Citrix XenServer
XenServer is another key player in the virtualization market. XenServer that is a product of Citrix, is built off a Xen hypervisor that is another cost-effective approach if your organization needs to incorporate virtualization into your environment. XenServer has full support for Windows and the Linux operation systems and is based on a pricing scale of a per server basis. While still having some unique features of their own, they still are amongst everyone else with offering live migration, snapshots, virtual switching, and management consoles.
What sets XenServer apart from a competitor like VMware is its cost per server compared to per processor. Also, XenServer promises to increase your server performance and reduce your power consumption by taking what could be several servers and consolidating them into one or two Hypervisors. This just allows for endless possibilities for expansion and taking your data center or current IT infrastructure to a whole new level of possibilities.
There are a few editions that XenServer offers: Free, Advanced, Enterprise, and Platinum. The free version has minimal features for management, alerting, switching, and live migration, but as you scale up to the higher levels, you begin to get features such as:
- Automated VM Protection Allows for simple VM backup and recovery through snapshots
Allows for simple VM - Live migration with Storage XenMotion
Ability to move live machines and ensure minimal downtime - Alerting
Notifications for virtual machine to easily troubleshoot performance issues - Reporting
Drill down capability to look at past/current performance of a virtual machine - Xen Center Management Console
A central location to manage virtual machines, storage pools, network settings - Management integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Allows you to full integrate with System Center VMM for a more centralized environment if you have multiple virtual environments. - Stoarge Link
Gives a “one stop shop” for storage managers to utilize their current data management techniques/tools and integrate with all virtual or physical servers - XenServer Conversion Manager
Easily convert VMware virtual machines into XenServer virtual machines - Memory Optimizaiton
A great feature to only utilize the memory demands of the virtual machines/hosts - Site Recovery
A simple setup to a complete disaster recovery between sties
Also has a testing feature for planned failovers - Power Management
Built in features that power off unused systems and reduce overall power consumption
