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Citrix Xen Server Review

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Citrix Xen Server The Fantastic Virtualisation Platform At No Cost

Friends the IT infrastructure around the world have evolved to Virtualisation because of its flexibility and scalability. There are some big players in the virtualisation segment like VMWARE, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen Servers, etc. All these platforms have free and licensed software to create virtualised data center. All have their pros and cons. But I am writing this post only for Citrix Xen Server which I have been using since last 8 years, and it has given our data center tremendous flexibility, scalability, performance and durability at zero software licensing cost. I think it may be beneficial to other people to share my experience so that they can take a better decision to choose a virtualisation software for their IT infrastructure.

Back in 2010 my company had purchased IBM blade servers and SAN based storage to upgrade its data center but without proper planning and after purchasing our company found that they have bought servers and storage bigger than there requirement. After deploying the required servers like oracle database, application server, and domain server most of the blade server resources were unused. And at that time I was a new System Administrator who had very basic knowledge of virtualisation like of using vmware on PC. Then I had found Citrix Xen Server a new virtualisation platform with open license and I gave it a try and deployed it in IBM blade servers.Believe me it was a great decision ever taken by me.

Data Center Infratructure

IBM Blade Center H Chasis
3 HS22 and 2 HX5 blades
IBM V7000 SAN Storage

I have deployed Xen server in 3 blades two HS22 and one HX5 with 12 virtual machines running. Server configurations are given below:

HX5( 1 x Intel Xeon 1.8 GHz 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, SAN BOOTING)
HS22 (2 x Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz, 4 cores 32 GB RAM, SAN Booting)
HS22 (1 x Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz, 4 cores 20 GB RAM, SAN Booting)

Citrix Xen Server versions running 6.5 and 6.2

Xen Center Management Console

I have deployed Linux base domain server, antivirus server, development oracle database servers, Microsoft Terminal servers, Squid proxy server, bind dns server, postix mail server, IIS web aap server, oracle forms server, etc. all of these are mission critical servers of our company. And all are running superb on Citrix Xen Server free version from the 8 years and we are very much satisfied. We are very much grateful to Citrix for creating such a great virtualisation platform and for providing a free version. I will share Citrix Xen Server installation and configuration guide in my next post.



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