Citrix Xen Server 5 5

Editor's Notes

• #4: We are absolutely committed to Xen and the XenServer virtualization platform, and the proof of that is the fact that we’ve very rapidly enhanced the platform over the past 2 years. We are convinced that XenServer has a great future in three particular areas—as part of the overall Citrix Delivery Center particularly for XenApp, XenDesktop, and even Netscaler, heterogeneous environments—particularly those running a mix of Linux and Windows, and emerging Cloud Computing infrastructures. The Xen engine that powers XenServer is the same one that powers the largest Cloud environment in the world at Amazon EC2.Finally, we are taking a customer centric and open approach to XenServer. We are enabling interoperability with Hyper-V because we know that many Windows-centric customers will choose Hyper-V. We see this interoperability through the common virtual machine format used by XS and Hyper-V, as well as the Citrix Essentials advanced management tools like Provisioning Services, StorageLink, and Lab Management that work on top of both XenServer and Hyper-V.
• #5: It’s clear that XenServer is the performance leader in the market. We like to use the analogy of the “engine” and the “car” for how we extend the Xen engine to build the commercial XenServer “car.” Independent testing is showing the Xen Hypervisor to be the best performing hypervisor available today – and if you’re considering virtualizing XenApp server, there’s one clear choice: XenServer
• #8: With the XS 5.5 release, much of our engineering efforts have gone into solidifying the management tools. These are the key features in the free XenServer. We’re really pleased to be able to offer these new capabilities to help partners build even stronger server virtualization practices. With the free XS, this opens opportunities selling the related storage, servers, and most importantly services to your customers—and make it even more economical to get everyone virtualized.
• #9: As well as the new features that have gone into XenServer, there have also been updates to the core Xen Engine that further improve performance and also provide support for the latest hardware, most notably the Intel Nehalem processors
• #10: Citrix Essentials for XenServer is the advanced virtualization management toolset that we sell on top of the free XenServer platformToday, Citrix Essentials includes features like the Automated High Availability, performance monitoring & alerting, and Provisioning Services.With Essentials for XenServer 5.5, we’ve added several other items.Probably the most requested enhancement is workload balancing, enabling load balancing of VM’s across a pool of XenServer hosts. Intelligent placement can provide recommendations of where to start a new workload that’s coming up or where to place existing workloads should you wish to optimize the usage of you environment or move workloads for maintenance purposesA valuable addition to the Citrix Essentials functionality comes in the guise of StorageLink. Storage link provides native access to the tools available in the customers storage array ensuring that investments already made in the purchase and training of those technologies are fully leveraged by XenServer.StorageLink includes EMC Clariion, HP EVA, HP MSA, and Netapp (all) support.Lab Management reduces the complexity, time and cost of managing non-production environments typically used in development, support and training organizations. And Stage management help organizations streamline the processed of moving new and updated workloads through pre-deployment staging and user acceptance testing into the live production environment
• #11: A view of how the lab, stage and Provisioning Services components fit into the application lifecycle for an organization
• #13: Citrix XenServer is the cloud proven, enterprise class, and free virtualization solution that enables customers to make the move towards virtualizing their servers, desktops and applications, or indeed host the worlds largest cloud computing infrastructure (Amazon EC2).Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of Citrix and Microsoft virtualization environments in corporate datacenters, while enabling easy interaction with existing servers that have already been virtualized with other third-party products.  It provides customers with a robust set of advanced management and automation solutions that enhance and extend the capabilities of Citrix® XenCenter™ and Microsoft System Center, the primary management systems of XenServer and Hyper-V, respectively.  While some features vary based on the underlying virtualization environment, the Citrix Essentials product line consists of Seven broad categories of capabilities: Automated Lab Management streamlines the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering applications on-demand throughout the full application lifecycle, from development labs to production servers.   Stage Management streamlines the process of staging, testing and deploying applications, content, patches,hotfixes and entire computing platforms into the full production environment Workload Balancing sits at the heart of the raison d’etre of virtualization, monitoring, optimizing and advising on the best placement of virtual workloads so as to deliver the best performance or the optimal user density of computing resources Advanced Storage Integration featuring Citrix® StorageLink™ technology fully leverages all the native power of third-party array-based storage systems making it easy for customers to manage advanced storage features directly from their virtualization management environments. Dynamic Provisioning Services reduce costs and optimize datacenter infrastructure by letting customers manage common sets of master workload images centrally and stream them on-demand to both virtual machines or physical servers. Workflow Orchestration enables users to automate key management processes across their virtual infrastructure using common task libraries and a graphical workflow canvas. High Availability delivers a broad range of powerful high availability options from automatic restart as the result of host or virtual machine failure to intelligent placement of virtual machines across resource pools based on resource availability.
• #16: Customers create silos to simplify application-specific redundancy and fail-over in order to meet requirements for service-level agreements. With many siloed applications, this design results in significant unused capacity, especially for critical apps that receive infrequent use. To retain the availability benefits of redundancy while reducing physical server footprint, under-utilized XenApp servers can be deployed into the Xen Hypervisor.Customers create application silos for a number of reasons. The application isolation technology included with Citrix XenApp is an excellent solution when compatibility issues prevent applications from running on the same server. However, when silos are necessary for other reasons - such as chargeback, regulatory compliance or even ownership - server silos may provide a better solution. But the drawback to this system design comes when siloed application servers experience marginal use. Virtualizing XenApp servers results in optimized resource utilization, reduced power consumption and freed rack space/server hardware.In traditional server deployments, hardware maintenance usually means reduced application availability. IT must schedule after-hours maintenance windows to power down servers in order to replace faulty or outdated hardware. With XenMotion, a feature of Citrix XenServer, actively running virtual machines can be migrated across physical servers with no service interruption. This allows essential workloads to remain running, enabling zero-downtime maintenance. A virtual machine running Citrix XenApp (or sets of virtual machines) can be moved seamlessly from one physical server to another in a simple drag-and-drop operation without impacting users or their application sessions.
• #18: XenServer supports several features to guarantee service uptime in the event of infrastructure failure. Firstly, resource pools can be configured for automated high-availability. This deals with individual host failures by restarting VMs that were running on that host onto the next available machine in the resource pool. Notable features include:Peer-to-peer "self-healing" architecture ensures there is no single point of management failure.Set VM restart priorities individually, to control the order in which services are restarted in the event of host failure.Dynamic failure planning algorithms allow administrators to see how many hosts failures can be tolerated without compromising services.
• #19: Most datacenters are faced with exploding storage costs that is magnified with a general lack of tools necessary to manage server images throughout the environment. There also exists a need to be able to deliver server workloads on demand, and even treat their delivery as a service, with the ability to tie back to the business. In particular, environments such as web server farms, VDI or application virtualization with tools like XenApp are environments that can benefit greatly from the consolidation of similar server images for greater flexibility and more efficient storage management.Dynamic provisioning services reduces total cost of ownership and improves both manageability and business agility by virtualizing a datacenter server workload-–operating system, applications and configuration-–and streaming the workload on-demand to virtual or physical servers across the network. Servers remain stateless until they are streamed to; no software is preloaded or permanently loaded on the system maximizing flexibility of hardware resources. By delivering server workloads on-demand rather than deploying them on individual virtual or physical servers, IT administrators are able to:Simplify and streamline server management, while reducing software rollout risk.Ensure consistency by provisioning simultaneously from a single standard workload image. Increase IT responsiveness and agility by enabling capacity on-demand–-repurpose any server to do any job. Reduce utility costs and space needs by cutting the number of backup servers that are required.
• #20: Key to virtualization, some may say the whole point of virtualization, is the optimization of the resources that are being used within your environment. Workload Balancing is the key to this providing the information on which resources are optimal for hosting a new workload that’s coming on line, or one that’s being moved to either optimize user density, user performance, or allow scheduled maintenance to take place. Citrix Essentials considers multiple performance factors of guest and host machines to identify and recommend the most appropriate resources on which to run specific workloads.
• #22: One of the most significant challenges customers face as they virtualize datacenter servers is the increasing complexity of interfacing with enterprise storage systems. Because server virtualization can often hinder the linkage between servers and storage, some virtualization vendors have attempted to replicate storage-related functions in their own proprietary management systems. Unfortunately, this approach is complicated and can effectively turn expensive array-based storage systems into little more than “dumb disks,” making many of their most powerful capabilities far less accessible to datacenter administrators.
• #24: Most organizations will contain two separate IT infrastructures: The company datacenter containing the mission critical applications, data and resources used by employees to accomplish the goals of the company, and the IT labs where the testing, development, training, IT support and research takes place. While the main datacenter consists of resources which are strictly controlled and managed, IT labs tend to be more dynamic in function. This dynamic nature facilitates a team collaboration and sharing environment, but often requires frequent reconfiguration to achieve it’s goals.
• #25: Server virtualization provides for a great deal of flexibility, especially in environments such as labs for testing and development. However, it also presents a unique set of challenges. In order to keep up with increasing demands for faster testing and development cycles, organizations need a way to better manage virtualized resources within the lab:The need for faster testing and development cycles is often accompanied by more complex texting requirements with geometric growth in complexity of product versions, test configurations & combinations, resulting in error-prone multi-machine setupsAs virtualization is used more pervasively throughout the lab it becomes more and more difficult to deal with infrastructure sprawl and wasted resources As a result there is a need to track, control and share virtualization resources throughout labs and even across geographic sites and development centersCitrix automated lab management allows administrators to create and manage a common library of workload configurations and to rapidly provision them with a single mouse click. Self-service access to approved configurations enables multiple groups to deliver consistent virtual environments improving the efficiency and accuracy of moving application workloads through development and testing and into production while achieving significant savings in time, and hardware and storage costs. By automating and simplifying virtual lab environments, organizations achieve: Shorter testing and development cycles –  Reduce time to market and IT response times by centralizing access to prebuilt production-like environments and utilizing advanced automation capabilities for self-service setup and tear down of approved virtual environments. Better quality – Improve stability and consistency by automating manual and error-prone build and test processes, maximizing test coverage and reducing time to detect and reproduce errors.Lower costs – Dramatically consolidate software and hardware resources, reducing sprawl and improving utilization across disparate teams.Increased productivity – Maximize collaboration and productivity of distributed development, test and support teams by making production-like environments visible and shareable across the enterprise.
• #26: Citrix Lab Manager helps IT Lab administrators improve efficiency by simplifying and standardizing many of the time consuming routine tasks that are part of the day to day tasks of running a lab.
• #28: Citrix Essentials Stage Management provides a visual platform for the change management and deployment lifecycle of virtualized production environments. By bringing a new level of control and automation to pre-production staging, IT delivery managers are able to streamline systems and processes delivering new and updated services to market with increased confidence and reduced risk.
• #29: Citrix Workflow Studio™ is an infrastructure process automation platform that enables you to transform your datacenter into a dynamic delivery center. It natively supports Citrix products including XenApp™, XenDesktop™, XenServer™ and NetScaler™. Built on top of Windows(r) PowerShell™ and Windows Workflow Foundation, Workflow Studio provides an easy-to-use, graphical interface for workflow composition that virtually eliminates scripting. Workflow Studio acts as the glue across the IT infrastructure allowing administrators to easily tie technology components together via workflows. The key benefits provided by Workflow Studio are: Graphically create workflows without writing scripts. Activate, schedule, and monitor workflow processes from a unified central dashboard. Mechanize repetitive configuration tasks. Integrate infrastructure components across the Citrix Delivery Center™. Extend / integrate application processes that span multiple products. Access a rich set of resources through direct integration with the Citrix Developer Network.
• #30: Essentials for Hyper-V allows virtual machines to be run on either Hyper-V or XenServer hypervisors without modification.  Easily migrate virtual machines from XenServer environments to Hyper-V for unparalleled IT flexibility.  Hypervisor interoperability and migration is made possible with common virtual hard disk formats and common storage management tools across Hyper-V and XenServer environments, including the automation of storage resource configuration across hypervisor hosts.