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Server virtualization with Citrix XenServer

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Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By Ramon Wartala

Version 5.6 of Citrix XenServer is a feature-stripped version of the virtualization product and is available free, in addition to the commercial Advanced, Enterprise, and Platinum editions.

In the summer of 2007, Citrix invested around US$ 500 million to acquire XenSource, the developers of the free Xen hypervisor. XenSource and its free hypervisor form the basis for what is probably the biggest rentable cloud today: the Amazon Web Service. On the basis of this extremely mature technology, Citrix launched version 5.6 of its XenServer product family in May 2010. XenServer, the product built around the hypervisor, includes a number of services and additional software tools that help administrators build and manage anything from a simple server to a full-fledged, virtualized data center.

From Xen to XenServer

Currently, four different product versions are available: Free, Advanced, Enterprise, and Platinum. The three commercial products have licensing based on server instances rather than processor cores. Depending on the functional scope, the prices are between US$ 1,000 and US$ 5,000, including 12 months of free upgrades, news, and information.

For server virtualization newcomers, Citrix offers XenServer Free, which you can download [1] without registering. However, you do need to apply for a free license if you run the server for more than 30 days, which means registering on the Citrix website. The license is valid for one year. Besides the XenServer ISO, which installs the host system after you burn it onto a CD, Citrix offers other free services.

In addition to a support CD for installing various Linux guest systems, Citrix offers XenCenter (Figure 1), a Windows-based management application for the host and virtualized guest systems. XenCenter provides a GUI and thus facilitates management of one or more XenServers. To help migrate physical and virtual systems to a XenServer instance, Citrix offers XenConvert, a conversion tool

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