XenServer 5 Released

As some of you know, I teach the XenServer classes, but I also deliver many VMWare engagements and I really like both products.

Until now, VMWare has had the advantage on enterprise features, but XenServer has rapidly matured from the 3.x versions to grow into an attractive alternative to VMWare with XenServer 5. Citrix has incorporated over 130 improvements from the previous versions and when you look at the features, the price and the compatibility with Hyper-V from Microsoft; VMWare has a really strong competitor all of a sudden.

The New Big Features:

Simplified Pricing – XenServer 5 will be sold per physical server , not by CPU core, for just $900.

High Availability – Utilizing their partnership with Marathon Technologies, XenServer went from 0 to robust HA features. I have another post that details the Marathon HA features incorporated in XenServer, but it’s important to point out that these are built-in features, not bolted on as a separate product.

Snapshots - both regular snapshots that capture VM’s in a crash consistent state, and Quiesced snapshots take advantage of the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

Disaster Recovery- Using copies of the pool’s metadata sent to another location, site recovery in a disaster is available.

XenCenter – has so many new features, it needs its own article. Performance monitoring is really significantly improved and is the foundation for a future feature set that will be out in a few months.

To me, one of the big features is the compatibility with Hyper-V. Check out my Interview with Peter Levine discussing the Citrix and Microsoft partnership.