Synergy First Day impression
Yesterday after a 15 hour flight and a lot of waiting in Houston we’ve arrived at the Las Vegas airport. Got our selves a cab to the MGM grand where all is going down. Registration is very quiet a 6:30 am (off course), got myself the goody bag and casino money coupons and left 
Oh by the way it was very thoughfull of Citrix to add an additional cord to the badge whch states your Citrix Status… This allow me to join the CCIA happy hour which I will attend today.
What is the biggest issue of America? Everything is bigger than anywhere else in the world which means I walk at least 8km a day from my Hotel room / Casino (MGM Grand) to the conference room (MGM Grand) and back. At least now I can explain to you why it’s called MGM GRAND.
Read more for a summary of the day.
SAP adopting Citrix XenServer next to VMware ESX: weird or smart ?
My first reaction was a pretty big laughter when I read the article that stated that SAP is going to use XenServer to virtualize about 500 servers. The laughter is, as Alessandro states, because of the fact that during Paul Maritz’ keynote at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes 2 weeks ago, SAP got over 30 minutes of (my valuable !!!) time for a (pretty boring) presentation about what amazing stuff they were doing with VMware.
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.
The Power of XEN
Last week I attended a meeting with several guys from Citrix. Purpose of the meeting was to convince us that the latest releases of Citrix XenServer are mature products for the enterprise market. Why this meeting? Because lot’s is said about Xen (the non commercial product) and XenServer (Citrix commercial product), but for now it only has a 3% marketshare. So when customers ask us for a reference it far more difficult to give a reference than for example VmWare. But back to the point, What did Citrix tell us to convince us?
Marathon everRun VM v4.0.2 is now shipping
EverRun VM 4.0.2 is shipped to day, which provides compatibility with XenServer 5.0. The Marathon corporate website has also been updated for customers downloading 30-day evaluations and single host trial edition evaluations.
The Xen HA feature that is available with XenServer 5.0 has not been integrated into 4.0.2. If Xen HA is enabled before or after everRun VM 4.0.2 is installed, it will automatically be disabled. everRun VM 4.1 is due to release on December 3rd and it will fully integrate and support Xen HA. Users who require both Xen HA and everRun VM have two options. They can deploy 4.0.2 now for fault tolerant VMs and upgrade to everRun VM 4.1 in December for Xen HA support. Or they can delay deployment until December 3rd when everRun VM 4.1 will be available.
As this everRun VM release is not providing new features other than compatibility with XenServer 5.0, upgrades from existing everRun VM 4.0.x releases are not supported. New deployments should be performed using everRun VM 4.0.2. Existing deployments must wait until December 3 to upgrade to XenServer 5.0 and everRun VM 4.1 to take advantage of the many new features in that everRun release.
