The newest version of Citrix XenServer is now available. Version 6.0, referred to as "Project Boston" has been made available on Citrix.com Click Here for the official page. Some notable features and changes include: Workload Balancing is now available a virtual appliance for ease of use. New Self-Service Manager feature allows for easy creation of Private Cloud environments that includes support for both XenServer and VMware vSphere. Lab Manager superseded by SSM XenServer hosts and guests can now be managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012. HDX Enha

While XenServer 5.5 has a pretty decent GUI, there are still a few tasks that we have to use the command line for. Resizing Storage Repositories would be one of those tasks. In my environment, we use a Fibre Channel SR in our main XenServer resource pool, so I can vouch that these steps will work for that type of environment. Before starting with these steps, make sure you have actually resized the LUN using whatever software provided by your SAN vendor. This process is simply getting XenServer to recognize the change. Open the console of your XenServer Resource Pool Master. Run xe sr

On Thursday, Citrix released a hotfix that resolved an issue where Virtual Machines would crash when migrated on Intel Nehalem processors. If you are using Intel Hardware with EPT support, you should install this hotfix. You can download Hotfix XS55E002, CTX122348 at the link below. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122348

At VMWorld Europe, Citrix announced that their popular virtualization platform, XenServer, would be offered free. Virtualization is quickly becoming standard practice at the enterprise level, and for those who don’t currently virtualize, being able to do so for free really helps the process. XenServer is different Desktop Virtualization software, such as Sun’s VirtualBox or VMWare’s Workstation, in that it is a true hypervisor. It runs a stripped down version of CentOS Linux which emulates hardware at a very low level. Desktop Virtualization software usually requires a full OS, such a