Bye bye Citrix XenServer
As we are in the week of the obituaries, let’s do another one. A few weeks ago when vSphere 5.5 was release I updated our Enterprise Hypervisor Comparison. As Citrix and Red Hat both had released a new version of their hypervisor product I also added those. Normally I only need to check for new features added or product limits which have been upgraded. But this time was different!
In the column with the new Citrix XenServer 6.2 I had to remove feature which were previously included in the product. WTF?
I rarely come across any XenServer deployments and when I speak to colleagues, customers, etc. I often hear Citrix XenServer is dead. Based on the number of XenServer deployments I see and the number of customers changing to Hyper-V or vSphere this seems to support this theory. Instead of adding new features and upgrading product limits, I had to retire numerous features.
Features retired in XenServer 6.2:
- Workload Balancing and associated functionality (e.g. power-consumption based consolidation);
- XenServer plug-in for Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager;
- Virtual Machine Protection and Recovery (VMPR);
- Web Self Service;
- XenConvert (P2V).
Features with no further development and removal in future releases:
- Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) support;
- Integrated StorageLink (iSL);
- Distributed Virtual Switch (vSwitch) Controller (DVSC). The Open vSwitch remains fully supported and developed.
It has never been a secret that Microsoft and Citrix joined forces but as expected Citrix XenServer had no place there as Microsoft invested big on Hyper-V. But now it seems that Citrix has killed XenServer. With version 6.2 they moved XenServer to a fully open source model essentially giving it back to the community. Of course much of XenServer already was open source, using code from the Xen Project, Linux kernel and the Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative. But with the retirement of many existing features it seems that Citrix is stripping XenServer from all Citrix add-ons before giving the basic core back to the open source community.
Citrix still delivers a supported commercial distribution of XenServer but when an identical free version is available …… At the feature and functionality level, the only difference is that the free version of XenServer will not be able to use XenCenter for automated installation of security fixes, updates and maintenance releases. Free Citrix XenServer does include XenCenter for server management, but not patch management. I doubt many customers will buy a version of XenServer for patch management alone.
It’s interesting to see Gartner has moved Citrix outside the leaders Quadrant and placed it in the visionaries Quadrant. Visionaries in the x86 server virtualization infrastructure market have a differentiated approach or product, but they aren’t meeting their potential from an execution standpoint.
So it looks like Citrix has given up on XenServer and is going to focus on their core business, the desktop and the ecosystem of products around it.
Within their partnership with Microsoft they cannot or may not compete with Hyper-V although XenServer has,in the past, always been a better product than Hyper-V. With the battle on application delivery intensifying, their focus needs to be on their main portfolio. VMware is targeting Citrix’s application delivery platform with VMware Horizon Workspace and on the desktop front Citrix faces two enemies. Where Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is targeting their Server BAsed Computing/XenApp platform and VMware Horizon View is battling Citrix XenDesktop.
I wonder when we will hear that Citrix finally killed XenServer …..
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This is an interesting development because I was under the impression that Citrix’s vGPU (shared physical GPU) tech preview for XenDesktop requires XenServer as the hypervisor. Are they only going to market XenDesktop with vGPU on Hyper-V instead? Their current model isn’t going to fly on vSphere since VMware won’t allow Nvidia’s code on the hypervisor.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. With View 5.1, The NVidia GRID K1 and K2 cards from NVidia are supported to do either vSGA (virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration) or as a dedicated scenario where you pin a number of desktops to the K2 card. Carefull though, there are not a lot of servers that are certified by NVidia to be compatible with their GRID cards, so make sure you are on that list before you continue with it.
Now, the most interesting part is, will this work with Citrix (either XenApp or XenDesktop) as a hosted platform. I can’t tell you for sure. If you look at this presentation by NVidia, you can assume it should work (http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2013/presentations/S3501-NVIDIA-GRID-Virtualization.pdf).
We currently have a request out with NVidia to provide us with a Quadro card, as well as with Teradici for their APEX v2 card to write a whitepaper on accelerating graphics in a virtual world. Let’s hope they are willing to help us by providing their hardware to us.
(Disclosure: I work on the XenServer engineering team at Citrix.)
Rick: you’re entirely correct that vGPU is only available on XenServer. That alone demonstrates that there’s no intention to “kill off” XenServer. Then look at how other Citrix products such as Netscaler SDX wouldn’t be possible without XenServer and that also gives a good idea that it’s not going away.
Erik is right that XS 6.2 deprecated/retired several features (note, though, that the Microsoft SCVMM integration is not being deprecated). It depends on how you interpret it: one way is product streamlining (removing features which relatively few people used, to spend effort on more important features), another is to see it as killing the product. Evidently you’ll not be surprised to find that the intention is the former, though evidently that doesn’t make it any less painful for the people who were using the features concerned.
In terms of focussing on XenDesktop, the statistics we see from (optionally-enabled) phone home technology in XenDesktop is a very significant fraction of deployments on XenServer. I completely agree with Erik that in straight “server virtualisation” in enterprises XenServer is not a big player: that’s acknowledged, and therefore the focus is on integration with XenDesktop and other Citrix products. Oh, and we’re putting a fair amount of work into OpenStack too…
So, no plans to kill XenServer: in fact, we’re hiring ;-).
Rick,
VMware is supporting the GRID K1 and K2 cards by NVidia. There is a specific driver for ESX. Having said that, you do have to pay attention to the HCL by Nvidia, as not every mainstream server is supported. Check their serverlist first before you continue!
As for the most interesting part of your question: will this mean that when using Citix as a hosted platform, you can use Nvidia GRID cards to accelerate graphics. I’m don’t have an answer for you there. If you look at this presentation by Nvidia, you are very tempted to think it works.
As we here at VMguru would like to test and tell, we currently have a request out with Nvidia as well as with Teradici and FusionIO for a test sample of their servercards so we can write a best practice document on how to optimize for best graphics in a centrally hosted desktop environment. Check our website for updates on this and many more :)
Rick,
VMware is supporting the GRID K1 and K2 cards by NVidia. There is a specific driver for ESX. Having said that, you do have to pay attention to the HCL by Nvidia, as not every mainstream server is supported. Check their serverlist first before you continue!
As for the most interesting part of your question: will this mean that when using Citix as a hosted platform, you can use Nvidia GRID cards to accelerate graphics. I’m don’t have an answer for you there. If you look at this presentation by Nvidia, you are very tempted to think it works.
As we here at VMguru would like to test and tell, we currently have a request out with Nvidia as well as with Teradici and FusionIO for a test sample of their servercards so we can write a best practice document on how to optimize for best graphics in a centrally hosted desktop environment. Check our website for updates on this and many more :)
No real surprise on work load balancing being killed off as it never functioned properly in my experience, whether as a Windows service or a linux based vApp.
Web self service was a handy product, but not really something you’d point an end user toward. It should have been marketed as an alternative way to manage your VMs outside of XenCenter.
IMO a big problem with the WLB, WSS, DVS is they were all extra moving pieces in the form of additional VMs that had to be deployed in your environment and made your environment more fragile.