Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Xenserver

XenServer Enterprise for free?

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Before anyone starts shouting, yes I’m a VMware employee and a VMware fanatic or whatever they call it these days.

One of my customers phoned me up today and wanted to discuss the fact that XenServer Enterprise is available for free. I wasn’t prepared at all which makes a discussion like this very “interesting” to say the least, especially because I’m not a competitive expert.

I answered the customers question by asking a question: Do you really think the product is free and enterprise ready?

The customer referred me to this blog article by Mr. Crosby, the article clearly states:”…will find in XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”.

This particular customer is a heavy DRS user, I’m talking about multiple clusters with each at least 3 resource pools which contains at least 100 VM’s each. The current version of XenServer doesn’t have the DRS implementation the customer currently uses, but not only doesn’t the current version have this feature… the next version will also not have this feature. DRS will be part of Xenserver Essentials, in other words the paid management tool.

I’m just a consultant, I might be wrong… but most of my customers consider DRS to be an Enterprise feature. But it’s actually not only DRS that’s missing from the Free “Enterprise” Virtual Infrastructure solution… what about High Availability? I could be wrong again but all my customers seem to agree that High Availability is an Enterprise feature. Again HA is available, but it has been shifted from XenServer Enterprise to XenServer Essentials, yes the paid version… and what about support on the Free version, can’t seem to find any info on support.

Now I’m not going to tell you guys that VMware has the best product or that XenServer doesn’t cut it in an enterprise environment because that depends on your needs and wants. I do want to stress that not everything is what it seems to be and don’t believe everything you read.

Everything you always wanted to know about XenMotion

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VMware isn’t the only one anymore doing that magical live migration and Citrix wants everyone to know about the ins and outs:

XenMotion is a feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that gives an administrator the ability to move a running virtual machine from one XenServer to another. Virtual machines can be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance. Administrators can move running application work loads to take advantage of available compute power.

Read more at the source.

Xenserver patchmanagement

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One of the things that Xenserver, still lacks is decent patch management. VMware solved this in ESX3.5/VC2.5 with the “update manager” which is an awesome tool for updating your ESX Hosts. (Yes it can be used for Windows/Linux and applications, but it needs to be refined in my opinion.) Patching Xenserver is a manual job, but not for long. Citrix just announced a new feature for the upcoming Xenserver release, pool-wide patchmanagement.

Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:

  • Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
  • Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
  • Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
  • Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
  • Apply the patches
  • Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

All in a single guided process.

There should be a beta available soon. It’s good to see Citrix is bringing Xenserver up to speed. This competition/rivalry will eventually make all products better! Read it at the source.