Raymar’s Citrix XenServer™ Solution

Features & Benefits

What is Xen?

Xen is a unique open source technology invented by a team led by Ian Pratt at the University of Cambridge and developed cooperatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative datacenter solution vendors. With Xen server virtualization and desktop virtualization solutions, 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 machines, 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. The Xen hypervisor is exceptionally lean-– about 50,000 lines of code-–which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.

Powering Citrix XenServer™ for server virtualization

The inventors and lead developers of Xen, with the rest of the XenServer™ team, take this powerful virtualization engine and build out a full managed server virtualization platform, designed for efficient management of Windows and Linux virtual machines and cost-effective server consolidation.

XenServer™ is a free enterprise-ready, cloud-proven server virtualization infrastructure that delivers the ten minutes to Xen experience of easy installation and intuitive XenCenter multi-server management, with flexible storage integration and open APIs that enable users to use their best-of-breed tools to enhance their enterprise system and storage management processes.

With the addition of Citrix Essentials for XenServer, customers can create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual server infrastructures. Citrix Essentials enables optimized usage of computing resources through intelligent workload placement and rapid provisioning of new virtual machine resources on demand. It also streamlines storage management in virtual environments through integration with existing storage platforms.

Key Benefits of XenServer™ for server virtualization

XenServer™ has fast become a leading server virtualization technology with over 5,000 customers and enterprise-class features that rival leading virtualization platforms. XenServer, as recently reviewed by Allan Stevens of ZDnet, "is very much a production-class virtualization solution with features that match, and in some cases exceed, what's available on rival platforms."

Best Virtualization Value
Enterprise-Class Features
Easy Setup and Administration

XenServer™

For everyone. For small business, large enterprises, and cloud providers. For Windows® and Linux environments, and environments with direct attached storage or complex storage networks. For organizations that want centralized, multi-server management for scalable administration and live migration of virtual machines for zero downtime maintenance. Citrix XenServer™ is the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform that delivers the critical features of live migration and centralized multi-node management for free.

Essentials for XenServer, Platinum Edition

For large lab environments, complex server environments or large server farms, the Essentials for XenServer, Platinum Edition provides workload lifecycle automation and dynamic provisioning of server workloads to help reduce server and storage sprawl, and minimize repetitive administrative operations.

Essentials for XenServer, Enterprise Edition

For server environments with demanding uptime requirements, complex shared storage architectures and the need for distributed performance management. The Essentials for XenServer, Enterprise Edition provides integration with native storage services, workload balancing, high availability and performance monitoring and reporting.

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