Citrix Systems announced Citrix XenServer 5, the next generation of its server virtualization product line. XenServer 5 overcomes the limitations and complexity of first-generation solutions with new management capabilities and ease-of-use that make datacenters more dynamic for customers of all sizes. This release comes on the heels of new data showing XenServer gaining share in the rapidly-evolving server virtualization market less than one year after acquiring XenSource and the XenServer product line. XenServer is a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that helps customers transform static datacenters into dynamic "delivery centers." XenServer is also a growing force in the emerging cloud computing market and a key component of the new Citrix Cloud Center solution launched.

"XenServer 5 is going to completely change the way a lot of people think about server virtualization," said Lou Shipley, VP and General Manager, XenServer product group at Citrix Systems. "We are excited to see the growing momentum around XenServer as customers around the world begin to experience a more powerful, open, easy way to build dynamic datacenters."

"Having installed the beta version of XenServer 5 we've found it to be a well-rounded product which has matured quickly to exceed the market's demands," said James Livesey, ICT technical analyst at BULL TCL who is responsible for Barnsley Metropolitan Council's IT services. "The key for us was the position of XenServer in the broader Citrix Delivery Center product family. The licensing for server and desktop virtualization is bundled so well by Citrix that it makes sense, from both a financial and features perspective, for us to leverage XenServer as the center of our virtualization strategy."

New Management Capabilities Add Reliability
Adding to the already long list of proven enterprise-class features such as live migration, resource pooling and workload provisioning, XenServer 5 adds more than 100 new virtualization management features including major new advances in high availability (HA) and disaster recovery. These new capabilities include the industry's most advanced HA, auto-restart and failover technologies that can be seamlessly upgraded to full fault tolerance for the most mission-critical applications.

XenServer 5 also includes resilient distributed management architecture. This design stands in stark contrast to other virtualization solutions in which a single point of failure could bring down all servers across an entire datacenter. In addition, the latest edition of XenServer includes expanded support for replication and remote mirroring architectures, as well as built-in replication for virtual machine metadata information to allow bulletproof, easy and reliable virtual machine and application recovery for disaster or site failure scenarios.

Open Architecture Simplifies Management and Improves TCO
XenServer 5 features an enhanced open architecture that makes it even easier for customers to leverage their existing investments in storage and datacenter management systems. Unlike other virtualization products that are built on closed proprietary systems, the open storage APIs in XenServer allow customers to access and control advanced functions such as snapshotting, cloning, replication, de-duplication and provisioning in their existing storage systems from vendors such as EqualLogic and NetApp directly from within the XenServer management console. This approach allows customers to fully leverage all the capabilities of their existing datacenter infrastructure rather than deploying and managing an entirely new set of tools and people that apply only to their virtual servers.