Installation guide

Introducing XenServer

• enabling easy import and export of Virtual Machines in the virtual hard disk formats of all major vendors,

as well as offering raw block storage to Virtual Machines

• leveraging shared storage technologies, where present, as a core building block of XenServer resource

pools, to facilitate live-relocation of running Virtual Machines and easy relocation of workload to achieve

optimal utilization of pool resources

XenServer, uniquely amongst all virtualization products on the market, offers an open API to integrate di-

rectly with the various kinds of storage infrastructures available. With built-in support for IDE, SATA, SCSI

and SAS drives, XenServer can manage all forms of storage local to any server in a resource pool. Through

NAS, iSCSI and SAN support, XenServer extends the available Virtual Machine storage options to the most

common datacenter architectures in use today, while providing plug-in APIs for storage vendors to integrate

any storage management technology, from clustered file systems, through clustered volume management.

Storage repositories (or SRs) are elemental components of the XenServer architecture. All are managed

via the XenServer API, and through this API XenServer can leverage the built-in features of the underlying

storage infrastructure, including snapshotting, backup, and automated creation and assignment of LUNs for

new Virtual Machines. Not all SRs support all primitives - but XenServer can accommodate this by adding

software-level features that can be used if the storage infrastructure cannot support a particular primitive,

such as snapshotting.

1.4.4. XenMotion™ delivers an agile virtual infrastructure

When a XenServer Host in the pool needs physical maintenance, VMs can be relocated to other servers in

the pool, while they are running, with only hundreds of milliseconds of observable delay. This live relocation

capability is called XenMotion.

1.4.5. The XenServer product family

The three variants available are

• Express Edition™ supports a single XenServer Host with dual sockets (or multiple XenServer Hosts, one

at a time), up to 4GB physical RAM, hosting up to 4 concurrent VMs.

• Standard Edition™ supports multiple simultaneous XenServer Hosts with up to 128GB physical RAM,

and no limit on the number of concurrent VMs except the amount of available RAM. In addition, it also

adds support for specifying VLAN trunk ports in virtual bridges on the XenServer Host.

• Enterprise Edition™ supports multiple simultaneous XenServer Hosts with up to 128GB physical RAM,

and no limit on the number of concurrent VMs except the amount of available RAM. It also offers the

following additional features:

• clustering of XenServer Hosts into resource pools

• support for NFS, NetApp, Fibre Channel and iSCSI shared storage repositories

• live relocation (XenMotion) of VMs within the same resource pool

• additional Quality of Service (QoS) control for VMs

Each member of the XenServer product family provides the XenCenter management interface and a full

set of product documentation.

1.4.6. XenServer elements

XenServer contains all you need to quickly and easily set up a virtualized Xen environment. The main

installation CD contains: