XenSource

Virtualisation battle heats up with announcement of Citrix XenServer version 4.1

Newest release of the much-vaunted server virtualisation solution made in the UK brings functionality level on par with VMWare for about half the price!

The main new capabilities and improvements include:

• Increased number of simultaneous running VMs
• Improved Citrix Presentation Server performance and maximum number of user sessions
• Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
• Initial shared fibre channel storage support
• Enhanced support for NetApp filers, including snapshot and cloning
• Windows guest Hot disk remove
• ISCSI improvements
• Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
• Improved hardware support
• Improved guest support

For further information please email the Citrix Team or call on 01638 569600.

Wikipedia describes Virtualisation as follows:

"…a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources."

In the ever-changing world of computing, virtualisation has come to mean many things, however, in the server virtualisation sphere, XenSource is establishing a new standard. XenSource provides high performance server virtualisation solutions that enable multiple virtual server instances to run concurrently on the same physical server, allowing far fewer servers to perform the same tasks.

XenSource evolved as a result of an Open Source project (Xen), pioneered by the University of Cambridge (still ongoing). Having been re-engineered to run on many different operating systems, including Windows, XenSource is a commercially available server virtualisation software that differs from its competitors in many ways.

Where others use emulation (executing instructions which are then simulated by the hypervisor), XenSource´s main differentiator is its use of "paravirtualisation" - it sits directly on the bare metal and communicates seamlessly with the operating system. This results in much faster performance and stability.

The Xen hypervisor is now the industry-standard open source infrastructure virtualisation software, developed collaboratively by 20 of the world's most innovative data centre solution vendors and with global source code-level partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, AMD, IBM, and HP.

XenEnterprise is ideal for IT professionals seeking to quickly install, build and manage a virtualization infrastructure for Windows and Linux in x86 server environments. XenEnterprise delivers dramatic improvements in server utilisation, reducing capital expenditures and infrastructure management costs through server consolidation, space and energy-saving.

COMPUTERLINKS are the sole distributor in the UK for XenSource and provide a full-service offering including training, vendor accreditation, sales support, pre-sales technical support, post-sales technical support and marketing. Please contact us for more details.