Citrix announces preview of next-gen XenServer
Citrix has just released a technical preview of “Creedence”, code-name for the next version of XenServer, that might just be able to give the company a leg up in the virtualization stakes.
The release could be just in the nick of time for Citirx, coming just a day after Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for the x86 virtualization market. In our report we noted Citrix’s decline from being a market “leader”, to a “visionary”, to no more than a “niche player” in the eyes of the all-seeing analysts. Gartner went on to speculate that Citrix “is no longer investing strictly to keep up with market leaders VMware and Microsoft for traditional server virtualization.”
With the alpha release of Creedence it seems that Gartner could be onto something. Creedence has been “heavily optimized to work with other Citrix products like XenDesktop”, writes Tim Mackey on the XenServer blog. One of these heavy optimizations includes read caching, which has been enhanced to allow more virtual desktops to boot up simultaneously.
The new release of XenServer has a few more improvements that’ll please virtualization folks too, as well as Citrix users. These include the ability to migrate 32-bit virtual machines to 64-bit, a 64-bit control domain and the introduction of Linux kernel v3.10. Citrix has also added TRIM and UNMAP into the mix to better reclaim storage. Finally, Creedence comes with support for Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machines, plus integration with Microsoft System Center and expanded vGPU support for XenDesktop.
According to Mackey, Creedence is ready for some stress-testing in the wild, but those willing to give it a go might need to pull of a few tricks. “The one thing we can say is that we’re still working on the performance tuning so if you push things really hard, dom0 may run out of memory and you might need to follow CTX134951 to increase it (valid values are 8192, 16384 and 32768),” Mackey writes. “This is particularly true if you’re running more than 200 VMs per host, or need to attach more than 1200 virtual disks to VMs.”
Citrix hasn’t yet decided if Creedence will become version 6.5 or 7.0 of XenServer when it finally launches.
photo credit: Vieeto Voom via photopin cc
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