Citrix XenServer 4.2 reaches public Beta status

Citrix has opened up the public beta of its latest server virtualization platform, XenServer 4.2. The new version is code-named Project Orlando, and it lists quite a number of new features and product enhancements that could make the virtualization platform worth your time and effort.

One of the hot spot areas within the server virtualization market is business continuity and high availability. So why wouldn’t Project Orlando update this component in the XenServer product? Citrix said that its platform already offered customers the ability to script or manually manage high availability. And its replicated configuration database has removed the potential single point of failure imposed by external management servers.

But now, the latest version is offering customers a more automated solution. Virtual machines can be placed in a resource pool and then identified as to whether or not they should be restarted in the event that its host server fails. Priorities can also be assigned to each virtual machine so that your most critical workloads can be returned to service without overstressing your resources.

Other features include the following:

• Windows Server 2008 guest support

• Persistent performance statistics and metrics

• Fully integrated Fibre Channel multipath support with configuration via XenCenter

• VM grouping, searching, and tagging

• E-mail alerts

• Disaster recovery for VM metadata

• Active/active NIC aggregation

• Wider hardware support

With Xen 3.3 still in the final testing stages, Project Orlando comes with Xen 3.2 as the underlying hypervisor technology.

The platform is also introducing a new physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration tool called XenConvert. The new beta P2V tool can be run on a Windows server or desktop machine, and then its workload can be exported into a VHD format file, an XVA appliance file, or it can be directly imported into a running XenServer instance. The product works with most common 32- and 64-bit Windows versions.

In order to participate in the beta program and download the software, you will need to register for a “My Citrix” account.

Once you download and install the product, you can participate with others in the community by joining the XenServer “Project Orlando” Beta Forum.