Citrix XenServe 5.6 Beta1 is available to download and for free here :
This new version brings a lot of really important options I really needed to bring XenServer at my customer’s presentation and be able to use it with my XenApp and XenDesktop architectures. I mean, most of my customers, until now, prefer to pay choosing VMWare ESX or Sphere than Citrix XenServer and one of the main reason is about the granular role-based access controls option which simply doesn’t exist in the actual production version (XenServer 4, 5 and 5.5). This option is coming very late but is still welcome !
Citrix introduces this new version giving the following list of new features :
- Granular Role-based Access Controls. Administrative users can be assigned one of several roles, which govern the actions they are able to complete from XenCenter and the command-line interface (CLI).
- Administrative Logging and Audit. Administrative changes made from XenCenter or the CLI are logged and available in the Workload Reports in XenCenter.
- Dynamic Memory Control. This feature can increase the density of virtual machines running on a host by reducing the memory footprint of existing virtual machines so that new ones can boot.
- Enhanced VM Snapshots. It is now possible to create full VM snapshots including the disk and memory state. Virtual machines can be easily rolled back to prior snapshot states with a “revert to snapshot” option.
- Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management. Workload balancing (WLB) recommendations can be applied automatically without administrative intervention. Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others.
- StorageLink Site Recovery. Enhanced integration with storage-level replication enables recovery of an entire virtual infrastructure at a secondary disaster recovery site.
- Citrix License Server integration. Essentials for XenServer features are now activated using a license applied to a Citrix Licensing Server
The snapshot is really enhanced compare to the previous versions, this is what was missing with role-based access controls, this is small things but so important to all my customers, this is one of the first thing they wanted to see, snapshot management… Until now I was with my powershell scripts etc etc but it wasn’t very sexy to show…
Now it looks like that : (more…)
