For today's look at a XenServer "Project Orlando" feature, let's consider performance. 

Yes, there are a number of performance improvements in this release -- from storage and network I/O for Windows guests, to enlightened Windows Server 2008, to  memory usage for scalability.  But I'm not just thinking about performance -- I'm thinking about how we think about performance.

In previous releases, XenCenter displaced a 15-minute window into server and virtual machine performance.  And those numbers were local to the interface -- if you quit and restarted XenCenter, the counters went away.

Starting in "Project Orlando," XenServer manages performance data at the server, so it's not bound to a XenCenter session.  And it's stored in a self-scaling Round Robin Database (RRD) format, with sampling and reporting every:

• 5 seconds for the past 10 minutes
• one minute for the past 2 hours
• one hour for the past week
• one day for the past year

Statistics can be collected over HTTP in an XML representation, too, so you can import them into your favorite performance management and reporting tool. See the SDK Guide for more details.

Now it's even easier to tell what's going on on your XenServer boxes... and what has been going on, which is at least as important.