Citrix Xen about new virtual line

Dean Vaughan, manager channel development, told CRN that version 5 is a resilient distributed management architecture.

“The latest edition of XenServer includes expanded support for replication and remote mirroring architectures,” he said.

“It also includes a built-in replication for virtual machine metadata information to allow virtual machine and application recovery for disaster or site failure scenarios.”

XenServer 5 features an open architecture and makes it suitable for both Linux and Windows Operating Systems (OS).

“We have also made sure version 5 supports Windows Server 2008 while still running Windows Server 2003,” he said.

Vaughan said Citrix XenServer 5 is available through Citrix’s channel partners. Pricing starts at a suggested retail price of US$900 per server, regardless of how many CPUs or sockets.

“A new instructor-led course to help end-users learn best practices for optimal implementation of XenServer 5 will be available in the fourth quarter,” he said.

“An online version of this training will be available exclusively for partners.”

According to Vaughan, the latest product release cements the integration of the XenSource line with Citrix –- which the vendor purchased for US$500 million in October 2007.

“The acquisition complimented our market strategy. We realise that customers don’t want 'one size fits all' products,” he said.

“We wanted to be able to cover the scope of products, from server virtualisation, to application virtualisation and desktop virtualisation.”