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XenServer Creedence Tech Preview and Creedence Alpha
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This morning astute followers of XenServer activity noticed that Citrix had made available the previously announced Tech Preview for Creedence. The natural follow on question is how this relates to the alpha program we've been running on xenserver.org. The easy answer is that the Citrix Tech Preview of XenServer Creedence is binary compatible with the alpha.4 pre-release binary you can get from xenserver.org. From the perspective of the core platform (i.e. XenServer virtualization bits), the only difference is in the EULA.
So why run a Tech Preview if you have a successful alpha program already?
That's where the differences between a pure open source effort and a commercial effort begin. While the XenServer platform components are binary compatible, Citrix customers have expectations for features which couldn't be made open source, or implementations directly supporting Citrix commercial products. Perfect examples of these features and implementations can be seen on the Tech Preview download page, such as Microsoft System Center Integration, expanded vGPU support for XenDesktop, and the return of both the DVSC and WLB. While there is no guarantee any of those features or specific implementations will be present in the final Citrix release, or for that matter under what license, Citrix is seeking your input on them and a Tech Preview program is how that is accomplished.
I can't access the Tech Preview site; what's wrong?
If you can't login to the Tech Preview site, that likely means your account isn't associated with a Citrix commercial contract for XenServer. Since the alpha.4 pre-release is binary compatible, you can experience all the platform improvements yourself by downloading XenServer from the xenserver.org pre-release download page.
How do I provide feedback?
If you are able to participate in the Tech Preview program, you'll find the options for feedback listed on the Tech Preview page. Of course, even if you can participate in the Tech Preview program we're always accepting XenServer feedback through our public feedback options:
The XenServer incident database: https://bugs.xenserver.org
Development feedback (xs-devel): https://lists.xenserver.org/sympa/info/xs-devel
What cool things are in alpha.4?
This is the best for last! We've already got in Creedence a 64 bit dom0, updated Linux 3.10 kernel, updated open virtual switch 2.1.2, improved boot storm handling, read caching for file based SRs; so what goodies are in here for the core platform people? Let's start with TRIM and UNMAP to better reclaim storage, then add in 32 bit to 64 bit VM migration to support upgrade scenarios and storage migration from XenServer 6.2 and prior, all with additional operating system validation with SLES 11 SP3 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
What testing would you like us to do?
Don't let the alpha label fool you, alpha.4 of XenServer Creedence has been through quite a bit of testing, and is very much ready for you to try and stress it. The one thing we can say is that we're still working on the performance tuning so if you push things really hard, dom0 may run out of memory and you might need to follow CTX134951 to increase it (valid values are 8192, 16384 and 32768). This is particularly true if you're running more than 200 VMs per host, or need to attach more than 1200 virtual disks to VMs.
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