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Move vSphere VMs to XenServer? Citrix thinks someone wants it

New tech preview scales up, eases migrations and mixes CPUs into compute soup

Would anyone move VMs from VMware to Citrix? XenServer's made it easier with a w technical preview of XenServer, probably for version 7.0.

This is the second such release since version 6.5 gave the world so much joy last January.

In line with Citrix's plan to make XenServer a terrific environment for its own wares, and mostly adequate for general virtualisation, the additions are not world-stoppers.

The biggies Citrix thinks most noteworthy are:

Improved Heterogeneous Pool Support so that if your hosts all use CPUs from the same company, it's easier to mix hosts with different CPUs. You'll still be able to migrate across hosts, even if they have different CPUs. Which sounds like a nice way to keep last year's servers relevant, if required; The ability to chow down on more VM types in Conversion Manager, which now happily manages conversions of VMs created under vSphere and ESXi versions 5.0 through 6.0. The ability to migrate Microsoft Windows OS versions has been extended to include Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows Server 2012; Scalability, as XenServer hosts can now handle 5TB of memory and guests can put 1.5TB RAM and up to 288 physical CPUs (inclusive of sockets & cores) to work; Control over host disk read and write I/O metrics when conducting workload optimization.

Earth shattering stuff? No. But certainly advances XenServer users will appreciate. Especially those doing things like running a big VDI farm that demand big VMs and lots of lovely failover. Which is just where Citrix thinks XenServer has a sweet spot.

The preview's yours for the downloading here. ®

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