Citrix XenServer enables businesses to deploy high-performance Windows and Linux virtual machines rapidly and easily, and to manage them and their related storage and networking resources from a single easy-to-use management console.
Three editions are available that are fully compatible, with additional capacity and features enabled by license key. The products include:
- Express Edition: a free starter package for bringing virtualization to every server
- Standard Edition: high-performance rich-featured server virtualization with multi-server management, with capacity for most business-critical workloads
- Enterprise Edition: a powerful platform managing virtualization as a flexible aggregated pool of compute and storage re sources, for dynamic managed virtualization environments for the enterprise
The foundation of Citrix XenServer v4 is the open source Xen™ hypervisor, an open, proven and fully supported engine for server virtualization.
Xen is a unique open source technology invented by a team led by Ian Pratt at the University of Cambridge (who subsequently founded XenSource) and developed cooperatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative data center solution vendors. With Xen virtualization, a thin software layer (known as the Xen hypervisor) is installed directly on the hardware, or "bare metal," and is thereby inserted between the server’s hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more "virtual servers," effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. Xen’s paravirtualization technology is widely acknowledged as the fastest and most secure virtualization software in the industry, and is enhanced by taking full advantage of the latest Intel VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization assist capabilities. Xen is exceptionally lean-- less than 50,000 lines of code – which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.
The inventors and lead developers of Xen, with the rest of the Citrix XenServer product team, take this powerful virtualization engine and build out a full managed virtualization platform around it, de
signed for efficient management of Windows and Linux virtual machines. Citrix XenServer v4 combines the performance, security, and openness of the Xen technology with XenCenter comprehensive management -- a platform perfect for rapid adoption of virtualization for server consolidation, software development and test, virtual desktops, and business continuity.
Citrix XenServer v4 is a native 64-bit virtualization platform, with the scalability required by business-critical applications. The highest host and guest CPU and memory limits available,
coupled with fine-grained resource controls for CPU, network and disk, enable it to deliver optimal quality of service.
| Single-server management |
Multi-server management |
Multi-server management with resource pools |
| 2 CPU sockets |
Unlimited CPU sockets |
Unlimited CPU sockets |
| 1 GB - 4 GB physical memory |
1 GB - 128 GB |
1GB - 128GB |
| Up to 4 VMs simultaneously active |
Unlimited VMs simultaneously active |
Unlimited VMs simultaneously active |
| 4 GB RAM per VM |
32 GB RAM per VM |
32 GB RAM per VM |
| Cannot add to resource pools |
Cannot add to resource pools |
Can be added to resource pools |
| Dedicated storage only |
Dedicated storage only |
Shared and dedicated storage |
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XenMotion live migration |
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VLAN configuration |
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Resource QoS (CPU, disk, network) |