Citrix Releases XenServer 4.1

Citrix releases XenServer 4.1. I’ve been working with this version for a while now and this first offering post Citrix acquisition shows a lot of promise and some more maturity.

Storage

One of the most anticipated and needed features that version 4.1 brings is Fiber Channel shared storage support. What this means is now XenServer resource pools (clusters of hosts) can utilize Fiber Channel SAN storage.

Other storage features in XenCenter such as exposing the XAPI to NetApp storage arrays shows the open nature of the product under the hood. You can actually configure the NetApp storage via the XenCenter storage wizard. Other storage features, such as being able to right click on the storage and check the link state IP storage shows some polish to the basic tool.

Network

NIC bonding is now supported in 4.1. Once again, a really anticipated enterprise class feature addition.

New Templates

Another indication that XenServer is a Citrix product is made apparent in the new templates. One of the templates is one for XenApp server, which is Citrix Presentation server re-branded. According to the XenServer team, XenApp has a unique workload as a virtual machine. Citrix spent a good deal of time tweaking the performance settings of the template to make XenApp run faster on XenServer than any other virtualization platform.
The download site for XenServer is:

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148