Citrix XenServer5.5

Citrix XenServer™ is open, powerful server virtualisation that radically reduces datacenter costs by transforming static and complex datacenter environments into more dynamic, easy to manage server workload delivery centers. Based on the open source Xen hypervisor, XenServer delivers a secure and mature server virtualisation platform with near bare-metal performance.

XenServer delivers industry best TCO through faster application deployment, improved server utilisation, simple management and accelerated application delivery. XenServer is easy to set up and use, and offers intelligent storage capabilities through the most complete native integration with leading system and storage vendors.

Citrix XenServer will help your IT organisation:

Achieve the best server virtualisation TCO
Avoid vendor lock-in with an open architecture that works with what you have
Accelerate application delivery for a more agile datacentre

Faster and more powerful

Powered by Xen – Boasting faster out-of-the-box performance, Citrix XenServer™ 5.5 gets more virtual machines, with more users and faster applications onto your 64-bit, x86 servers. The Xen® 3.2 hypervisor includes control domain performance tuning, updated paravirtualisation drivers and VHD performance tuning.

Tuned for Windows – XenServer adds support for Windows Server® 2008, has been optimised to run Windows-based workloads (up to 30 percent faster) and has been certified on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server through Microsoft’s Server Virtualisation Validation Program (SVVP).

Tuned for XenApp – Citrix XenApp™ customers benefit from XenServer’s memory management performance enhancements for XenApp workloads. More users and faster applications lead to more efficient application delivery with XenApp.

Simple multi master management

Dozens of usability enhancements – XenServer’s hypervisor wasn’t the only thing to get more powerful. The best server virtualisation user experience in the industry just got better with more than 30 new ease-of-use enhancements.

Search, sort and tag – The XenCenter™ management console allows administrators to tag and search virtual infrastructure with ease to keep track of virtual machines as they proliferate across large datacenters. Web 2.0 style tagging and searching capabilities allow IT professionals to assign metadata and virtual tags to workloads, either pre-defined or customised to each organisation’s needs.

Performance monitoring and alerts – XenCenter includes performance monitoring, trending and alerting. Easily track key performance statistics for virtual and physical servers to identify hot spots, balance computing resources and alert administrators about potentially detrimental server behavior or changes.

Wizard driven – XenServer includes new Wizard-driven utilities such as XenConvert which transforms physical servers into virtual machines in minutes. The XenCenter management console also includes new wizards for advanced storage and server networking configurations.

Enhanced Conversion Tools make it easy to convert virtual machines created in the VMDK format (commonly used by VMware) into the VHD format (commonly used by Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V). The new XenConvert tools also make it easy to seamlessly convert between any of the common open virtualisation format packages, including OVF (open virtualisation format), OVA (open virtual appliance) and XVA (XenServer virtual appliance).

Enhanced Search enables customers to view and manage XenServer environments by a range of criteria including VM name, resource pool, location, server, storage repository, snapshot time, and network name – all from a single location. It also provides the ability to create custom views or folders.

Active Directory Integration makes it easy for customers to use their AD credentials to mange XenServer hosts as well as log and audit user activity.

Expanded Guest Support adds SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, Debian 5.0 and RedHat/CentOS/Oracle 5.3 to a growing list of supported guests that includes virtually every version of the Windows and Linux operating systems.

Disaster proof

Automated high availability – XenServer adds automated high availability (HA) with resource-based placement of virtual machines in the event of server failures. Automated HA includes dynamic fail-over planning based on available resources to help ensure that virtual machines always restart on the appropriate physical server.

XenCenter self-healing – XenCenter combines new automated HA with its distributed management architecture to create a self-healing, hard to kill management console. Every server in a resource pool can be a fail-over target for the XenCenter management console.

Disaster recovery – XenServer includes enhanced support for SAN based remote replication and auto backup of virtual machine configurations to remote sites. Whether it’s across town, across the country or across the ocean, organisations can have their virtual infrastructure up and running in no time.

Consolidated Backup allows third-party backup vendors to interface directly with XenServer to provide full and incremental, in-guest, file and image backups of virtual machines. The new consolidated backup capabilities in XenServer also provide customers with the ability to execute full GUI-based snapshots directly from the XenCenter central management console.

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