In April this year, Citrix announced that it would transfer the development of the Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation. It acquired the development of the Xen hypervisor when Citrix acquired XenSource in 2007. Today Citrix annouced version 6.2 of XenServer which from now on is fully open source, Citrix still provides a paid version of XenServer though, which includes support and maintenance. This version is the follow up of version 6.1 which was released in October last year.
Version 6.2 changes the licensing model from per-server to per-socket licensing, there will only be one package which will be fully featured and includes functionality which used to be found in the premium editions of XenServer. For existing users individual server licenses will be converted to two socket licenses.
For version 6.2 Citrix or XenServer.org at time of writing don’t provide any release notes yet, luckely Alexander Ervik Johnsen provides the new features on his blog.
- 500 Windows VMs per host and 650 Linux VMs per host
- 3250 vCPU per host
- Traffic reduction between a VM and the Control Domain (Dom0)
- Automatic scaling of Dom0 memory and vCPUs based on physical memory and CPU capacity on the host.
- Performance and Monitoring supplemental pack is now fully integrated
- Clone on boot, which allows rapid deployment of hundreds of transient desktop images from a single source, with the images being automatically destroyed and their disk space freed on exit.
- New and improved Guest Support
- Microsoft Windows 8
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2 (32/64-bit)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
- Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
- CentOS 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
- Debian Wheezy (32/64-bit)
- VSS support for Windows Server 2008R2 has been improved and reintroduced
- Improvements to logging in Dom0: logs cannot over-consume Dom0 resource, increasing host stability
- Live Storage Migration is now possible from the VM Storage tab in XenCenter
- Support for additional CPUs (AMD Piledriver, Intel Haswell-DT)
- Updated in-box device drivers
- Minor Hypervisor upgrade (Xen-4.1.5)
- Updated DM Multipath (0.4.9.56)
- Support for alert severity filtering in XenCenter
- Updated XenServer alert severity levels for consistency