posted it on YouTube.

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You can register here. I hope to see you and the Citrix Angels there.

Follow me on Twitter.

Twitter is obviously growing rapidily in popularity. According to a recent TechCrunch article, "Twitter's global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009". Many different groups within Citrix have begun to embrace Twitter. I use Twitter quite a bit, and have found several different Citrix Twitter accounts that I follow. Below are several recent Twitter accounts started by different departments within Citrix -

@citrixsupport - Mike Stringer, a Senior Director in Technical Support, created this account to provide updates from Citrix Technical Support.

@citrixreadiness - David McGeough from our Dublin office has been very active recently on this account.

@xenappjunkie - Vinny Sosa just started this Twitter account about XenApp.

@xdsupport - XenDesktop support. I have not yet found out who owns this account.

@citrixpartners - This twitter account is specifically for info related to Citrix partners.

@nssupport - Julio Rodriguez recently started this NetScaler related account.

@citrixblogs - This is an automated rss feed account that posts links to every new group blog post on the Citrix Community blogs.

@citrixonline - This account is dedicated to info on GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoView from Citrix Online.

@go_view - This account by Brenda Dentinger focuses on the new GoView product from Citrix Online.

@ctxs - This account is an rss feed of Citrix press releases.

@xenserverarmy - This account posts info specific to XenServer and Essentials for XenServer.

@citrix_synergy - This account posted live updates from Citrix Synergy.
There are several other new accounts that have no or few updates yet.

@xasupport

@xssupport

@citrixeducation

You can also follow me on Twitter, and other Citrix employees such as Chris Fleck, Tedd Fox, Matt Lesak, Lauren Whalen, Rich Crusco, Vishal Generiwala, Dan Feller, and Pete Downing.

If there are other Citrix accounts or Citrix employees you follow on Twitter, please post them in the comments.

In continuation of our virtualization performance tests with large enterprise application platforms running on XenServer, we recently completed an extensive series of performance and scalability tests with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on XenServer 5. In the past, we successfully demonstrated the enormous server consolidation and management benefits of virtualizing Citrix XenApp 4.5 and 5.0 as well as Microsoft Exchange 2007 using XenServer. Test results for these can be found on the white paper section of XenServer/Essentials at Citrix.com:  http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/documents_onecat.asp?contentid=683148&cid=White+Papers.

The results of tests for SQL Server 2008 on XenServer were equally as impressive.

Testing was done with readily-available load test programs, DBHammer for SQL and SQLIO, using three hardware configurations we described simply as small, medium and large. We compared results of XenServer with that of native, physical SQL servers running anywhere from one to eight instances of SQL Server 2008, all on single servers. Multiple instance SQL servers were compared to virtual host servers running an equal number of SQL Server VMs. Finally, we did comparison tests using the latest available release (as of Q1 2009) of another virtualization platform provider, described as Vendor X. The following is a highlight of the results: 

Small Configuration:

• When comparing a single instance native server with a single XenServer VM, XenServer's virtualization overhead was less than 8%. By comparison, overhead for Vendor X was 36%.
• In the two instance native vs. two VM tests, XenServer out-performed both the native server and Vendor X by a considerable margin.

Medium configuration:

• XenServer continued to virtualize with less than 8% overhead in the single instance/single VM test and outperformed both the native server and Vendor X in the two and four instance/VM tests.
• Note: Vendor X did not participate in the single instance/single VM test due to published maximum VM size limitations.
  

 
Large configuration:

• Native servers outperformed XenServer in the two instance/VM test, however XenServer outperformed native servers in the four and eight instance/VM tests.
• Vendor X outperformed XenServer in the four instance/VM test, the only test in the entire SQL Server 2008 test series where they did so. However, Vendor X performance degraded considerably once the number of VMs doubled from four to eight, while XenServer's performance actually improved.     
• Note: XenServer did not participate in the single instance/single VM test due to published maximum VM size limits. Vendor X did not participate in both the single and two instance/VM tests due to published maximum VM size limits.

  

Once again, XenServer continues to demonstrate the ability to virtualize the most demanding of enterprise application platforms with relative ease. The key benefit of using XenServer virtualization with Microsoft SQL Server lies in the low virtualization overhead, making XenServer an effective server management tool in SQL Server 2008 farms running primarily single instance servers. However, the benefits of virtualization and the strength of XenServer specifically are most pronounced with multiple instances of SQL Server. Multiple XenServer VMs are increasingly more productive than physical SQL servers as the number of instances increase. 

The results for all tests in the project along with a detailed description of the tools and methodologies can be found at: http://citrix.com/%2Fsite%2Fresources%2Fdynamic%2Fsalesdocs%2FSQL_Server2008_XS5_WP.pdf

 

During Citrix Synergy 2009 last week in Las Vegas I was part of the team which delivered the Learning Labs on XenServer. Besides presenting on XenServer 5.5 (more on that here: Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Workload Balancing Video) I also did a learning lab on Testing XenApp on XenServer and/or a different virtualization platform.

With EdgeSight for Load Testing (ESLT) now included in XenApp, it's really straightforward for partners and customers to do their own testing/bake-off and find out that XenApp is an excellent workload to virtualize on XenServer.

To make it even easier to do this, my colleague Adam Lotz created the XenApp Server Virtualization Test Toolkit, which includes:

• Documentation for setting up a test environment
• Microsoft Office Transform file
• ESLT scripts, including the one we used for our internal testing
• Tolly Group report with the results of the XenApp on XenServer 5.0 vs. VMware ESX 3.5 testing

The Toolkit can be downloaded on the XenServer Resource Kit page here.

On the Resource Kit page you can also find the Web-Based Console for XenServer, which I blogged about [here] as well as the latest version of the XenServer v2xva Conversion Utility. With the upcoming release of XenConvert 2.0 (released together with XenServer 5.5) the v2xva will become obsolete, since that functionality will be included.

We will be starting another round of testing XenApp soon (on new releases) and will update the toolkit if necesarry.

Happy testing!

Joel

With the release of XenServer 5.5 just around the corner, it is time for video demonstrations of some of the new features. In the video below you will see demo's of the following new features:
- Active Directory Authentication
- Enhanced Storage Features
- XenCenter Enhancements

Which will all be available in the free version of XenServer.

Also included in the video is a demonstration of Workload Balancing, which will be part of Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise and Platinum. The demo includes:
- Workload Balancing Installation
- Workload Balancing Congfiguration
- Using Workload Balancing
- Workload Balancing Reporting

The running time of the whole video is approximately 23 minutes.

Other components of Essentials for XenServer are:
- Lab- and Stage Management
- Provisioning Services
- StorageLink Technology
- Workflow Orchestration

Demo's for these features can be found on the Citrix blog as well as on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/citrixdemo

http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/petersc/2009/02/20/Video+Tutorials+Posted

(Workflow Studio)

Enjoy!

Joel

Gosh, it's three and a half years since Xen 3.0 first shipped.  Time flies when you're having fun.  Xen.org has announced the availability of Xen 3.4, which offers the community the results of a couple of major evolutions of the Xen code base and its community, as it has become a major player in the industry (I've seen IDC and Yankee surveys that validate that Xen is used for ~20% of virtualized server sockets today, with an accuracy of +- 3%.  It's going to be an exciting year...  Anyway, back to Xen 3.4.  Here are some major categories:

-          Xen Client Initiative (XCI) - Xen 3.4 contains a first release of the Xen client hypervisor to offer the community a compact client hypervisor with tons of features for testing and further development.  For the first time the Xen project is moving away from providing simply the hypervisor, and leaving it to vendors/users/developers to build their own system.  This release contains the whole enchilada, including Dom0, the management tool stack and Xen.  In other words, everything you need to be up and running with a Xen client system.

-          Reliability - Availability - Serviceability (RAS) - From a server-side perspective, Xen 3.4 has a raft of new  features to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combinations of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

-          Power Management - Xen 3.4 substantially improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.  Many of these changes are applicable to both client and server machines, but for example one of the features that I like on the client side scheduler is an ability to synchronize clock ticks to VMs for which the timer frequency is known, to maximize  CPU idle time and maximally utilize CPU awake time.  This is good for battery life on client systems where in general users are up for disappointment when they realize that more VMs (read: more security/flexibility) can easily translate into worse battery life.  This is the key reason that I decided to ditch a type-2 client side product recently, because my Mac battery wouldn't make it through a flight.

You can find the bits at the Xen.org website at: http://www.xen.org/download

Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor, the open source industry standard for virtualization. Xen.org is a global community of independent and industry developers, university researchers, users, and virtualization gurus who regularly contribute to the shared design, development, support, and improvement of the Xen hypervisor platform.

The new release, Xen 3.4, furthers the vision of creating a powerful, efficient, and ubiquitous virtualization hypervisor. As part of the Xen community's commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:

•    Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements-Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.

•    Reliability - Availability - Serviceability (RAS)- In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

•    Power Management - Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.

Xen 3.4 is currently available via free download to developers by visiting the Xen.org website at: http://www.xen.org/download

Momentum in the Xen Community

The Xen community remains strong and active.  On average, Xen.org receives more than 750 new code submissions to the source tree each month from developers across the world working on an array of solutions within the hypervisor. Industry leading companies such as Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, Fujitsu, and Novell are part of the vibrant Xen.org community and contribute to the development of the hypervisor code. The Yankee Group's Third Annual Virtualization Survey reports a significant increase of commercial Xen-based solutions which represent 17 percent of total market share. This includes a Citrix XenServer share of 11 percent, plus an additional six percent from other open source suppliers.

On an ongoing basis, university research and other high profile Xen projects   are regularly incorporated or run on the hypervisor. For example, Project Snowflock from the University of Toronto leverages the Xen hypervisor to instantaneously launch thousands of virtual machines for fast, efficient, scalable parallel processing and Project HXen extends the Type1 virtual machine monitor (VMM) functionality in Xen to a Type 2 VMM for a simplified method of deploying Xen to desktops, laptops, USB sticks and other devices where the base OS is left in place. For high availability, Project Kemari  and Project Remus provide transparent, comprehensive, high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. These are examples of the various contributions across academia and within the development community to Xen.org.

To date, thousands of companies and universities have chosen the power of open source Xen, making the Xen hypervisor their choice to provide virtualization in their IT environment. Last month, more than 100 attendees from the open source community participated in the Xen Summit sponsored by Oracle; similar events are planned in Europe and Asia this year to support the growing global community.

In addition, the Xen.org community is committed to providing more resources to its members:

•    Xen.org Solutions Searchis a new online tool enabling customers to quickly find consultants, hosting providers, developers, and solutions built on the Xen hypervisor platform. This search system profiles the growing ecosystem for the Xen hypervisor.

•    Xen.org is committing resources to expand the global footprint for support and promotion of the open source Xen hypervisor. Materials are being translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese with the community Wiki now available in English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Chinese, Korean Japanese, and Italian. Support groups for customers are also available in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Italian.

•    Finally, Xen.org is excited to offer an event for virtualization customers and prospects in Europe called Xen Directions,being held in conjunction with LinuxTAG on June 27, 2009 in Berlin, Germany.  A variety of hands-on Xen demonstrations will be offered to the European technical audience for the first time. In 2010, Xen.org will be hosting the first event in South America as part of the FISL event in Brazil.

In the early days of virtualization most developers and IT Pro's would not trust deploying production workloads in Virtual Machines. However, as soon as it was apparent how easy it was to test apps and configurations plus prototype new environments prior to production, virtualization became a defacto standard for test and dev environments. Over time virtualization improved in performance, robustness and management to the point where IT is now comfortable deploying a significant portion of production workloads on Virtualized platforms.

Move the clock forward to today and Cloud based Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ). Most companies are not ready to deploy their production environments to the Cloud, however every company spends a significant amount of time and resources for testing , evaluation and PoC's prior to deployment in production on premise or at a Colo. It turns out that IaaS is a great platform for test, dev and evaluations even if it may be early for enterprise production environments. Zero capital, rapid deployment, temporary workloads and elastic capacity are all attributes of IaaS that map directly to test and dev environments.

Citrix has now established the Citrix C3 Lab with Amazon Web Services to enable; PoC's, evaluations, demonstrations, testing, training and more. Pre-built Virtual Appliances available as AMI ( Amazon Machine Image ) templates are now available for XenApp, Citrix Secure Gateway and Access Gateway. In addition we are providing C3 ( Citrix Cloud Center ) Blueprints and a community site dedicated to provide " How to " descriptions, configuration guides, videos and forums to support the Lab. The time to build XenApp environments  can literally change from days to hours or even minutes utilizing C3 Labs. The expense of buying test servers for every new test or evaluation is changed from $ thousands up front to as low as 12.5 cents per hour. The time for racking, cabling and powering is  gone. The time to install Windows OS, then patches, then XenApp, then configure, then redo ( because you didn't read the manual ) is eliminated. You can literally be up and running in a little as 15 minutes. More complex environments can also be built with multiple AMI's networked together in almost unlimited configurations.

Going forward expect to see more C3 Blueprints, more Citrix products in AMI templates, and more suggested solutions to evaluate. We may also utilize the lab for tech previews or hosting research projects to gain customer insight and feedback. Stay tuned for more and give us some suggestions.

Saving significant time and money for test and dev just may be a leading indicator for how Clouds aew adopted into IT production environments later.

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Citrix XenDesktop is a finalist in the Virtualization category for the "Best of TechEd" award from Windows ITPro magazine.

If you are attending TechED 2009 in Los Angeles, please vote for XenDesktop as the "Best of TechED" at this link -

http://windowsitpro.com/awards/teched_finalists_2009.html

(you must be logged into to MSTechEd.com and attending the event to vote).

Follow the Twitter feed for "Best of TechEd 2009" here.

Follow the official TechEd 2009 Twitter feed here

Ian Pratt recently was on stage during the keynote sessions at Citrix Synergy showing the current implementation of the Type 1 Xen client hypervisor running on a PC and Mac. He did the demonstrations with Patrick Gelsinger from Intel.

The complete 45 minute Intel presentation is at http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/423.

To see Ian demonstrate the Windows Xen client go to 27 minutes 30 seconds. To see Ian demonstrate the Mac Xen client go to 42 minutes as Mark Templeton joins the stage.

For more information on the Xen Client Inititiave in the Xen.org open source community, go to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/General_Project_Information. The complete source code of the current XCI is at http://xenbits.xen.org/xenclient. If you have any questions on the open source Xen.org community, please let me know at stephen.spector@xen.org.

Ian Pratt, Citrix VP of Engineering, founder of the open source Xen.org community, and project leader of Xen.org was recently interviewed by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte of FLOSS Weekly. The recorded podcast is about 40 minutes long and can be accessed at http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/FLOSS-067.mp3.

This PodCast is a chance to learn about the origins of the Xen.org Xen Hypervisor project, how Cloud Computing was really behind its origins, and how the Xen.org community continues to drive the leading open source hypervisor.