Blueprint for Optimizing Citrix XenApp High Availability
Marathon Technologies released a couple of whitepapers and a blueprint for optimizing Citrix XenApp High Availability. As you know, the technology for HA in Xenserver is actually from Marathon and you can also enable Fault tolerance with Marathon EverRun VM. These documents aren’t about Xenserver, but “a set of planning and implementation tools designed to help companies ensure high availability of applications delivered with Citrix® XenApp™ more efficiently and cost effectively“.
The documents are a good read if you want to learn more about XenApp and about how you can protect each component of XenApp.
Change Microcode in Xenserver/Everrun
Up until today I even didn’t know what Microcode or what it’s purpose was. After today I’ve learned a lot about it and would like to share it with you.
”Microcode is a layer of lowest-level instructions involved in the implementation of machine code instructions in many computers and other processors” is the description from Wikipedia. I read more and normally the microcode is updated by using a BIOS upgrade or ROM Flash from your vendor (In my case Intel). … Continue Reading
XenServer 5.0 Enterprise Ready?
Since 2 months I’ve been playing around with the new enterpise version of XenServer 5.0. As you can read in my first post my expectations of the new version were high. I’ve created a summary of pro’s and con’s. As far is I’m concerned VMware ESX server 3.5 Enterprise and Citrix XenServer 5.0 platinum are in the same league although some key features from ESX 3.5 are missing within XenServer and the other way around. Below you’ll find the way I created my test environment and all challenges I ran in to. See for your self if you consider XenServer enterprise ready.
XENServer 5.0 Released!
Citrix has released the new edition of XENServer. This version mainly focusses on High Availabilty and takes this to a new level! As told before in earlier posts Citrix has partnered up with Marathon and created a super High Available infrastructure. This infrastructure is able to create a XenApp environment that is so high available that when a physical server which hosts a virtual XenApp server dies, another server takes over the virtual machine without users losing sessions and even worse their work. There’s a very cool interview with the “Hypervisor Guru” Simon Crosby on the citrix website in which he explains the new features and high availabilty options.
With the realease of the XENServer 5.0 a new version of XENCenter is released aswell. In the first version of XENcenter a lot of small issues made the management a lot more complicated than for example in Virtual Center. With the new release of XENcenter a big step forward is made. Later on this month I’ll publish a review of XENCenter 5.0 on this Blog.
Next release of Xenserver public beta release available now
The Citrix blog announces the following news:
The public beta is available of the next release of Xenserver. Highlights of the release include:
- Automated high availability
- Windows Server 2008 guest support
- Persistent performance statistics and metrics
- Fully integrated Fibre Channel multipath support with configuration via XenCenter
- VM grouping, searching and tagging
- Email alerts
- Disaster recovery for VM metadata
- Active/active NIC aggregation
- Xen hypervisor updated to version 3.2
- XenConvert P2V migration tool
- Wider hardware support
…and many more. … Continue Reading
