From its corporate blog Roger Klorese, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, reveals a major feature coming for XenServer:
There’s been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world — a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the “Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest” contest.
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We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.
Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:
- Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
- Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
- Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
- Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
- Apply the patches
- Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically
Roger is referring to the virtualization.info post Patch Tuesday for VMware, which raised some concerns about the growing need for a hypervisor patch management strategy.
VMware is already addressing the issue with the launch of Update Manager, included the new VI 3.5.
With this feature Citrix starts to build those features needed to attract big customers and become more competitive on the enterprise market.