XenServer Project “Cowley” Beta

The beta release is now available on mycitrix.com for your download and use. Here’s some of what is new:

• Distributed Virtual Switching.  This new capability provides distributed fine-grained networking configuration and control policies, which increases visibility into XenServer virtual networks.  Support for the Open vSwitch (OVS) has been added as a post-install option on XenServer hosts, as well as a Controller for administration of multiple vSwitches and cross-host internal networks.  The open vSwitch also includes support for jumbo frames configuration on storage networks.
• VM Protection & Recovery is used for configuring scheduled snapshots and (optional) export of virtual machines.
• Web Self-Service.  Provides browser-based access to selected virtual machines by delegated administrators.
• Boot from SAN with multi-pathing support.  Boot XenServer hosts with Fibre channel HBAs from a SAN, with multi-pathing support.
• HA Restart Priority.  Configure HA policies to restart specific VM(s) first, such as StorageLink Gateway VMs or the Distributed vSwitch Controller VM.
• Improved XenDesktop VDI scalability.  Increased host VM density and resource pool scalability, via multi-vCPU control domain (Dom0) and other enhancements.
• Enhanced XenCenter.  Including StorageLink configuration entirely within XenCenter, workload reporting for VM utilization and chargeback.
• Improved MPP RDAC multi-pathing including path health reporting and alerting.
• Snapshot improvements. Automatic reclamation of storage space after VM snapshots have been deleted.
• Enhanced guest OS support for Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, RHEL 6.0 (RTM), CentOS 6.0 (RTM), Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RTM), Debian Squeeze (32 and 64-bit), and SLES 11 SP1.
• Generic RHEL 5.x support.  RHEL / CentOS / Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0- 5.5 support with a generic “RHEL 5” template.
• Brocade HBA drivers and command-line tools are included and shipped with XenServer.
• XenDesktop platform enhancements.  Provides local host caching of VM images to reduce storage TCO for XenDesktop VDI deployments. (Note: these platform enhancements will be enabled by a future version of XenDesktop)

You can download the beta from this link