Today Citrix opens the public beta of the upcoming XenServer 4.2 (codename Orlando).
The first beta introduces very interesting features like:
- Xen 3.2
- Automated high availability
- VM grouping, searching and tagging
- Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
- Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
- Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
- Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
- Support for alerts as email
From this version the product will also include a P2V migration tool called XenConvert, which is part of the beta as well.
The tool, currently supporting only 32 an 64bit version of Windows, is able to migrate the physical server image directly into a XenServer host, or it can just output it as VHD or XVA (XenServer Virtual Appliance) on a given location.
Enroll the beta program here (login required to see the actual link).
Update: Citrix also published a series of screencasts to demonstrate some of the new features coming with XenServer 4.2.