Solutions

XenServer

XenServer: Industry leading open-source server virtualization
Citrix XenServer is an industry and value leading open source virtualization platform for managing cloud, server and desktop virtual infrastructures. Organizations of any size can install XenServer in less than ten minutes to virtualize even the most demanding workloads and automate management processes – increasing IT flexibility and agility and lowering costs. With a rich set of management and automation capabilities, a simple and affordable pricing model and optimizations for virtual desktop and cloud computing, XenServer is designed to optimize private datacenters and clouds today and in the future.

Key features

1. Cloud Ready

   XenServer is a cloud-proven virtualization platform used by the world’s leading public clouds across all major cloud orchestration platforms including CloudPlatform, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. XenServer is cloud ready: designed for horizontal scale, cloud-scale performance, security, openness and simplicity.

   CloudPlatform integrations
   XenServer includes security and scalability enhancements for cloud environments and direct integrations with CloudPlatform, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack.

   Resilient architecture
   XenServer is designed with an agile, fully replicated architecture that implements a master/slave model, where any slave can become a master with no loss of functionality or configuration. This architecture enables cloud builders to cluster hosts without incurring any additional configuration or management complexity.

   Network isolation and protection
   XenServer scales to 800 VLANs per pool, enabling cloud builders to provide isolation between virtual machines (VMs) and users in a multi-tenant cloud environment. Linux iptables firewall partitioning enables host segmentation, while security and network spoofing and traffic sniffing tools prevent IP address spoofing, denial of service attacks and session hijacking.

   Strong open source heritage
   Access to the source of technology is a key aspect of understanding and managing the risk associated with selecting cloud solutions. Xen has been under development for 10 years as an open source project, and is now part of the Linux Foundation as the Xen Project under a GPLv2 license.

    

2. High-performance virtual infrastructure

   XenServer provides a complete virtual infrastructure including a 64-bit hypervisor with live migration, centralized management for virtual machines and hosts and a full complement of tools to get virtual environments up and running quickly.

   XenServer
   XenServer provides a highly reliable, available and secure open source virtualization platform that offers near-native performance and best-in-class VM density. The solution takes just 10 minutes to install using an intuitive, wizard-driven utility for easy server, storage and network setup.

   XenCenter management
   XenCenter provides all VM monitoring, management and general administration functions through a single, intuitive interface. XenCenter is a highly available management architecture with no single point of failure, as it shares all management and configuration data across all servers in a resource pool without the need for a separate database.

   XenMotion
   Citrix XenMotion eliminates the need for planned downtime to perform hardware and software upgrades. It allows live, running VMs to be moved from one host to another within a resource pool with no application or service outage.

   XenServer Conversion Manager
   XenServer Conversion Manager provides a simple batch conversion tool to automate the process of converting VMware VMs into XenServer VMs.

3. Datacenter automation

   Use XenServer to streamline critical tasks, maintain a manageable disaster recovery plan, increase server performance and reduce power consumption.

   High availability
   Automatic restart capability allows IT teams to restart VMs if a failure occurs at the VM, hypervisor or server level, and to bond network interfaces for network redundancy. Auto restart helps protect virtualized applications and bring higher levels of availability to the business.

   Site recovery
   Create a site-to-site disaster recovery plan for virtual environments. Site recovery is easy to set up and fast to recover, and allows frequent testing to ensure disaster recovery plans remain valid.

   Host power management
   Take advantage of embedded hardware features to lower datacenter electricity consumption by dynamically consolidating VMs on fewer systems and then powering off underutilized servers as demand for services fluctuates.

   VM snapshots
   Create snapshots of VMs to capture disk and metadata settings for backups, archives and configuration changes.

   Memory optimization
   Reduce costs and improve application performance and protection by sharing unused server memory among VMs on the host server.

   XenMotion
   Move live, running VMs and their associated virtual disk image within and across resource pools, leveraging local and shared storage.

4. Advanced integration and management

   XenServer optimizes computing resources with a deep integration between physical and virtual resources that enables rapid provisioning, storage integration, tiered access to VMs and granular management of virtual environments.

   IntelliCache
   Optimize XenServer for Citrix XenDesktop deployments by utilizing local storage for boot images and non-persistent data.

   Heterogeneous pools
   Enable resource pools that contain host servers with different processor types while fully supporting XenMotion, high availability and shared storage functionality.

   Role-based administration
   Improve VM security by maintaining a tiered access structure with varying levels of permissions.

   Performance reporting and alerting
   Receive immediate notification with historical reporting of VM performance for rapid identification and diagnosis of fault or failure in the virtual infrastructure.

Notes:
1. 2013 Info-Tech Vendor Landscape: Server Virtualization