What if, you can dynamically scale up or scale down your XenApp servers based on user load? What if, you could avoid over-provisioning your XenApp servers but also meet the occasional peak capacity demand? What if, you can consolidate XenApp user sessions on fewer servers to reduce power consumption and simplify server maintenance? These are the type of questions we heard from our customers and partners that led to the creation of XenApp Power and Capacity Management feature. The Technology Preview is available now and you can evaluate it on Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp 5 releases.

So, how does it work? XenApp administrators can define server workloads/silos, specify the capacity requirements for each workload and sit back to watch the system automatically consolidate sessions across fewer servers, power up servers as needed and power down idle capacity. Or, admins can just turn the light off when no one is home e.g. create a simple schedule to power on servers at 8 am in the morning and power them down at 7 pm in the evening. Try it out and let us know.

Watch my Citrix TV video showcasing this technology at Synergy 2009. We think this technology will play a key role in our vision towards autonomic farm management and would like to hear more from you. Check out the Tech Preview and give us your comments/feedback. You can use the support forum for any technical issues with this release.

NOTE: For this Tech Preview release, we are supporting Wake-on-LAN power control for physical servers and using the XenServer API power commands for XenServer virtual workloads. We do support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare ESX for load consolidation but this Tech Preview release does not support power management for these virtualization platforms.