XenServer 7.5

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XenServer 7.5
// Xen Orchestra

One release per quarter, this is the CR cycle of Citrix. And this is the latest one available: XenServer 7.5!

What's new?

The official changelog is here, but here is a simple recap.

Increased pool size

You can use pools up to 64 hosts! That's a really good news, it means you can use XOSAN for the same pricing, with a LOT more hosts/storage!

USB passthrough

You can pass now a physical USB device to a VM, as if it was plugged directly to it. This could cause some security questions, but it would be probably handy for various use cases.

Note: this feature is only available in XenServere Enterprise Edition or wait for the coming free XCP-ng 7.5 release!

Networking SR-IOV

This is still experimental, but should allow to use ultra-fast networking by having the VM directly connected to the NIC. Less overhead too.

To enable it: xe-enable-experimental-feature network_sriov

Note: this feature is only available in XenServere Enterprise Edition or wait for the coming free XCP-ng 7.5 release!

Thin pro for block storage

This is really exciting! At least, this feature is probably the big missing piece for years… Good news: you can have thin pro on iSCSI/HBA, with GFS2 technology.

Bad news: you need to create a new SR (you can't "convert" an existing iSCSI SR to thin pro), nor migrate a VDI from this SR to another type (see "Bonus" section.

Note: this feature is only available in XenServere Enterprise Edition or wait for the coming free XCP-ng 7.5 release!

Bonus: qcow2 is here

For the new thin pro on block storage (GFS2), you can create VDI that are 16TiB big, thanks to the use of qcow2 format. This will trigger some questions (you won't be able to export those in VHD format anymore, because 2TiB limit is within VHD format itself), so you won't be able to migrate those 2TiB+ disks to any other SR type than GFS2.

XCP-ng 7.5 status

As soon we validated the update process, we'll provide a 7.5 release for XCP-ng, as usual with 2 choices: upgrade from the ISO or just use yum update (or via XO UI, see that we included update directly from Xen Orchestra!).

Stay tuned on XCP-ng website, into the news section! (or subscribe to the newsletter from there)

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