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