New Release: XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 Beta "Project Cowley"

The entire XenServer product team is pleased to announce the release of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 Beta “Project Cowley” to MyCitrix.com. The landing page for this release can be found here and contains links to all relevant resources for this release. The ISO downloads, Virtual Appliances, Beta license file and the beta documentation can all be found at the appropriate downloads section on MyCitrix.com. For external communication the use of the landing page URL is preferred.

What’s New in this release

Feature highlights for this beta release are:

·    Distributed Virtual Switching Integrated, Open vSwitch technology provides distributed fine-grained networking configuration and control policies – increasing visibility into XenServer virtual networks and providing a centralized 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 and Recovery Policy based snapshotting and archiving of selected VMs across a XenServer resource pool enables administrators to schedule and recover when needed from the XenCenter management console.

·    Web Self-Service Portal Allows XenServer administrators to delegate VM rights to select individuals and enables users to request and access VMs via a simple to use web-based portal.

·    XenDesktop performance improvements Further enhances the best-in-class performance for XenDesktop on XenServer including local storage caching for better TCO and increased scalability via performance tuning in the control domain (requires a future version of XenDesktop to use).

·    Enhanced XenCenter Including StorageLink configuration entirely within XenCenter, workload reporting for VM utilization and chargeback.

·    Boot from SAN with multi-pathing support Boot XenServer hosts with Fibre Channel and iSCSI 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.

·    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.

Please read the release notes and documentation for more details.

Support

Partner and customer support for this beta will be provided through the Cowley support forums which will be monitored by several members of the PM and engineering teams. The external bugtracker will also be utilized for collecting information from the field (see the announcement section on the forum for more details).

Post-Beta Deliverables

We are currently working hard to have an updated Evaluation Virtual Appliance available which will include the latest WLB and SL components as well as a pre-installed beta license file. We expect that the updated EVA will be available over the next couple of days.