Citrix has released a public Beta of the next major version of XenServer dubbed “Project Boston” (version 6.0 when released), providing private cloud self-service tools and platform, networking, performance and scalability improvements designed to create a multi-tenant environments.
XenServer “Project Boston” features:
- StorageLink and Site Recovery are now fully integrated within XenServer and managed from XenCenter.
- All virtual appliances are now Linux-based, only one Installation ISO as the Linux Supplemental Pack has been removed and Supplemental Pack are now available in virtual appliance format.
- Based on the Xen 4.1 hypervisor, Open vSwitch is now the default network stack, Hardware (SR-OIV) Support and improved networking performance.
- The ability to manage XenServer hosts and VMs with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012.
- The ability to monitor XenServer hosts with the System Center Operations Manager 2012 and special Supplemental pack from Citrix targeted for general availability when System Center 2012 ships later this year.
- HDX enhancements for optimized virtual desktop use experience and GPU Pass-Thru that allows a single GPU card or GPU on multi-card GPU card to be assigned to VMs.
- Ubuntu 10.04 support, RHEL 5.6 and SLES 10 SP4 support updates and experimental support for Solaris and Ubuntu 10.10.
- “Rolling Pool Upgrade” wizard.
- NFS support for HA.
- 1TB host RAM support.
- Increased VM vCPU and vRAM levels
- NIC bonding improvements.
In approximately 2 weeks, Citrix will also make available a Self-Service Manager Feature which enables you to build “private cloud” self-service environments, Virtual Appliance support that now allows creation of boot sequenced multi-VM virtual appliances for use with HA and Site Recovery, and VMware VMDK and Microsoft VHD disk images import functionality.