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One of the most requested features from Service Providers and Enterprises is IP Address Management (IPAM). I can't tell you how many times I have listened to customers ask for a platform that manages IP Addresses effectively on a large scale, even to the point of managing disparate classes and subnets. What happens when two companies merge, do you munge spreadsheets or do you have this software yet? It's not only the software that is unique but that it runs as a XenServer VM in Para-Virtualized mode, meaning it is high-performance. Even better is these run in linux. 
Nixu Software specializes in software designed for DNS, DHCP and IP address management. To run Nixu Products in a virtual machine environment, simply download the ISO installation media from their website and boot up a new virtual machine. The installation media auto-installs the entire server stack.
Unlike traditional computing appliances that require specific hardware to run on, Nixu Products provide a quick and cost-efficient way to migrate and consolidate core network services such as DNS and DHCP to virtualized computing environments. By streamlining tedious network and system management routines, Nixu Products offer exceptional availability and ROI.
Here are some of the Highlights of using NIXU DNS and DHCP in a XenServer VM:
- Centralized IP Address Management
- Merge/Join IP Blocks
- Split IP Blocks
- Subnets in use – report
- Subnets free – report
- Addresses in use – report
- Addresses free – report
- Runs in XenServer as a VM, optimized for Para-Virtualization
- Supports pv-ops
- Supports IPv6
- Uses secure communication between secondary name servers, using keys
- Role based administration
- Assign subnets to administrative domains
- Supports BIND syntax
- For the BIND junkies
- Has a configuration checker
- Automated installation and maintenance reducing management overhead
- Centralized management of all nameservers
- Hardened design for security
WATCH this video tip:
Download the Nixu / XenServer Integration Guide.
Read about Nixu Software here.
Read about Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.
Download Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.
Tap into the power of AppExpert!
Virtualize your servers, desktops, applications; the benefits are clear, it's a question of when not if - sure get that. Virtualization is not an end point, but an enabler of a more flexible and efficient compute environment - ok get that too. Ultimately virtualization must enable IT to contribute to better business results. What about other parts of the IT infrastructure beyond servers, clients and applications? Are we evolving to having islands of virtual clients and servers connected via a static network infrastructure? See this post in Archimedius for more on this theme.
Not to be left behind in the dust of server virtualization, network interconnects are also marching toward being enabled in dynamic virtual environments. Case in point is HP's recent introduction of its Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology, a new component in HP's Virtual Connect architecture. Flex-10 enables you to add 4x more NICs to each server blade without more hardware. In addition to supporting oodles of connections and NICS, Flex-10 provides the ability to dynamically adjust bandwidth for each network connection on the fly. With HP Flex-10 technology, you choose how many NICs are on each server and can adjust the bandwidth of each NIC in increments of 100 Mb.
This HP Flex-10 product is an example of how it is not just servers that can be virtualized and illustrates how the days of static infrastructure will soon be over. HP product details are posted here. Seems those HP hardware folks have some cool few new virtualization solutions to share beyond their XenServer based virtualization solutions. I'm now wondering how long before those virtualized server workloads are able to talk intelligently with the network infrastructure to automate and optimize the cloud ....?
Citrix Education just announced the rollout of its redesigned certification program. The new certification structure, developed in collaboration with Citrix customers, offers candidates more choices such as certification tracks by role and specialization, as well as streamlined update paths that make it easier for IT professionals to stay current. The certification changes support IT professionals' need to demonstrate specialized knowledge in key server, desktop and application virtualization technologies.
The next generation of Citrix certifications deliver:
1. Certification by job level
Three levels of IT professional certification are offered, which allow candidates to match their certification path to their job role:
- Administrator Series - Consists of the Citrix Certified Administrator™ (CCA), which has been expanded to include tracks supporting Platinum product editions. Also offered is the new Citrix Certified Advanced Administrator™ (CCAA) certification, which takes the CCA one step further with in-depth product specialization.
- Engineer Series - Consists of the new Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer™ (CCEE), which offers seasoned IT professionals the opportunity to validate their ability to combine the coordination of operational planning efforts with 'tactical design' expertise and integration know-how.
- Architect Series - Consists of a re-vamped Citrix Certified Integration Architect™ (CCIA) certification, which allows IT professionals to hone real world skills with a range of technologies to design strategic approaches to application and workload delivery.
2. Certification by solution
Various paths, including Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Server Virtualization and Application Networking, are available, so that IT professionals can align their certifications to the technology solutions most relevant to their job role.
3. Certification by product specialization
IT professionals can achieve specific designations for the latest Citrix products, such as Citrix XenApp™, Citrix® NetScaler®, Citrix XenDesktop™, Citrix XenServer™, and others, to prove their competency and skills on the latest enterprise products.
4. Simplified certification update paths
With the release of the next generation certification programs, update paths to the newest CCEE and CCIA certifications will be available for current advanced certification holders. These update paths will significantly reduce requirements by focusing on the domains, features and technologies that are most required to advance to the next generation CCEE and CCIA certifications.
For more information on the next generation certification structure, visit www.citrixeducation.com > Certifications.
Citrix technologies have been around for almost 20 years, we have helped other companies to stay on their feet during time of economic crisis by implementing access and application virtualization technologies that not only helped them succeed with their business needs but also reduced their operational costs.
With the economy outlook looking so obscure, companies have begun seeking for new ways to reduce costs while challenged to provide their customers with unchanged level of services and products.
Understanding what technologies to invest in times like this can be crucial decision; while researching some market trends I stumbled upon a recent post on ZDNet by Dan Kusnetzky with the title "Can virtualization help when times get tough?"
After a brief analysis Dan pointed our six ways virtualization can help a company financially, here they are:
- Access virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix and Microsoft, can make it possible for administrative and operational cost reductions while still making needed applications available in a secure, reliable way.
- Application virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, Microsoft and many others, can make it possible for applications to be made available to staff members in a reliable way and even make it easier to update these applications without having to visit each and every laptop or desktop computer.
- Processing virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron and many others can either allow many machines to work together to get tasks done more quickly to optimize staff member's time or consolidate tasks onto a smaller number of physical machines. This approach can result in hardware, software, operational and administrative cost reductions.
- Network virtualization can make it possible to reduce the costs of administrative and operating costs.
- Storage virtualization can do for storage what processing virtualization does for processing.
- Management and security software for virtualized environments may be the area having the biggest opportunity for cost reduction.
Citrix was mentioned not once or twice, but at least 3 times and shows how we've managed to grow exponentially our portfolio; Citrix is now more than ever the ONLY end-to-end virtualization company from Network (NetScaler, WanScaler), Server (XenServer, Provisioning Server), Application (XenApp) all the way to Desktop (XenDesktop).
To compliment the great work done by Dan pointing out the values of virtualization, I will list below some extra reading that can help you define the best strategy to save money while using virtualization technologies:
The Economic Impact of Provisioning Server Streaming Platform
This study describes the financial impact of moving from a traditional datacenter environment, where individual servers are dedicated to specific functions, to an environment where applications and content are streamed to an individual server that exists in a pool of shared servers dynamically using Provisioning Server.
Virtual Desktop ROI Calculator
Calculate your savings with a desktop delivery solution you can take to the bank!
Green IT: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint with Citrix
This white paper explains how Citrix solutions can help bring environmental and organizational objectives into alignment, by alleviating the energy impact of equipment needed to serve both the datacenter and the desktop.
For more, visit: Citrix.com/Solutions
Best,
Gus
PS. Sorry if some of the links require a sign up; I hate signing up for stuff, but these docs are totally worth it...
...And don't forget to check out Chris Fleck's posts about Cloud Economics:
Join Citrix and Egenera on November 11th at 1:30pm EDT, as Dee Cantrell, CIO of Emory Healthcare (EHC), shares her award-winning experience leading The Virtualization Project. Learn how, by implementing technology from Egenera and Citrix, Cantrell and her focused team:
- Improved TCO by 60 percent
- Streamlined administration requirements by 80 percent
- Created an affordable, scalable and highly available IT infrastructure.
- Provided secure access under HIPAA Privacy and Security Regulations
Register today at http://www.egenera.com/ehc
I have had several customers, and even other Systems Engineers here at Citrix, ask me about the differences between the newly released XenApp plugin, formerly known as the ICA client, and the Desktop Receiver which ships with XenDesktop. So, I figured I might as well write my inaugural blog on this topic.
Introduction
Because the XenDesktop and XenApp technologies are so closely tied, many customers, and even some SEs, get confused around which client to use for the XenDesktop environment. Others view the Desktop Receiver and the XenApp plugin as interchangeable and believe they can be used to access either type of resource. Recently, confusion has increased around which client to use when you need both XenDesktop and XenApp connectivity because of two statements found in the documentation for XenDesktop 2.1.
Statement 1 from the Product Update for XenDesktop 2.1:
An updated Desktop Receiver for use on XenDesktop AND XenApp resulting in a single point of access and management for customers living the virtualization dream and benefiting from the entire Citrix solution.
Statement 2 from the Release Notes of XenDesktop 2.1:
Installation of either the Desktop Receiver or the Desktop Receiver Embedded Edition on the same computer as XenApp plugins (client-side software for Citrix XenApp) is not supported. If you want your users to be able to access both virtual desktops and virtual applications from the same computer, Citrix recommends installing XenApp plugins on the virtual desktops that you create with XenDesktop. This allows your virtual desktops to receive virtual applications.
At first, I was confused by what appeared to be a contradiction of statements. However, as I began to research the behavior, I decided to go ahead and try the two clients. After spending part of a day testing both, I think I can explain how both of the statements above are correct, though they could have probably been worded a bit clearer.
The XenApp plugin (version 11.0) and Desktop Receiver (version 10.251) are different ICA clients. They both use a similar code base, so the functionality is similar. Both clients allow you to access published XenDesktops and/or published XenApp resources (applications or desktops), depending on what resources are available. However, at the moment, these two clients are not yet merged into a single code base, so you get slightly different behaviors between the two clients.
Using the Desktop Receiver
Since the Desktop Receiver and the XenApp plugin client share similar ICA code they cannot co-exist together, hence the need for Statement 2 from the XenDesktop 2.1 Release Notes. If you install the XenApp plugin client first and then attempt to install the Desktop Receiver, the install will fail and require that you first remove the XenApp plugin because it holds a version number higher than the Desktop Receiver.
The Desktop Receiver has only support for PNAgent and the web client. The Program Neighborhood Classic (with custom ICA connections) client is not installed with the Desktop Receiver. The Desktop Receiver does support the Desktop Toolbar, so you can run in modes other than full screen. The only limitation that I am aware of in the Desktop Receiver is that if you are using the Desktop Toolbar, the pass-through authentication method is not supported on Web Interface. You need to set the site to Explicit authentication. Once you authenticate to the site, the credentials are passed automatically into the XenDesktop. The loss of pass through authentication when using the Desktop Toolbar is a result of a tightened security infrastructure. Citrix is looking to address this in a future release.
When the Desktop Receiver is pointed to a XenApp farm, it works as a standard PNA client, and displays those resources only, thus validating Statement 1 from the XenDesktop 2.1 product update. The screenshot below shows the Desktop Receiver working like a normal PNAgent when pointed to a PNAgent configuration site that only has a XenApp farm configured.
One thing to remember is that with the Web Interface 5.0 that ships with XenDesktop, you can create a Web Interface or PNAgent site that aggregates resources from both the XenDesktop and XenApp farms, by simply adding the additional farm through the Manage Server Farms link on the site configuration. Then when users access the site, they will have all their available resources displayed. The screenshot below shows the Desktop Receiver when pointed to PNAgent site that has aggregated a XenApp farm with a XenDesktop farm.
Using the XenApp Plugin
With the XenApp plugin, access to normal XenApp published resources works as expected and you have the PNAgent, Web, and Program Neighborhood Classic (with custom ICA connections) options available. When accessing a published XenDesktop, you only get Full Screen mode (no support for the Desktop Toolbar or long-running operations feedback). I was able to successfully install and use the XenApp plugin to access both a published XenDesktop and a published XenApp application.
If you have an older ICA client, and you want to use XenDesktop, the recommendation is to use the Desktop Receiver for the user's workstation and then inside the XenDesktop, install the older ICA client for connectivity into the existing farm. If you are going to use an ICA client or XenApp plugin in the XenDesktop image, be sure to point it to a site that does not have the XenDesktop published, or you risk letting the user create a XenDesktop auto-reconnect loop that will require manual intervention to stop.
Conclusion
In the end, it depends on what functionality you want or need to provide to the end-users. If you need Desktop Toolbar support, you need to deploy the Desktop Receiver. If you need the Program Neighborhood Classic or custom ICA connections, then your choice is to use the XenApp plugin. If you don't have any pressing needs for either of the client-specific features, then you can choose either one.
The new XenApp template for XenServer has generated a great deal of interest. There have been a several posts about XenApp on XenServer on the Citrix Blog (read Dan Feller's posts here, here, here and here). You can listen to an interview with Dan about this topic as part of the Citrix Delivery Center podcast here.
Recently Laura Whalen in our Solutions Marketing team put together an excellent slide presentation that covers the reasons why you would want to virtualize XenApp on XenServer.
One of the first few slides of the presentation reviews the business case for virtualization based on data from IDC and Gartner. It occurred to me as I reviewed this slide that this might be a good opportunity to add in some slides I recently put together for a different purpose.
A couple of months ago I was asked to give a presentation to some non-technical business leaders in my area about virtualization. As I thought about how to explain to these CEO's and CFO's why virtualization gets so much buzz, it seemed obvious to focus on the costs savings. In my opinion, the server consolidation and costs savings created by server virtualization are a primary driver in most companies first foray into server virtualization. Rapid deployment, high availability and disaster recovery obviously play a huge role in expanding the reach of virtualization, but in my experience the costs savings of consolidation are the biggest initial factor. The ridiculously high costs of energy these days make this costs savings even more important.
After making that decision, I decided to take some data I saw in a webinar by John Humphries of IDC and Simon Crosby of Citrix (archive here
) to use as the basis for the presentation to these business leaders.
Of course, a slide presentation full of numbers is no more effective than a presentation filled with technology jargon. I decided to use as many visuals as I possibly could so I did not put the audience to sleep in the first two minutes. I added in numerous stock photos (mostly from istockphoto.com), some public domain pictures from USA.gov and a few photos and screen shots of my own to make a very visual presentation. I have taken a few slides from that deck and added them into the deck built by Laura Whalen.
The template for the other slide deck included a black background. I was not able to get the graphics to work properly in the standard Citrix template (with a white background) without many hours of pixel by pixel editing. I was able to use the transparent re-color feature of PowerPoint 2007 to convert the graphics from Laura's presentation to work with a black background, however.
My Frankenstein presentation creation is embedded below.
(click here to see the presentation in full screen)
Scalability of XenApp on other virtualization products has prevented many from using server virtualization with XenApp. One of the highest priorities after the acquisition of XenSource was to improve this scalability. The new XenApp template does this. You can virtualize the management components of your XenApp farm and individual XenApp servers to gain the availability, management and disaster recovery benefits. We have found that for many resource intensive applications a one vm to physical server provides the best scalability. You can still gain the availability, management and recovery benefits for those servers.
Since there are many notes included with this presentation (mostly from Laura) I have uploaded a pdf of the notes pages (in a zip file to shrink the size a bit).
EDIT: The posts and podcast interview I did with Dan Feller provide much more in depth coverage of this topic. To avoid any confusion, the x64 version of XenApp is recommended for use with XenApp on XenServer. The server utilization number referred to in the slide deck is from an IDC estimate of all servers, not just XenApp servers. As I mentioned in the post and you can see from the documentation provided by Dan, most XenApp servers running applications for users will be the most scalable when one vm is running on one physical server. The cost savings from reduction in servers comes into play with those servers because XenApp running on XenServer is much more scalable than any other virtualization platform based on our testing. That greater scalability will lead to a reduction in servers when using server virtualization. Further, the ability to consolidate license servers, data collectors, and other components offer additional consolidation savings. All of this is in addition to the deployment, support and high availability savings possible with server virtualization.
Edit #2: I have received a few emails asking to see the slides I created for the non-technical audience of business leaders. You can find the presentation "The Buzz on Virtualization" here. This is a very high level overview. One technical person told me it was so high level his grandmother could understand it (I do not think he meant that as a compliment ... ). It did work very well for the audience where I presented it. I like to experiment a great deal with slide design and you can see that in this deck.
This next embedded presentation dives down into the technical details of how live migration of a virtual machine happens with XenMotion.
You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
In a previous post, I embedded a presentation (thanks to SlideShare.net) that briefly reviewed the new server virtualization features of Citrix XenServer 5.
This next embedded presentation dives down into more technical detail for each of the new features.
You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
During a recent presentation I gave to one of our alliance partners, an interesting question came up during the discussion - How can a commercial software company build a business based on open source software? After the question was asked, I saw many heads nodding in agreement. On the surface, this question may appear to be difficult to answer.
An excellent way to answer this pressing question can be found in a very intriguing book called Wikinomics. There is a story in the opening chapter about GoldCorp, a gold mining company. The story of the GoldCorp Challenge highlights the power of working with a very diverse group of people to take innovation and creativity to new heights. Rob McEwen of GoldCorp used that creativity and innovation to build a very successful business.
Read this short excerpt from the opening chapter -
It was late in the afternoon, on a typically harsh Canadian winter day, as Rob McEwen, the CEO of Goldcorp Inc., stood at the head of the boardroom table confronting a room full of senior geologists. The news he was about to deliver was not good. In fact it was disastrous, and McEwen was having a hard time shielding his frustration.
The small Toronto-based gold-mining firm was struggling, besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, which had caused them to cease mining operations. Conditions in the marketplace were hardly favorable. The gold market was contracting, and most analysts assumed that the company's fifty-year-old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, the mine seemed destined for closure, and Goldcorp was likely to go down with it. Tensions were running at fever pitch. McEwen had no real experience in the extractive industries, let alone in gold mining. Nevertheless, as an adventurous young mutual fund manager he had gotten involved in a takeover battle and emerged as Goldcorp, Inc.'s majority owner. Few people in the room had much confidence that McEwen was the right person to rescue the company. But McEwen just shrugged off his critics.
He turned to his geologists and said, "We're going to find more gold on this property, and we won't leave this room tonight until we have a plan to find it." At the conclusion of the meeting he handed his geologists $10 million for further exploration and sent them packing for Northern Ontario. Most of his staff thought he was crazy but they carried out his instructions, drilling in the deepest and most remote parts of the mine. Amazingly, 2 few weeks later they arrived back at Goldcorp headquarters beaming with pride and bearing a remarkable discovery: Test drilling suggested rich deposits of new gold, as much as thirty times the amount Goldcorp was currently mining!
The discovery was surprising, and could hardly have been better timed. But after years of further exploration, and to McEwen's deep frustration, the company's geologists struggled to provide an accurate estimate of the gold's value and exact location. He desperately needed to inject the urgency of the market into the glacial processes of an old-economy industry.
In 1999, with the future still uncertain, McEwen took some time out for personal development. He wound up at an MIT conference for young presidents when coincidentally the subject of Linux came up. Perched in the lecture hall, McEwen listened intently to the remarkable story of how Linus Torvalds and a loose volunteer brigade of software developers had assembled the world-class computer operating system over the Internet. The lecturer explained how Torvalds revealed his code to the world, allowing thousands of anonymous programmers to vet it and make contributions of their own.
McEwen had an epiphany and sat back in his chair to contemplate. If Goldcorp employees couldn't find the Red Lake gold, maybe someone else could. And maybe the key to finding those people was to open up the exploration process in the same way Torvalds "open sourced" Linux.
McEwen raced back to Toronto to present the idea to his head geologist. "I'd like to take all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world," he said. "Then we'll ask the world to tell us where we're going to find the next six million ounces of gold." McEwen saw this as an opportunity to harness some of the best minds in the industry. Perhaps understandably, the in-house geologists were just a little skeptical.
Mining is an intensely secretive industry, and apart from the minerals themselves, geological data is the most precious and carefully guarded resource. It's like the Cadbury secret-it's just not something companies go around sharing. Goldcorp employees wondered whether the global community of geologists would respond to Goldcorp's call in the same way that software developers rallied around Linus Torvalds. Moreover, they worried about how the contest would reflect on them and their inability to find the illusive gold deposits.
McEwen acknowledges in retrospect that the strategy was controversial and risky. "We were attacking a fundamental assumption; you simply don't give away proprietary data," he said. "It's so fundamental," he adds, "that no one had ever questioned it." Once again, McEwen was determined to soldier on.
In March 2000, the "Goldcorp Challenge" was launched with a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants with the best methods and estimates. Every scrap of information (some four hundred megabytes worth) about the 55,000-acre property was revealed on Goldcorp's Web site. News of the contest spread quickly around the Internet, as more than one thousand virtual prospectors from fifty countries got busy crunching the data.
Within weeks, submissions from around the world came flooding in to Goldcorp headquarters. As expected, geologists got involved. But entries came from surprising sources, including graduate students, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers, all seeking a piece of the action. "We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry," says McEwen. "When I saw the computer graphics I almost fell out of my chair." The contestants had identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, 50 percent of which had not been previously identified by the company. Over 80 percent of the new targets yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found. McEwen estimates the collaborative process shaved two to three years off their exploration time.
Today Goldcorp is reaping the fruits of its open source approach to exploration. Not only did the contest yield copious quantities of gold, it catapulted his under-performing $ 100 million company into a $9 billion juggernaut while transforming a backward mining site in Northern Ontario into one of the most innovative and profitable properties in the industry. Needless to say McEwen is one happy camper. As are his shareholders. One hundred dollars invested in the company in 1993 is worth over $3,000 today.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Goldcorp Challenge is the validation of an ingenious approach to exploration in what remains a conservative and highly secretive industry. Rob McEwen bucked an industry trend by sharing the company's proprietary data and simultaneously transformed 2 lumbering exploration process into a modem distributed gold discovery engine that harnessed some of the most talented minds in the field.
McEwen saw things differently. He realized that the uniquely qualified minds to make new discoveries were probably outside the boundaries of his organization, and by sharing some intellectual property he could harness the power of collective genius and capability. In doing so he stumbled successfully into the future of innovation, business, and how wealth and just about everything else will be created. Welcome to the new world of wikinomics where collaboration on a mass scale is set to change every institution in society.
Open source, wikis, blogging and other new forms of mass collaboration like MIT OpenCourseWare, Innocentive, NineSigma, and YourEncore are discussed in depth in Wikinomics.
Reading this book gave me a much firmer grasp on the real power of building a business by massively collaborating with others to mine for the golden nuggets of creativity and innovation of the open source Xen community. Citrix is able to use those golden nuggets to craft a fully supported and managed commercial software product and business.
Simon Crosby, CTO of the Citrix VMD Division, did an interview with Brian Ducharme of Virtual Strategy Magazine during VMWorld to review the Citrix announcements during the event.
Here are the Citrix press releases from the event -
Citrix Unveils Cloud Computing Strategy and Product Line
Citrix and Marathon Partner to Bring World Class High Availability and Fault Tolerance to Citrix XenServer
XenServer 5 Changes the Game in Server Virtualization with Unprecedented Reliability, Openness and Ease-of-Use
(click the link to play - there is a current issue with embedding videos)
One of the many new features of XenServer 5 is advanced integration with Storage Infrastructure. The Citrix XenServer Adapter for Dell EqualLogic integrates server and storage functionality on a single management interface and delegates tasks according to each platform's core strengths.
As an integrated virtualization solution, XenServer and EqualLogic allows you to maintain high operating efficiency by delegating such advanced capabilities as Thin Provisioning, Fast Cloning, and Automated Snapshots to the EqualLogic SAN. Thin Provisioning helps IT administrators control costs by dedicating only the storage capacity needed in the short term, and maintaining unallocated storage in a common pool for later use by applications or user groups as disk resources are actually consumed. Fast Cloning lets storage administrators create copies of entire volumes as a background process, without disrupting network operations.
Once created, clones can be used to accelerate the provisioning and deployment of standardized VMs, as well as to test new applications, configurations or procedures. Snapshots are efficient captures of storage volumes that can be created without disrupting network operations, for use in backing up or testing data. In addition, XenServer supports iSCSI multipath I/O (MPIO) and simplified disaster recovery, two strategic tools for improving business continuity even in the event of network failures or other outages. MPIO support allows multiple network paths — e.g., separate subnetworks or VLANS — for both the SAN arrays and the virtualization servers,
as a means of both improving performance and safeguarding against Ethernet switch failures or other network problems. Disaster recovery tools apply snapshot and fast cloning technologies to the processes of initial VM placement, the real-time
movement of VMs via XenMotion, and automatic high availability.
Achmad Chadran of Dell Equallogic blogged about this integration from VMWorld -
the integration module goes even further, by:
- Streamlining the VM provisioning process all the way through the creation and assignment of virtual disk drives
- Relieving XenServer resources from having to perform burdensome storage tasks
- Taking storage technology further out of its traditional "black arts" realm and into a more business-focused IT culture
After you try out this integration with your own implementation of Dell Equallogic, you will understand why Achmad says this is a "very cool piece of engineering".
Peter Blum put together an excellent overview video that demonstrates this new integration with Dell EqualLogic.
(click to play)
http://www.equallogic.com/partners/CitrixDemo/xenserver_equallogic_demo_controller.swf
Citrix XenServer 5 allows you to take full advantage of all the powerful features of your storage hardware.
Virtual Storage Management in XenServer 5
Here are some screen shots of the new Storage Wizard -
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Visit XenServer5.com to learn more and download the free XenServer 5 Express. You can watch a recored webinar on Virtual Storage management in XenServer 5 here.
As part of the XenServer 5 release, several new features have been added to XenCenter.
Here is a brief summary of the new XenCenter 5 features -
- Powerful, Self-healing Management Architecture
Unlike other management consoles, XenCenter distributes management data across servers in a resource pool to ensure there is no single point of management failure. If a management server should fail, any other server in the pool can take over the management role.
- Search, Sort and Tag
User-defined grouping and metadata tags allows simple, powerful searching and sorting capabilities across virtual machines, hosts and resource pools based on custom fields to help administrators easily identify and manage virtual infrastructure.
- Performance Monitoring and Trending
XenServer adds new enhanced performance monitoring, reporting and alerting dashboards that make it easy for IT professionals to see both real-time and historical views of virtual machines and physical host performance over long periods of time with virtually no storage or performance overhead.
- Physical to Virtual
Use the new XenConvert feature to move existing physical server workloads to XenServer virtual infrastructure in no time with. Tools are also available to convert other virtual machines to run on XenServer.
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Visit XenServer5.com to see video demos of the new XenCenter and the other new features of XenServer 5.
One of the new features of XenServer 5 is High Availability. Check out these screen shots to get a close up view of how to configure High availability in XenServer 5.
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You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
XenServer 5 has just been released, and now we can talk about experiencing zero downtime with live migration. With XenMotion, virtual machines can be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance or to seamlessly balance available compute power within a pool of physical servers.
Here's a cool demo of this new XenServer 5 Feature:
Get your weekends back by managing and maintaining your physical hardware during business hours...
For more on XenServer 5 check out XenServer5.com
You can also download a copy of XenServer 5 right here.
Citrix has announced Citrix XenServer 5.
As Peter Levine wrote earlier today, XenServer 5 is built to be "the industry's most comprehensive and open, bare metal virtualization solution on the planet".
Below you can see a brief presentation that cover's the newest features of Citrix XenServer 5 (presentation hosted at SlideShare.net). After reviewing the slides, you can take a look at which features are are available in each version of Citrix XenServer 5.
Below you can see the features available in each release -
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You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
One of the attractions of virtualization is the ability to deploy applications as pre-built virtual appliances. An article in CIO Magazine describes a virtual appliance as "an application is designed, certified and delivered, with its own little OS, to run as a virtual machine on your existing physical server, or to run in a VM via a "cloud computing" service like Amazon's." Virtual Appliances are expected to provide rapid deployment, simplified support, improved performance (OS and Application Tuned by ISV), and increased security. There are many advantages to virtual appliances. But is this deployment method the best solution to your deployment issues?
With all the buzz about virtualization and cloud computing, the interest level from both IT departments and vendors in virtual appliances is rising rapidly. Citrix has offered an Evaluation Virtual Appliance of XenApp for over a year. It has been downloaded over 11,000 times, according to Kurt Moody. Microsoft nows has virtual appliances for Windows Server 2008, System Center Configuration Manager, SharePoint Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and more. Many virtualization vendors like Marathon Technologies, Platform Computing, Fortisphere, VMLogix, deliver their product as a virtual appliance.
Some application vendors have also jumped on the virtual appliance bandwagon, such as Business Objects and Satori. Several virtual appliance sites have been launched, included rPath, VirtualAppliances.net and JumpBox.com in addition the the existing VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Even Paralells has started offering virtual appliances from their website.
There are some concerns about this new model. As this article points out, there are questions about licensing of the OS and application (especially for Windows based applications) as well as export and security issues.
With all these new virtual appliances becoming available, I am curious to know if you use virtual appliances, and, if so, for what purposes? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of virtual appliances?
Please vote in the polls below. Once you have voted, please post in the comments if there is anything else you would liek to see from virtual appliances.-
| Have you ever used any virtual appliance? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes |  |
| No | |
| If you have used a virtual appliance, did you use it in test, production or both?? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Test | |
| Production | |
| Both Test and Production | |
This tip shows you how to connect remotely to XenServer Configuration Console GUI from XenCenter and save a trip to the Datacenter.
UPDATE
Adding the command line to be typed for Copy & Paste purposes...
/usr/bin/xsconsole
best,
Gus