XenServer 7

Olivier Lambert

• 1 min read

XenServer 7 (aka "Dundee") is officially available!

Download

You can download it here: http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/11616/XenServer-7.0.0-main.iso

What's inside

This new release is great, for multiple reasons: more stable, more powerful, more resilient.

Faster

Why faster? Just check first what's inside:

  • CentOS 7 for the Dom0 (vs CentOS 5 in XS 6.5)
  • Better Dom0 disk usage (new partition scheme)
  • UEFI boot support
  • CGroups
  • NFSv4 and FCoE support for Storage
  • Xen 4.6.1 (vs 4.4.1 in XS 6.5)

And a lot of libraries used in the toolstack are also now updated. It means globally faster operations for everything (export thus backup speed!)

Some benchmarks could be found here: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/the-future-of-xenserver-dundee/

100% Xen Orchestra compatible

In fact, XenServer 7 is more compatible with Xen Orchestra, because the toolstack is more reliable than in 6.5. So you'll have:

  • less bugs in XAPI with JSON-RPC
  • full JSON-RPC support (faster XO!)
  • more securiry with XAPI isolation via control groups (cgroups)

You'll be happy to have your XenServer tasks displaying properly the real progress in % during any long process (migrate, copy, etc.). This was broken (in JSON) in previous XenServer versions.

Faster Continuous Replication

Our great replication feature is more resilient in Xen Orchestra, because XenServer can stand a replication down to the minute on VMs you want to protect. This wasn't possible in 6.5, due to some random VHD delta issues.

Upgrade process

You can read this blog post dedicated to the upgrade process to XenServer 7. It's a big release, thus there is big changes: how to upgrade to XenServer 7.

Bonus: XO 5.0 Beta

Another good news: Xen Orchestra 5.0 will be available in beta soon! Keep an eye on our blog :)