We have a poll going on over on *Linkedin*asking for feedback and opinions about the impact of making XenServer free. If your part of Linkedin please add your vote. So far the result are not too surprising with the majority feeling the largest impact will be around new adopters to virtualization. This has been one of the primary targets for XenServer and the product strategy initiative. In addition, we expect many companies with existing virtualization implementations to evaluate XenServer and some of those also make a switch as a result. This could be because of the current costs or performace limitations such as running XenApp on virtualized servers. The Poll seems to reinforce this may happen as well, however more data/samples are required to better quantify the results. Let us know your thoughts. 
Download XenServer for free here

 
 
 
 
 

Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V provides customers with a powerful set of advanced virtualization management capabilities that extend the enterprise management capabilities of Hyper-V and System Center to help make virtualized environments more scalable, more manageable and more agile.  

Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V includes:

• Automated lab management enables Hyper-V customers to develop, test and deliver applications faster by automating and simplifying the entire virtual machine lifecycle, including movement across virtualization platforms.
• Advanced storage integrationusing Citrix StorageLink™ technology makes it easy for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center customers to fully leverage all the native power of their existing array-based storage systems.
• Dynamic provisioning serviceslets customers centrally manage a common set of master images which can be streamed on-demand into Hyper-V virtual machines or physical servers.
• Hypervisor interoperability makes it easy for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous Hyper-V and XenServer environments.

You'll find the beta software here. (If you don't have a My Citrix account, you'll be asked to create one first; if you have one, you may be asked to log in.)

Support for this beta release is being provided via an online forum where you can share your experiences with Citrix personnel and other users. To access the Essentials for Hyper-V Early Release forum send us an email with forum in the subject line to #CVSM_support@citrix.com. Please include your My Citrix username in the email.

Please check out the advanced capabilities of Citrix Essentials for your Microsoft Hyper-V environment, and help us deliver the best virtualization management experience we can.

In part-1, I discussed how to mount a read-only NTFS USB drive into your XenServer filesystem.

In part-2, I discussed formatting a USB drive exclusively for XenServer.

In this week's installment, I'll talk about Accessing CIFS shares in XenServer.

There's actually a simpler way to read and write to an NTFS partition from XenServer, but you'll need to plug your USB drive into a Windows machine and share it. Once shared, and knowing the share name, and the IP address of your Windows machine, you can use the following example mount commands:

mount //192.168.1.51/ShareName /mnt

or
mount //192.168.1.51/Sharename /mnt -o username=olivierw

You may have to supply a password for your share, and you may have to supply an alternate user name to the CIFS service (other than the default 'root' user). By-the-way, this is the method that XenServer itself uses when you create an ISO CIFS Storage Repository in XenCenter.

There are a lot of things to do in Vegas, such as seeing a show, riding a roller coaster and of course, becoming a high roller; however, none of them come with a guarantee that you will go home with something more valuable than you arrived with. At Citrix Synergy, not only will you leave with new and/or renewed connections with other professionals in the industry and at Citrix, but you will leave with knowledge that will deliver more value to your company and to you as an individual.

Sure, there are multiple valuable conferences within a conference at Synergy (iForum, Network World Live! and Virtualization Congress) but my personal favorite is GeekSpeak Live!  If you haven't seen or attended a GeekSpeak session (examples Shawn at Synergy  and Michael with GeekSpeak Roadtrip!) , you need to check this out. These sessions are where true unfiltered technical interactive discussions occur, many sessions are led by Citrix CTPs such as Charles Aunger , Ruben Spruijt  & Jeroen van de Camp, and Brian Madden and many more, but you also have the ability to lead and/or change a discussion topic on the fly.

This year we have expanded GeekSpeak Live to not only include our traditional evening sessions, but we also have the GeekSpeak SpeakEasy sessions on the exhibit floor and we have woven GeekSpeak session through the traditional conference tracks as well.

As we get closer and closer to Citrix Synergy, I will be posting more information about our GeekSpeak sessions and presenters. Please feel free to leave a comment on this blog, check out the GeekSpeak forum or drop me an email if you are interested in a topic or being a GeekSpeak session lead.

Before I go, I wanted to share a discussion I had with a Citrix Synergy attendee. The discussion started regarding the GeekSpeak session, but quickly transitioned to "I am planning to attend, but my boss/finance team is really leery of spending on technology conferences (especially in Vegas), given the negative press that AIG and others in the industry have gotten regarding conferences. Do you have any advice for me?"

We at Citrix are completely aware budget constraints and have pulled together some information on the topic for you. The fact is that from a cost perspective, Vegas is a value compared to other cities hosting technology events Vegas is 20%-60% cheaper from an attendee perspective. With the data we provided, she was able to assure her management that Citrix Synergy was not a boondoggle!

I look forward to seeing you at Citrix Synergy and Geekspeak Live! , perhaps the one time that "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" isn't true!

This is a continuation of my blog regarding Boot device manager but in this blog I will go through specifically using BDM in a Xendesktop/PVS  with VMs hosted on Vmware ESX 3.X
 
1.       The following instructions assume you have already created your ISO file with Bdm.exe ... if not see http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/trevorm/2009/02/25/Using+PVS+Boot+Device+Manger+with+XenDesktop+and+Xenserver

2.       We need to move the iso file  to your ISO library on Virtual Center.  You can use WinSCP to copy it over.

3.       Modify our target Virtual Machine template settings to have it boot to the xdppvs.iso on startup

4.       Next we need to edit the bios of the Virtual Machine and move the dvd/cd object to the top of the boot list. See screenshot below on how to have VM automatically enter into the bios on next boot.














 
5.       Now we have our VM configured to boot from the ISO we created with BDM. For XenDesktop Setup Tool which is used to create multiple VMS very quickly we need to create a template.

6.       We now will set the hard disk on the virtual machine to 1MB since we are using Provisioning Services(PVS)

7.       We have a Vmware Virtual Machine with a 1mb disk, set to boot from a DVD/cd ISO file and now we need to convert it to a template in virtual center.

8.       So now that we have a Template we can run the Xendesktop Setup Tool to create a pool of Virtual desktops in minutes and not eating up terabytes of storage.

Note***

"When configuring the BIOS to work with the boot device (either USB or ISO
image), it is imperative that the NIC PXE option is enabled. The PXE boot option is
required in order for the NIC Option ROM to stay resident in memory during the
pre-boot process. This way, UNDI will be available to the boot device to properly
initialize the NIC. Otherwise, the API not found message would be displayed

by the boot device."

Many of us in the IT industry recall the old adage  "you'll never get fired for buying IBM" this held true for quite some time while IBM provided a comprehensive albeit expensive set of products that got the job done and provided the safe bet vendor selection. As the PC era took hold and the introduction of credible alternatives became available, the pendulum began to swing the other way. IT started being challenged about the "safe bet" choice and in many cases the assumption became if you were only buying IBM you were probably paying too much. This phenomena also translated into many purchasing processes that forced spec & price comparisons, in other cases it came about by users inside and outside of IT making departmental decisions to purchase PC's and other IT solutions from alternative vendors.

Wind the clock forward to today's situation in the server virtualization industry. The so called "safe bet" is to keep buying VMware regardless of the alternatives. And it's probably true today, you won't get fired just for buying VMware, however in today's economic climate this may not be the best alternative for your company or for your career. No doubt, VMware does offer a comprehensive server virtualization solution that gets the job done, albeit at a premium cost. You can continue to build your experience and expertise solely on VMware and be recognized as the company's "VMware guy/expert/fanboy/bigot/etc". Or, you can expand your horizon and expertise by carving out some time to install and evaluate XenServer and Hyper-V. The great news is you can now test and even deploy in production without spending the companies money, only your time which is valuable but so is the experience. As you drill into the capabilities of each virtualization platform you can develop your own first hand knowledge of the features, capabilities, and limitations of each. Equipped with this information you can build your own pro's and con's list as well as cost comparisons.

So before your management asks you if you have considered the alternatives, or the finance department cuts your budget again, you can now proactively develop your own proposal for a virtualization solution that gets the job done and saves the company significant money. Even if the decision is to stay with the status-quo, chances are you will be recognized as someone that takes initiative and looks for new ways to benefit the company. If you do start to carve out some area's to deploy XenServer or Hyper-V you will also be building your experience and resume as a "Virtualization guy/expert/guru/etc" that also knows how to save money. That has to be a good thing for your career in this economy.

Download XenServer for free here.
 

In part-1, I discussed how to mount a read-only NTFS USB drive into your XenServer filesystem.

In this week's installment, I'll talk about Formatting a USB drive exclusively for XenServer.

If you wanted to dedicate a USB drive to your XenServers, you could format it with a Linux filesystem. That way you could use it as storage to backup your VMs, and restore them on other machines if needed. Assuming you know the device name of the partition you want to use, use the following as an example command:

mkfs -v -t ext3 /dev/sdc1

Warning: Doing this will destroy any existing data on the partition, and you will not be able to use this disk on a Windows machine without reformatting it using Windows Disk Manager: You have been warned!

As always, with any Linux command you can use the online manual (if it's installed), for example:

man mkfs

Once formatted, you can mount this device into the filesystem, as shown previously in part-1. Now you can read and write to the drive, as in this following example which will backup a VM to the external USB drive:

xe vm-export vm='W2K8 DC' filename='/mnt/backups/W2K8 DC.xva'

Come back next week, and I'll talk about Accessing CIFS shares in XenServer.

Did you know that Citrix has a private Customer Advisory Community that enables global Citrix customers to serve as virtual advisors, providing their perspectives and opinions in an online forum? The Customer Advisory Community is comprised of 400 Citrix customers who span more than 30 countries and represent a broad cross-section of industries and organizations.

Customer Advisory Community members log in to the site each week, and provide Citrix with a wide range of feedback, including insight into their organization's IT direction, IT industry trends, and feedback on Citrix products, services and marketing, among other topics.

The Customer Advisory Community has a limited number of openings for new members this month, and we would like to offer Citrix customers the opportunity to be considered for membership!
As a member of the Citrix Customer Advisory Community, you would have the ability to:

• Provide insight into your organization's needs and challenges
• Share your thoughts on a variety of technology industry topics
• Learn early on about new Citrix initiatives and influence their direction
• Interact and network with your peers in a private, online forum
• Receive periodic rewards in exchange for your participation (if your organization's policies allow)

Those chosen to participate in the Citrix Customer Advisory Community will be asked to complete a click-through Non-Disclosure Agreement, create an account, and then log in and contribute their thoughts (via surveys, bulletin boards, etc.) an average of 5-15 minutes per week. Citrix partners with Communispace Corporation, a professional community management firm, to host and moderate the online advisory community.

To be considered for membership, please complete this brief, 10-minute questionnaire click here by March 6, 2009. Customers using one or more Citrix products are encouraged to apply.

Your responses will be kept confidential, and will be used only to determine your membership in the community. You will then be notified within the next few weeks about the status of your membership.

We hope to see you in the community!

I've spent the last day or so at Cannes meeting channel partners and customers who have been responding to the announcement that Citrix has declared XenServer virtual infrastructure to be absolutely free, and our additional annoucements of our  powerful value-added virtualization management capabilities in Citrix Essentials for XenServer and partnership with Microsoft to offer Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

The response has been fantastic, and almost overwhelming.  Across the board, customers, analysts and partners I have met have responded positively to the Citrix announcements.   Every CIO I have met in the last couple of quarters has had their budget cut, and is faced with the difficult task of moving IT forward in challenging economic times.  XenServer offers, free of charge, a complete virtual infrastructure package that delivers what every enterprise and every cloud needs to accelerate their goal towards a virtualized, automated, service-centric IT function that is agile and responsive to business needs.  

The powerful response to our announcement both in person and via blogs and email shows how important our move has been.  Customers who have been purchasing virtual infrastructure for resource pooling, live migration, optimal VM placement and who need built-in HA for management, powerful storage management, resource pooling, built-in DR and backup enablement, and with powerful AD-integrated, role based centralized managment for multiple resource pools  will find in XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution.  Citrix partners I've spoken to are excited because they think this accelerates their opportunities for value-added feature sales of Citrix Essentials for XenServer, as well as offering them a compelling value-added sale to the rapidly growing Microsoft Hyper-V footprint.  Here are just a couple of the over 150 positive news responses I've seen:

"[XenServer's] performance is great, the software is quite easy to install, use and manage, and it provides nice features in terms of management and Storage management." - LeMagIT

"When Citrix releases such a rich enterprise package for free, what company can afford to skip a XenServer evaluation in the current economy?" - virtualization.info

"Here's the real VMware dig---it eliminates virtualization's high entry price in a tough economy" -HP SysCon
 

"The highlight of the Citrix announcement - is going to put a lot of competitive pressure on VMware, commented Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates." - eChannelLine

Today a couple of commentators and interviewers asked me whether our move was one of desperation - essentially questioning whether Citrix is commited to XenServer and the virtualization market.  Of course we are. XenServer revenue grew over 800% last year!  What we are doing is accelerating our opportunity and at the same time offering customers and partners a unique opportunity to change the game in how virtualization is delivered and used by customers.  We are just shy of 6000 enterprise customers with XenServer, and whenever we compete head to head, we win.  This move is designed to get our product into use by more customers, ensuring that our commercial opportunity (in terms of Support and Citrix Essentials for XenServer sales) is further accelerated by direct pull from the customer base.  Xen is the engine powering the largest virtualization deployment in the world, Amazon Web Services.  The future is bright for Xen and XenServer. Over 100,000 different organizations use XenServer today, and XenServer is used in some of the largest production deployments of virtualization. (The largest of which I am aware is just shy of 10,000 servers).   

XenServer is the software foundation of the Citrix Delivery Center portfolio and the fact that we have chosen to accelerate the adoption dynamic for our core platform is nothing more than a clear signal of our commitment to Xen and XenServer. "Free Virtual Infrastructure" is much more than a "Free HypervisorIt's important to realize that Citrix is giving away a free virtual infrastructure platform and offering for-fee advanced virtualization management capabilities for those customers that choose to add on these capabilities. The advanced capabilities are those that customers will want for different production deployments of virtualization, for which we fully expect purchases of Citrix Essentials for XenServer, together with production Support.  We fully aim to dramatically accelerate the growth of our business in virtualization, by addressing advanced needs for automation, including High Availability, Dynamic Workload Management (DRS), StorageLink dynamic storage automation, complete workflow based orchestration, dynamic provisioning of VMs, and complete virtual machine lifecycle management including virtual Lab and virtual Stage management.  At the same time, users should compare the  free XenServer with VMware's free ESXi base hypervisor gimmick that has no production level features whatsoever.  We fully expect the free version of XenServer will satisfy the virtualization needs of the vast majority of organizations and remain committed to enhancing the value of the product over time.

Microsoft And Citrix Partnership

The response to our partnership with Microsoft in virtualization, with our offering of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Microsoft's commitment to support  XenServer with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, has been equally powerful.  The Microsoft field is charged up and ready to run with Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, and does so confident in its long standing partnership with Citrix.   Citrix has built a strong and sustainable business during its 20 year partnership with Microsoft, and our move enables us to offer customers a rich set of virtualization managment capabilities for both XenServer and Hyper-V.   I must confess being dumbfounded by VMware CEO Paul Maritz's statement yesterday to the effect that users are no longer developing applications for Windows or Linux, but instead for VMware.- further proof that VMware continues to believe in the imminent "death of Windows.".  Citrix enjoys a strong alliance with Microsoft for application, desktop, and server virtualization. We believe that many customers will adopt Hyper-V, and given our rich set of advanced management tools applicable to both XenServer and Hyper-V, it makes perfect sense to extend our partnership with Microsoft and capitalize on the Hyper-V market opportunity while we continue to move forward with Xen and XenServer.  Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V respectively are designed to offer equivalent price/feature capabilities to both platforms, effectively doubling our market opportunity.

The Xen Hypervisor goes from Strength to Strength 

 While I'm sure my friends at VMware would like to see Xen go away, they are probably completely oblivious to the fact that the xen.org Xen Summit is under way at Oracle this week, with over 120 of our developers present, representing more than 30 key contributing organizations to the open source hypervisor.  This is amazing given the down economy and pressure on travel budgets.  Xen continues to go from strength to strength, and what's more amazing still is that one single code base offers the world's most scalable open reference hypervisor from clouds, to enterprise datacenters and to rich client desktop devices and PDAs.  Can ESX match that?  No, ESX is still a 32 bit x86 only hypervisor with narrow focus and highly limited capabilities.  Customers tell me one of the reasons they are throwing out ESX is that it takes 6 months for VMware to offer supported drivers for new hardware that they purchase.  What a waste.  What a great example of a proprietary code base .failing to keep up with the pace of innovation.  ESX has become a burdensome, bloated OS in its own right.  Its requirement for patching and regular maintenance has ballooned over the years; over 150 patches have been issued for VI 3.5 in just over a year since its release.  VMware also experienced a very high profile reliability issue with the recent Update 2 bug, which brought many of their customer environments to a halt.  By comparison, XenServer 4.0 has been on the market for over 18 months and has required issuance of just 4 patches.  Despite VMware's claims about cost-savings, they ignore the new, ongoing maintenance costs that are introduced with their solution.

The VMware FUD Accelerates

VMware has issued a FUD-focussed response to our announcement.  I received it moments after they blasted it out to attendees at VMworld and to their channel, clearly rattled to the core by our announcements.  VMware's responseis 100% inaccurate, and wholly unworthy of a tit-for-tat response.  To my mind any vendor that adopts an approach of blatantly misrepresenting the facts, and actively misleading its partners, customers and the ecosystem in response to announcements by its competitors clearly signals its fear and desperation - and ought to leave its customers questioning the wisdom of their investment in a closed, proprietary, one-vendor-fits-all, expensive and out dated virtualization platform.
 

Вчера, компания сделала то, что многие ожидали, но боялись попросить !

Итак - Citrix XenServer теперь существует только в одной редакции - бесплатной!

Этот продукт официально станет доступен в бесплатном варианте в конце марта 2009 года. В настоящий момент, если Вы заинтересованы во внедрении решения по виртуализации серверной инфраструктуры и рассматривали Citrix XenServer в качестве одного из возможных решений, Вы можете скачать триальную версию уже сейчас по ссылке: http://www.citrix.com/freexenserver

О том, что входит в бесплатную редакцию Вы можете прочитать - http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939.

Здесь я вкратце перечислю доступный функционал:

• 64-х разрядный гипервизор
• Количество виртуальных процессоров - 8
• Использование виртуальных машин на базе Windows и Linux
• Отсутствуют ограничения на количество используемой оперативной памяти и виртуальных машин
• Средства для конвертации P2V и V2V
• Поддержка хранилищ SAN и NAS
• Централизованное многосерверное управление
• Распределённая архитектура управления
• Миграция работающих виртуальных машин без прерывания сервиса
• Разделяемая библиотека шаблонов Виртуальных машин
• Централизованное управление конфигурациями
• Поддержка виртуальных дисков и сетевых карт с возможностью "горячего" подключения
• Возможность "тонкой" настройки выделяемых ресурсов процессора
• Патч-менеджмент для виртуальной инфраструктуры
• Запуск виртуальных машин на наиболее подходящем сервере

Скачивайте и используйте в своих проектах.

Одновременно с объявлением о бесплатности Citrix XenServer, компания также объявила о выходе нового семейства продуктов - Citrix Essentials - http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148.

Существует две редакции:

• Citrix Essentials for XenServer - http://www.citrix.com/essentialsxs
• Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V - http://www.citrix.com/essentialshv

Таким образом, тесные партнёрские отношения с компанией Microsoft, продолжают развиваться не только в области терминальных решений, где Citrix XenApp дополняет и расширяет функционал терминальных служб Windows, но и в области виртуализации.

Citrix Essentials включает в себя:

• Automated lab management - обеспечивает проведение полного жизненного цикла доставки приложений и виртуальных машин от тестовой среды, до промышленного применения.
• Advanced storage integration - применение технологии Citrix StorageLink™ для максимально полного использования возможностей используемых сетевых хранилищ данных.
• Dynamic provisioning services - доставка по требованию рабочей нагрузки серверов в виртуальную среду или на физические серверы. Используется продукт Citrix Provisioning Server.
• Workflow orchestration - облегчает создание скриптов по управлению средой виртуализации. Используется продукт Citrix WorkFlow Studio
• High availability - обеспечивает построение решений высокой доступности.

Продукт будет доступен для загрузки с апреля 2009 года.

Yesterday Citrix announced the newest Citrix product that builds on top of the Microsoft Windows Server platform - Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Essentials for Hyper-V has four primary components -

1. Automated lab management enables Hyper-V customers to develop, test and deliver applications faster by automating and simplifying the entire virtual machine lifecycle, including movement across virtualization platforms.
   
   
2. Advanced storage integration using Citrix StorageLink™ technology makes it easy for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center customers to fully leverage all the native power of their existing array-based storage systems.
   
   
3. Dynamic provisioning services lets customers centrally manage a common set of master images which can be streamed on-demand into Hyper-V virtual machines or physical servers.
   
   
4. Hypervisor interoperability makes it easy for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous Hyper-V and XenServer environments.
   
   

This short video below by Peter Blum reviews the Advanced StorageLink capability built into Essentials with Hyper-V.

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I will post more videos and info on Essentials from Hyper-V from VMWorld Europe.

The new free Citrix XenServer will be posted in late March, and Citrix Essentials will be available in early April.  But... why wait?

You can complete a request form and download XenServer 5 and a license key that will enable all of the features of the new free XenServer plus a few of the features (including high availability and advanced StorageLink support for NetApp and Dell EqualLogic) of Citrix Essentials.  When the new bits are posted, there will also be an updater that will allow you to quickly transform your installation into the new free XenServer, or (with an appropriate edition key) the host-based capabilities of Citrix Essentials.

If you're already running Express Edition or Standard Edition, all you need is the license key on that download page.

Once the new free XenServer is available, if you're a user of Express Edition, upgrade and install the centralized multi-server management, resource pools, and XenMotion that now comes for free.  If you're a Standard Edition user, you can continue with the new free XenServer, or step up to Enterprise Edition and pay for Enterprise at your next Subscription Advantage or annual license renewal.

Either way, you'll get a powerful enterprise-class cloud-proven virtualization platform -- for free.

Get it now -- because, well, who wants to wait till tomorrow?

(Today seems to be "Stealing Titles from Authors" day for me -- thanks to Carrie Fisher for a line from POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE.)

As you've probably heard, today is the day the game changes for server virtualization, with Citrix offering XenServer for free and introducing advanced management for both XenServer and Hyper-V in the form of Citrix Essentials.

One question I've been asked has been: how did we determine what should be in the free virtualization platform?

Simple. We start with this proposition: XenServer = not just a free hypervisor, but the basic management capabilities 100% of or users require to make use of it in production,  pre-production, and production support scenarios. Citrix Essentials = the advanced management capabilities that add value to advanced scenarios -- mainly business-critical production, but also high-end production support and pre-production scenarios.

(By "pre-production" I mean development, test and staging.  By "production support" I mean technical support, demo, and training.)

We survey users of our products to find out why they bought the edition they bought, and what they'd like to see that is available in higher-end editions, among other things.

100% of Enterprise Edition users said they bought that version instead of the dearly departed Standard Edition because of XenMotion live migration, resource pools with shared storage,  and centralized multi-server management. 100% of Standard Edition users said those were the features they would like to be able to add.

So we put them into the new free XenServer, because they are the baseline of management that 100% of our users are looking for.

As we go down the list, percentages fall off a bit of a cliff.  The next most-requested feature is high availability, at about 30-40%. Despite others' best efforts at promotion, only a few companies implement high availability on 100% of their virtualized servers, and of those, far fewer protect all workloads.  So we included high availability for XenServer in Citrix Essentials, Enterprise Edition -- so the 30-40% of customers who want availability protection for their 10% or 20% (or more) of their workloads they consider business-critical can pay for the ability only on the servers they want to protect -- and run the majority of their workloads on the new free XenServer.

Similarly, our advanced StorageLink technology -- currently offered for NetApp and Dell EqualLogic storage, but delivering deep integrated management for more storage in a near-future release. Basic storage integration with logical volume management and VHD support for everyone - advanced StorageLink technologies for Citrix Essentials users.

So: if every user needs it to go beyond free hypervisors to a free virtualization platform that every server needs -- it's in the new free XenServer.  If it adds value to specific server roles, hardware, or other integrations -- it's in Citrix Essentials.  It's that simple.

(Apologies to John Irving and Nicholas Meyer for the titles.  The original versions come from books that are well worth a read.)

If you're reading this, you already know the news: XenServer, our enterprise virtual infrastructure platform is now free (including resource pooling and live relo), and we have announced Citrix Essentials for XenServer, and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as our virtualization management portfolio that offers a rich set of automated functions that drive the compatible virtualization layers beneath - the free Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, and the free XenServer Enterprise virtual infrastructure platform from Citrix.  Finally, and most importanly, we announced a powerful go-to-market roadmap with Microsoft.

Response to our announcements has been extremely positive, from our partner Microsoft to our channel partners and resellers, and many many customers and users.  There are the expected nay-sayers too, but someone had to drink the only thing that you get free from our competitor - VMware koolaid.

That said, I wanted to explain why we've made this change and why it is so important for Citrix and the XenServer crew:

1. Times are tough, and they are probably going to get tougher.   Now is a good time to dramatically ease the cost of adoption of virtualization, and a good time for Citrix to make a very significant contribution to the well-being of its customers. 
2. There are about a million servers running XenApp / Terminal Services.  With the incredible work that the XenServer team has put in optimizing for this workload, we can state with great confidence that just about every one of those workloads is a good candidate for consolidation.  We want to help our customers save money and gain agility.  Including XenServer as a supported component of the XenApp product, and therefore as an entitlement for our 220,000+ XenApp customers is the best way to accelerate this trend.
3. The Xen footprint in the enterprise to date has been predominantly delivered as a component in Enterprise Linux.  But the Linux management tools for Xen are pretty weak or non-existent.  We want anyone using Xen in Linux in the enterprise to start using XenServer instead.  You'll get better performance, greater reliability and fantastic management, with full Linux and WIndows support, absolutely free
4. We know that when we get into deals head to head with VMware, we tend to win.  XenServer's reputation for performance, ease of use and functionality at an incredible price, has led us to victory recently in major enterprise accounts such as Tesco PLC, where XenServer runs complex mission critical software systems.   To grow the XenServer business faster, we want to get more value to customers, sooner, and get them to demand fulfillment of the upgrade functions in Citrix Essentials, in a more scaleable fashion.  Hence, having the complete resource pooling, shared storage and dynamic infrastructure control in the free platform allows us to make the product that much more compelling out of the box, and encourages customers to want to purchase both support and additional features
5. There is a wealth of cloud/MSP vendors that today use Xen in Linux to virtualize their infrastructures and enable them to become VM-agile.  There is no reason why every such cloud should not use XenServer, and in so doing also offer hosted Windows VMs, with all the features of dynamic hot-plugging etc.
6. Simplifying the XenServer product line with XenServer and Essentials allows us to develop a powerful market partnership with Microsoft for server virtualization - framing a key aspect of our ongoing partnership in virtualization

That's about it really.  Changing the dynamics, adjusting to the reality of the market.  Aiming to win more share with a direct appeal to our end cutomer, and strong value propositions for our channel partners to deliver. 

See you in Cannes

Sleeping on an airplane can be a challenge. Some folks use over the counter cold medicines to help fall asleep during airplane fights. Some people go straight for the designer pharmaceuticals! And there is the rare person that simply grabs one of those sketchy airplane pillows and voila - sleep ensues. I tend to like curling up with a nice marketing free, data rich, (graphs are the best) virtualization performance testing white paper! Assuming you still have budget for travel - on your next plane flight try reading one or more of the virtualization performance white papers linked below. Bet you can't finish one before cutting some zzzzz's!  

Kidding aside, HP publishes some awesome technical papers. HP is a long standing and strategic partner of ours and we value their commitment and investment in support of Citrix as evidenced by the performance characterization papers below. What's nice is these papers are pretty much marketing free. HP ProLiant Solution Engineering develops papers like these as part of their extensive and ongoing commitment to joint solution testing with Citrix. Whether you are traveling or not these papers are definitely worth a read.

Check out the ProLiant DL785 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 3%, and the ProLiant BL465 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 10%.  So without further verbiage, here are the links:

1. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant DL785 G5
2. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant BL465 G5
3. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with Xenserver and HP ProLiant BL685 G5
4. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5
5. Consolidating servers with 32-bit workloads - XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5

Now where is that pillow!

According to a recent Forrester report, available here at no cost, new server virtualization technologies make high availability and disaster recovery much more affordable and practical than traditional HA and DR approaches. These new technologies can help more companies (especially small and midsized ones) protect a much broader range of applications. Our partner, Marathon Technologies, is hosting a webinar with Forrester Research to explain how you can use Citrix XenServer and everRun VM to reduce the costs and complexity of HA and DR.

Live Webinar: Practical, Affordable High Availability and Disaster Recovery for a Tough Economy – Featuring Forrester Research
Date: February 24, 2009 Time: 8:30 am PDT, 11:30 am EDT, 4:30 pm GMT
Duration: 60 minutes
Speaker: Stephanie Balaouras, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Michael Bilancieri, Product Manager, Marathon Technologies

Register for this webinar now

Today Dutch Meyer of UBC, and Jake Wires of the Citrix XenServer storage team in Vancouver submitted our implementation of the Microsoft VHD virtual hard disk format to the Xen community for inclusion in the open source code base.    So, if you want to write applications that read/write and process VMs in VHDs, you now have everything you need.   The software is licensed under the BSD license.

Why are we doing this? 

• First, the various Xen implementations from the Linux vendors vary wildly in their support for virtual hard disk images, and the performance of their implementations.  Thus far we have yet to see any good implementations of VHD in the Linux vendor category.    Cluttering users' storage with raw image files without any of the benefits of the built-in capabilities for snapshotting, cloning etc that are fundamental primitives in any production virtualization environment, is just a bad idea.    
• Second, since the majority of VMs will be in the VHD format in future, we want to enable the ISV ecosystem to adopt the format and quickly deliver a rich set of add-on capabilities that allow users to be more productive in their virtual environments.   VHD is more than just a VM format used by Hyper-V - it's a delivery format from Microsoft for future versions of Windows.  The format is documented publicly and the specification is available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise program.   
• Third, with Xen as the dominant hypervisor in use in the world's largest clouds, we want to enable cloud operators to benefit from our optimized implementation of  the VHD format to accelerate their progress towards hosting Windows in their clouds.    Being an optimistic chap, and noting VMware's sudden warming to open source, there is presumably a non-zero chance that they will pick up our VHD code, realizing that VMDK will at some point go the way of the dinosaurs. 
• Finally the code also supports QCOW, which means it should be easy to adopt for Linux distros that have been living in a parallel universe without VHD support.  Hopefully the QCOW team will implement the VHD support as another supported format within QCOW, which would be extremely powerful.

The release notes follow.These patches contain a completely rewritten blktap implementation and are an open source release of what Citrix intends to use in future releases of XenServer.   
They also contain Citrix's implementation of the VHD image format.

VHD is what XenServer uses to store file-based images, and this code is considerably more robust and efficient than the qcow implementation that is in the tree today. 
Benefits to blktap2 over the old version of blktap: 
* Isolation from xenstore - Blktap devices are now created directly on  the linux dom0 command line, rather than being spawned in response  to XenStore events.  This is handy for debugging, makes blktap  generally easier to work with, and is a step toward a generic  user-level block device implementation that is not Xen-specific. 
* Improved tapdisk infrastructure: simpler request forwarding, new  request scheduler, request merging, more efficient use of AIO. 
* Improved tapdisk error handling and memory management.  No  allocations on the block data path, IO retry logic to protect guests  transient block device failures.  This has been tested and is known  to work on weird environments such as NFS soft mounts. 
* Pause and snapshot of live virtual disks (see xmsnap script). 
* VHD support.  The VHD code in this release has been rigorously  tested, and represents a very mature implementation of the VHD image  format. 
* No more duplication of mechanism with blkback.  The blktap kernel  module has changed dramatically from the original blktap.  Blkback  is now always used to talk to Xen guests, blktap just presents a  Linux gendisk that blkback can export.  This is done while  preserving the zero-copy data path from domU to physical device. 
These patches deprecate the old blktap code, which can hopefully be removed from the tree completely at some point in the future.

VMware just let it slip that they plan to announce a new HA solution specifically for their vCenter management server at VMworld Europe next week. Right now the vCenter management system is a single point of failure in a VMware virtualization deployment. If the vCenter server goes down your setup then runs in a degraded state until you can get it back up and running. This new solution is really an active/passive clustering setup between two vCenter instances. Consultants have been doing this type of setup in field deployments using third party clustering software for a while now. So this is really just a bandaid to try and reduce their single point of infrastructure failure pain point. Now customers will have to setup and maintain not one but two backend vCenter instances and also now add in the complexity of a clustering solution on top of that. Word is that it's a third party solution, so only time will tell how integrated this all is.

The end result of all this is a higher cost of deployment and more complexity in a customer's VMware deployment. Go ahead and add an extra few days to your VMware deployment schedule for this. And upgrading this whole setup will be loads of fun every time a patch gets released.

Plus not only do you have to deploy a second instance of Windows Server to run this on you also have to pay VMware about $10k for the privilege of fixing a flaw with their core management infrastructure.

Citrix XenServer on the other hand includes an elegant fault tolerant peer-to-peer management layer at the core of its management architecture. Not only do we not have a single point of failure in our core XenServer management infrastructure we don't charge extra for it and don't require a dedicated management server. Plus it's so easy to use you don't even have to do anything to take advantage of it, it's all automatic, and under the covers. No databases to cluster, no extra machines to purchase, no extra windows servers to deploy, just simple and easy. 10 minutes to Xen.

For the latest updates on Citrix XenServer -- what's new, who's doing what, how to get things done -- follow @XenServerArmy on Twitter -- and watch the skies.  We'll be offering regular updates very soon.

http://twitter.com/xenserverarmy

***Update: As of the 2.0 release we now include 143 activities with the product, including libraries for Netscaler, XenServer, and XenApp. We keep adding more, and if you have specific requests, please email me...

Alex posted in our forums that he was extremely disappointed in the 1.0 release of Workflow Studio because of a lack of libraries/templates for use with Citrix products. We are working on releasing libraries for Citrix products, as well as libraries that integrate with Active Directory, Group Policy, Power Management, and Windows. I appreciate the criticism, as it made me realize that we haven't done a good job of describing the target audience of this 1.0 release. I would like to take the opportunity to explain the different audiences that Workflow Studio appeals to, and why we released 1.0 as it is. Hopefully this post will help to explain how the different features of Workflow Studio appeal to these audiences and also clarify how it can be used today and where we are going in the future.

To make sure we are all on the same page, I want to start by defining the audiences that I will refer back to later. The titles I chose are not important, but hopefully the descriptions will help you to place where this fits in your organization. In the IT industry people often wear many hats and don't fit neatly into a classification.

• IT Operations - This role is responsible for ensuring that IT systems are working and available on a wide scale, but would not typically do development or scripting tasks.
• Server Administrator - This role is responsible for specific server workloads and is intimately familiar with the software running on a system. They are comfortable with batch files, scripting, PowerShell, etc. but would not be comfortable doing traditional software development.
• Software Developer - This role is defined by people who write software that is either sold (Software Companies, System Integrators, Consultants, etc.) or used internally by other groups (often including the above two audiences.)

Workflow Studio is built on top of two technologies from Microsoft - Windows PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation. Linking these technologies to the audiences from above for PowerShell would be the Server Administrator, and for Workflow Foundation would be the Software Developer. Our intent with Workflow Studio is to merge these two technologies together and offer solutions that appeal to the IT Operations staff (and Server Administrators who are looking for tools, but are too busy to script solutions to all their needs themselves.) As a result of being built on top of PowerShell and Workflow Foundation, we offer features that the other two audiences will also find useful.

As Alex pointed out, the 1.0 release is not very interesting to the IT Operations audience yet because there isn't a large base of activity libraries and workflows available today. The Software Developer audience on the other hand can use 1.0 today with the publicly available APIs for our Citrix products (and if they choose, share or sell their work to the community at large.)

Now I want to take a look at specific features and functionality of Workflow Studio and how they map to these audiences:

IT Operations
The intended process of using Workflow Studio for this audience would be to download workflows (and activity libraries) that solve specific problems that this audience faces. All that needs to be done after downloading the workflows is to schedule or execute them as applications that solve those specific needs.

Workflow Studio has a community tab that links the product back to the Citrix Developer Network (CDN). Citrix, our partners, and the community at large can post activity libraries and workflows that can be downloaded and used without any need to write scripts or code. We built in a tutorial workflow called ExportServices that you can access through the Help menu to see how this process is intended to work. We plan to leverage this mechanism to release activity libraries and workflows to address specific problems faced in deploying the Citrix Delivery Center and the Citrix Cloud Center. We are also looking to our partners and community to build additional libraries and workflows that this audience will find valuable.

Obviously, this audience will not be well served until pre-built workflows are available that solve problems you face in your environment. Let me know in the comments or through email what types of things you would like to see. As we release activity libraries we will also release workflows that relate to them and as more are available we will be able to release more integrated workflows as well.

Server Administrator
The intended use case for this audience is to build and modify workflows using the Workflow Studio Designer for use either internally or to share with the community.

We are working on some activity libraries that will be available in coming weeks that will facilitate building workflows that leverage your existing VBScript and PowerShell scripts. This functionality will enable this audience to leverage their existing scripting knowledge in a more visual, database-driven, automatically versioned, and easily share-able way. Workflows can be extended through C# with the code-beside feature, so if you know a little bit of programming you can automate almost anything that .NET and C# will allow with just the Designer and not need to go into Visual Studio to build native activity libraries. We have built in some pretty powerful extensions to Workflow Foundation in our Designer that will help you be more productive and make it easy to share within your group, organization, or the community. For instance, the snippets functionality allows you to save templates of individual activity configurations or groups of activities and then export and reuse/share them. Workflows themselves can also be exported and reused/shared as well. The Workflow Studio Designer is accessed by either creating a New Workflow or editing an existing workflow. You can also download other workflows and edit them to see how they were built.

This audience needs activity libraries available, and we are working on several that will be released in coming months. Active Directory, Group Policy, Windows, Power Management, and Citrix product support are all coming soon, so stay tuned.

Software Developer
The intended use case for this audience is to build and share/sell activity libraries that the above two audiences will find useful. These can target Workflow Studio directly or target Workflow Foundation more generically as the vendors in my post on Workflow Studio Extensibility have done.

Activity Libraries are the mechanism for extending Workflow Studio. An activity library is a component defined by Microsoft as part of Workflow Foundation. These can be built without any knowledge of Workflow Studio (standard Workflow Foundation activity libraries), but there are some features of Workflow Studio that we think offer additional value. We make it easy to target Workflow Studio directly with a set of templates for Visual Studio. Specifically, we have a converter that will take existing PowerShell snap-ins and convert them to activity libraries automatically. You will soon be able to download these templates and documentation on automating Workflow Studio on our Download SDKs page.

Workflow Foundation and PowerShell have been around now for more than 2 years. These technologies are robust and stable and can easily be leveraged with the 1.0 release of Workflow Studio. If you are a Citrix partner (or want to be one) and have some ideas in this space, feel free to contact me to discuss.

Hopefully this will help clarify where we are with Workflow Studio and where we are going. Feel free to email me with comments or thoughts on how we can do a better job of addressing your needs with Workflow Studio - whichever audience you may fall into.