Dynamic Memory Control deprecation?

[Jeff Riechers]

Anyone know why this feature is going away?  I always found it useful in VDI environments to help with issues when machines are rebooted.

[Tobias Kreidl]

In what version do you see this in the release notes?

[Tobias Kreidl]

Who makes these decisions? It's in the release notes here: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-hypervisor/vms/vm-memory.html

For upgrading you sometimes need to migrate VMs to other hosts and need the VM memory to shrink to fit. This featire has been around a long time and it seems like a terrible decision to plan to remove this in a future release! Why?!

[Alan Lantz]

Yes, I remember reading that is is in a deprecated state, meaning it will still work, but in the future will be removed.

 

--Alan--

 

[Kyle Peterson]

Anyone happen to find a replacement for xenserver at the same price point that will work with xendesktop?

 

Really wish something like proxmox or ovirt would work for xendesktop

[Tobias Kreidl]

^^^ How about XCP-ng?

[Kyle Peterson]

I like Xcp-ng but they are in the same boat, dynamic memory control is deprecated there as well

 

So unless they add in their own solution(very possible in the future) to replace that feature. Who knows though

[Tobias Kreidl]

True, they depend a lot on the XS/CH releases and building on those. Not sure if ovirt or proxmox support dynamic memory for VMs or not.

[Kyle Peterson]

As far as I know pretty much all other hypervisors support memory ballooning, xenserver seems to be the only one dropping it.

 

 

[Tobias Kreidl]

... which raises the question why this wasn't fixed in the first place? Clearly, it's possible to have it work reliably. Pushing a product and failing to allocate adequate resources to sustain it -- let alone develop and implement new features that the end users have been asking for for ages and have not received -- is a bad business model.

[Kyle Peterson]

Exactly, unfortunately I think citrix is working on dropping xenserver all together and will continue to remove some pretty normal features that exist is every other hypervisor that exists.

 

Honestly feels like they are trying to push people away, I guess that makes sense since no one really uses xenserver anymore haha. Compared to 5-8 years ago I feel like my company is the only one in north america paying for the enterprise edition.

 

 

 

[Alan Lantz]

Citrix really missed the ball with XenServer. It could have been a fabulous product. I have been a strong advocate for the past ten years or so and we are still currently running it with the Enterprise edition. But their disastrous decision to severely restrict the free edition pushed many users away.  Maybe in its peak they had, what, 3% of the marketshare? Now its probably 1%. With limited features, features being removed, hardware limitations, and continual lack of third party support, we have make the decision to join the masses and go with VMWare. I hate seeing a product I really thought would be a major rival to VMWare and Hyper-V die, but sometimes good products just don't make it. XCP-Ng would have been a good choice as well, but I have mutliple products with VMWare plug-ins I want to leverage, so VMWare it is. 

 

--Alan--

 

[Kyle Peterson]

Yeah its too bad, we've been using it since 2008 but will be looking at vmware next hardware refresh.

 

Just a little worried about finding out the total cost haha.

[Alan Lantz]

I can assure you the cost was substantial.  And yes, we are doing a hardware refresh ourselves 

which is what prompted this decision.

 

--Alan--

 

[Tobias Kreidl]

Our using XenServer at NAU over the last 10+ years was predicated on its much lower cost and comparable feature set.  Sadly, the product IMO has failed to keep up with competitors and much is because Citrix didn't allocate adequate resources to it. It has a very solid run, but the number of paying customers is now I'm sure much smaller and many use it for free in conjunction with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (XenApp, XenDesktop) which doesn't generate any direct revenue. I advocated over my four years as a CTP to integrate a number of features that I heard from the user community as being highly desirable and a tiny fraction of those ever got implemented. Plus, as Alan stated above, the changing of the free licensing model drove away also a number of paying customers who no longer could maintain development or QA servers with similar features as their production servers and did not want to pay the difference.

 

But now officially retired, and no longer affiliated with the CTP program, my arm waving is even less effective. I just have to sit back and let things take their course. I will continue to try to help on this forum as long as I feel I have relevant, accurate information to convey, but my days as an active user are over. It was a good run and I do not regret the initial choice of this hypervisor in our environment. The world, however, continues to evolve and those who will succeed are those who can best adapt to the changes needed and demanded by consumers.

 

-=Tobias

[Jeff Riechers]

It's a shame.  I still run it on my home lab, and have a datacenter lab that is 50% xenserver and 50% vmware.  But at this rate I am probably going to have to shift over to either pure VMWare, or leverage the Azure on-premise hypervisor to pair up with Azure once that comes out.

[Mark Syms]

DMC is dropped as it never worked correctly in the Xen hypervisor and it would require a wholesale architectural overhaul to make it work, resource for which does not exist and so the feature is removed along with the several hundred bugs filed against it.