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Citrix XenServer 6.1 – New features

Citrix XenServer 6.1 – New features
  • 2024, November 22

Citrix XenServer 6.1 – New features

Citrix Xenserver is a good enterprise-class hypervisor and is improving with every new release. In Xenserver 6.1 there are couple new features that certainly will make your life easier and improve administration process. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Storage XenMotion:

Storage XenMotion gives administrator a possibility to move running VMs from one host to another even between different XenServer pools. This enables administrators to:

  • Move Virtual Machines between XenServer pools – e.g. migrate a VM from a test environment to a production environment;
  • Perform hypervisor maintenance – updating or upgrading XenServer hosts without VM downtime;
  • Perform server hardware maintenance – upgrading standalone XenServer host hardware without VM downtime;

 

Live VDI Migration:

Live VDI Migration allows system administrator to relocate a Virtual Machine Virtual Disk Image (VDI) without powering off the VM. This enables system administrator to:

  • Move a VM from cheap, local storage to fast, resilient, array-backed storage;
  • Move a VM from a development to a production environment;
  • Move between tiers of storage when a VM is limited by storage capacity/performance;
  • Perform storage array upgrades.

 

Live VDI Migration eliminates the headache you experience when you need to update firmware of the disk array. Instead of shutting down virtual machines it can be live-migrated to the temporary disk array with zero-downtime.

Networking Enhancements:

  • Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support: enables the use of industry-standard network bonding features to provide fault-tolerance and load balancing of network traffic.
  • Source Load Balancing (SLB) improvements: allows up to 4 NICs to be used in an active-active bond. This improves total network throughput and increases fault tolerance in the event of hardware failures. The SLB balancing algorithm has been modified to reduce load on switches in large deployments.
  • Multi-Tenancy improvements: allows system administrator to restrict a VM to send and receive traffic on a specific MAC address and a number of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, without relying on VLANs and switch management software. When these extensions are deployed VMs cannot impersonate any other VM, or intercept traffic intended for any other VM. This increases security in environments where VMs cannot be fully trusted.
  • VLAN Scalability improvements: removes a previous limitation which caused VM deployment delays when large numbers of VLANs were in use. This improvement enables administrators using XenServer 6.1.0 to deploy hundreds of VLANs in a XenServer pool quickly.
  • Emergency Network Reset: provides a simple mechanism to recover and reset a host’s networking, allowing system administrator to revert XenServer hosts to a known good networking state. Refer to CTX131972 and the XenServer 6.1.0 Administrator’s Guide for detailed information.
  • IPv6 Guest Support: enables the use of IPv6 addresses within guests allowing network administrators to plan for network growth.

 

Guest Enhancements:

  • Citrix XenServer Conversion Manager: enables batch import of VMs created with VMware products into a XenServer pool to reduce costs of converting to a XenServer environment.
  • New Installation Mechanism for XenServer Tools: XenServer Tools are now delivered as industry standard Windows Installer MSI files. This enables the use of 3rd party tools to deliver and manage the installation and upgrade of the XenServer device drivers.

 

Enhanced Guest OS Support:

  • Ubuntu 12.04
  • CentOS 5.7, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, 6.1, 6.2
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.7, 6.1, 6.2
  • Windows 8 (32-bit/64-bit) – experimental support
  • Windows Server 2012 – experimental support

 

Ongoing Improvements:

  • Supported number of VMs per host increased to 150.
  • GPU Pass-through: support for up to 4 GPUs per host.
  • Updated Open vSwitch: v1.4.2 provides stability and performance improvements.

 

XenCenter Multi-Server Management

Citrix XenCenter provides all the virtual machine management, monitoring and general administration functions in a single interface including configuration, patch management, and virtual machine libraries. IT staff can effortlessly organize hundreds of virtual machines from a centralized, highly available management console that installs on any Windows desktop or laptop. The Resilient Distributed Management Architecture distributes server management data across the servers in a XenServer pool to ensure that there is no single point of management failure. If a management server (pool master)fails, any other server in the XenServer pool can take over the management (pool-master) role.

XenCenter is great management feature for all XenServer versions, because if you want to build a XenServer pool with more than one host you don’t need to install separate server or virtual machine like VMWare vCenter or Microsoft HYPER-V SCVMM. All that you need is install XenCenter on any desktop and laptop and connect with it to XenServer. With XenCenter system administrators can control any single XenServer host and XenServer pools.