Citrix launches new XenServer release, gains server virtualization market share

At the Citrix Synergy show that took place in San Francisco last week, Citrix announced a new version of the company’s server virtualization platform, XenServer 5.6.  The hypervisor technology is the foundation for many Citrix desktop virtualization projects, as well as a growing number of data center and cloud services offerings.

For years now, Citrix has lagged behind VMware in terms of market share, but the company continues to make great strides. During the keynote presentation, Citrix president and CEO Mark Templeton threw out a few notable numbers around XenServer’s growth:

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• XenServer has been activated for production use in more than 45,000 enterprise data centers worldwide to date, including 45 percent of the Fortune 500.
• Based on analysts’ estimates and current download numbers, Citrix XenServer market share is projected to increase to 18 percent by the end of 2010, which is a big milestone for the company.
• The hypervisor technology is also said to be the back-end virtual infrastructure for approximately 40 percent of all Citrix XenDesktop VDI implementations — a large percentage to be sure, but one that should be somewhat expected.

XenServer continues to prove its legitimacy as a key player in the enterprise virtualization market. With Version 5.6, the free edition of XenServer continues to deliver a series of performance, scale, and support enhancements which include increased memory support to 256GB per host and support for up to 64 logical processors per server. Networking capabilities have also been expanded to include support for up to 16 NICs per host and support for single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), which provides very high I/O performance.

Beyond the free version of Citrix XenServer, the company has also announced a new edition to the product line, called the Advanced Edition, which includes everything in the Free Edition, as well as dynamic memory control, high availability, and a host of advanced reporting and alerting capabilities. The new Advanced Edition was one of the biggest key takeaways from the XenServer 5.6 announcement, but was probably lost or skipped over by many attendees during the keynote presentation.

Citrix said the Advanced Edition would make virtualization and cloud computing more accessible to enterprise organizations, regardless of their IT budget. Organizations, especially cloud providers, were looking for high-availability features in their enterprise hypervisor without being required to pay for added “fluff” they might not need in the higher, more expensive Enterprise or Platinum editions. The Advanced Edition’s price is only $1,000 per server, and for cloud service providers, Citrix is offering subscription-based pricing of only $30 per month.

“We’ve found [the Advanced Edition] contains the features that cloud providers want who are building very large clouds based on XenServer,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix. “The Advanced Edition comes after XenServer Free, and it adds all the memory optimizations, it adds high availability, and it is priced very affordably for folks who are building very large clouds with tens of thousands of servers.”

XenServer 5.6 may also end a long running argument between Citrix and VMware. OK, maybe not end it, but perhaps reshape it a bit. The two virtualization companies have had words over the usefulness of a feature called “memory overcommitment” within an enterprise deployment. Part of the reason for the arguing was that VMware had already had the capability within ESX for quite some time, while Citrix is only now adding support for it.

With XenServer 5.6, Citrix adds support for Dynamic Memory Control, which increases performance by sharing unused memory across virtual machines. With it, users can increase the number of virtual machines per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing virtual machines to be compressed so that additional virtual machines can boot on the host server. As virtual machines on that host are powered off or migrated to other hosts, running virtual machines can then reclaim that unused physical host memory. Much like on VMware ESX, users will have to define minimum and maximum memory settings for virtual machines.

On top of the enhancements in the Free and Advanced editions, new capabilities have been added to the Enterprise Edition. The new integration and management functions of XenServer include role-based administration and snapshots-reverts; role-based administration improves virtual machine security by maintaining a tiered access structure, while snapshots and reverts allow virtual servers to be backed up and restored where both the disk and memory imaging are saved.

Citrix also added automated workload balancing, which maximizes and optimizes server performance by intelligently placing and rebalancing server workloads based on user-defined and set thresholds. In addition, you’ll find a new host power management feature that extends existing workload balancing capabilities by consolidating virtual machines during off hours to fewer host servers and then reactivating and migrating them as demand picks up. This feature will help minimize data center power consumption and save money by helping organizations go green; it’s also very much like VMware’s Distributed Power Management feature found in vSphere.

The Platinum Edition extends the previous three editions and adds functionality — in the form of StorageLink SiteRecovery and a self-service portal extension to Lab Manager — to help administrators accelerate the delivery of IT services that drive the business. SiteRecovery provides an automated way to recover from a data center outage through a single console that leverages the native capabilities of a customer’s existing storage array. The self-service portal enables IT to remain in control but offers employees more flexibility by giving them quick access to needed IT resources that have been preconfigured and approved, or by allowing them to create new virtual machine environments that go through a request submission for IT approval and build-out.

“Within the stack in general, and within the automation stack we have features now which allow you to build a complete private cloud with all the features you’d need for power optimization, for automated load balancing, high availability and failover, and we price per server,” said Crosby. “Pricing per sever means we are neutral with regard to Moore’s Law, where our competitor continues to price per socket, which means they get more expensive as Moore’s Law grows and delivers more capacity to your server.”

Crosby added that the latest XenServer 5.6 platform can scale. He noted that a XenServer cloud that he has been working on is now at 12,000 servers and more than 100,000 virtual machines and still growing. Scaling to numbers like these show XenServer’s enterprise- and cloud-readiness.

To that point, another major announcement came from Rackspace president, cloud and chief strategy officer Lew Moorman, who brought news of a partnership between Citrix and Rackspace, the No. 2 cloud hosting provider behind Amazon. As part of the announcement, Moorman said that Rackspace was going to migrate from Xen and standardize its virtual infrastructure on the Citrix XenServer platform. The company is moving to XenServer in order to get a fully certified virtual infrastructure that can run Windows guest operating systems, and to gain Citrix ISV support and access to Citrix Xen APIs. This was a major validation for Citrix XenServer scalability as a cloud virtualization platform.

Citrix said that XenServer 5.6 will be available on May 28. In addition to the Free Edition and the Advanced Edition, which costs $1,000 per server, the Enterprise and Platinum editions will cost $2,500 and $5,000 per server, respectively.

This article, “Citrix launches new XenServer release, gains server virtualization market share,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Marshall’s Virtualization Report blog and follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.