XenServer 8 Unveiled: Navigating Hypervisor Upgrades and New Features

Join hosts Bill Sutton, Todd Smith, and Geremy Meyers for episode 175 of the Citrix Session Podcast as they dive into the critical aspects of upgrading to XenServer 8. In this episode, they discuss the impending end-of-life status of Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 cu1, scheduled for June 25th, 2025, highlighting the necessity for users to transition to the newer XenServer 8. The team outlines the enhanced features, including support for Windows 11 with VTPM, integrated PvS accelerator, added support for Nagios and SNMP, and the revolutionary Xen Conversion Manager which eases VM conversions. They also navigate through operational tips, such as leveraging a content delivery network for updates and the benefits of infrastructure as code with Terraform support. Whether you’re planning a migration or looking to optimize your Citrix workloads, this episode offers invaluable insights into making the most of XenServer 8's capabilities.

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone and welcome to episode 175 of the Citrix session Podcast I'm 1 of your hosts Bill Sutton. With me. I have a couple of folks who are with us just about every week from Citrix, Todd Smith and Jeremy Myers Todd. You want to say hello real quick to the.

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Todd Smith: Sure. Hey, Bill? And everyone out listening?

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Todd Smith: Been a been quite an interesting time here weather. Wise. I'm I'm going from the frigid cold of New England down to 80 degrees. Here in Fort Lauderdale today.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, you're down at the mothership this week, right?

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Todd Smith: I am.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, good for you, Jeremy. You want to say Hello.

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Geremy Meyers: Well, Hello, gang! I'm Jeremy Myers, based somewhere in the middle between Florida, where it's 80 and Massachusetts, where Todd sits, and it's not 80. We'll just leave it at that.

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Geremy Meyers: But listen, I'm happy to be here. I think we have a an important topic here as we we face down an end of life product. So

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Geremy Meyers: I'm thrilled, Bill. Let's talk about.

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Bill Sutton: Yes, we do. The the topic for today is a blog article dated January 29.th

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Bill Sutton: The title is, it's time to upgrade your Hypervisor to Zen Server 8 by Michael Lindholm.

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Bill Sutton: So this is like Jeremy said, a pretty important talk topic. We don't hear a lot about zen server. Well, maybe we hear a little bit more than we used to, but still not a great deal. And but it's a very important part of the Citrix ecosystem, and certainly still supported and still available to run your Citrix workloads. And really a good solid hypervisor, we actually have a project. It's integr right now for a customer

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Bill Sutton: that is essentially moving everything off that other hypervisor to zen server for their citrix workloads. And it's a pretty significant pretty significant lift it's about, I think.

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Bill Sutton: Think it's 1,500 licenses or 1,500 users, and it's going to expand by another 2,000 via acquisition. So there are still a lot of customers using this and we wanted just wanted to bring this to life. So the

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Bill Sutton: kind of the overall message here at the top.

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Bill Sutton: Is that the Citrix Hypervisor, 8.2 cu. One cumulative update will reach end of life on June 25th of this year 2025.

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Bill Sutton: So it's a good time to upgrade your hypervisor to zen Server 8.

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Bill Sutton: Jeremy, you want to talk about features, or maybe circle back and do kind of a high level overview before I might. I kind of jumped into it right.

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Geremy Meyers: You know what? It's all right. It's it'.

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Bill Sutton: That's what I always do, Jeremy.

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Geremy Meyers: It's what you do. It's great, you know. We'll hit the features in a minute, but you know, the thing I'll point out is oh, this is very confusing. I've had this conversation with many customers and the current version of let's just say the Hypervisor.

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Geremy Meyers: because 2 things have happened. Number one. It's it's changed names again back to the original name, which is great. So we have called it Citrix Hypervisor for a few years now, and it was Hypervisor 8.2.

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Geremy Meyers: So when you go out and look at the newer version, it's going to be called Zen Server 8,

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Geremy Meyers: which is, gonna feel like a step back. So we're going to go from 8.2 hypervisor to zen server 8. Believe it or not, this is the newer version right? So this article covers the fact that 8.2 cu. One, like Hypervisor is going end of life this year, June 25, th 2025. So to your customer, that's running this platform, and we have quite a few customers who are just be aware, start thinking through what your migration plan looks like. Because.

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Geremy Meyers: Todd, it's February, and we're not that far away from June, and as we all know, it only accelerates

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Geremy Meyers: the closer you get, so.

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Todd Smith: I think you're bringing up a really valid point is that you know, when you're updating something as critical as a hypervisor, it needs to be well planned out, and in some cases for some customers

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Todd Smith: going from February to June. That's a pretty short and accelerated timeframe.

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Geremy Meyers: Yup. So here's another thing that's really important to point out as well. Right? So

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Geremy Meyers: the way customers got Hypervisor in the past is it came, it shipped with any version of Cvad it shipped with any version of you know, Das universal Uhmc, the newer hybrid multi-cloud, the Cpl license. So it was meant to run Citrix workloads. Let me take a step back. It runs best. It runs. Citrix workloads best.

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Geremy Meyers: It's 100 supported for Citrix workloads. Bug fixes engineering request things like that all for Citrix Citrix workloads. We also support non citrix workloads as well. Just to be aware of that. So we do have customers going down that path. But if you look in your licensing portal today. So if you log into citrix.com and go look at your downloads and go look at the licenses available to you. If you've done an upgrade, or if you've done a license transition, or if you purchase new licenses

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Geremy Meyers: over the course of the last year you will see a license file

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Geremy Meyers: for 10,000 sockets in your licensing portal. So that's thing number one is, you should have those licenses out there. If you've done some kind of transaction renewal that sort of thing over the past 12 months. However, if you haven't yet. You might not see zen server out there in the portal. However, you do have access to it, and this is where I would highly recommend you reach out to your account, rep you'd reach out to your partner, reach out to integra

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Geremy Meyers: and make sure you put the request in to be able to get the licenses. If this is a platform you're using, and you have not done that transaction recently.

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Geremy Meyers: Not a big deal. It's still free of charge is still included. There's just a request that's gotta go in to actually get that license provision. And like, I said, whether or not you've got 10 Cbad licenses, or 5,000 or 10,000, you'll be entitled to 10,000 sockets.

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Todd Smith: Of Zen server fully supported, and and I think the key word there, Jeremy, is.

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Todd Smith: We license it based on sockets, not cores.

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Bill Sutton: Of course.

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Todd Smith: So some of the competitors out there look at the number of cores you have, which

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Todd Smith: you know some of the newer hardware platforms. You can have 64 cores on one socket.

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Todd Smith: depending on. You know how much money you want to spend on hardware. So it's a critical thing to to.

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Todd Smith: to kind of mention.

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Geremy Meyers: And and the last thing is we roll into features. Because we've spent 5 min talking about the 1st paragraph.

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Geremy Meyers: it's a premium feature set, too. So you get all of the features. You get 10,000 sockets. It really is a slow, solid platform, but

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Geremy Meyers: I think what this article is trying to get to is with Zen Server 8. There are actually some newer features that folks are looking for.

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Geremy Meyers: That are that are worth sort of talking through. So this is what this article actually goes through.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. So the 1st one is support for Windows 11, which I think is pretty

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Bill Sutton: self explanatory. But Vtpm, either of you guys want to take a stab at what that is.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah. So Todd.

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Todd Smith: I knew if I waited long enough, Jeremy, it would take this.

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Geremy Meyers: You know I can't stop myself. I can't stop myself, so there's a trusted what is it? Called the virtual trusted.

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Bill Sutton: Thanks.

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Todd Smith: Trusted platform.

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Todd Smith: Yes.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah. Listen, if you're on a windows. 11 there's a security feature baked in that is looking for hardware that's got this Tpm.

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Geremy Meyers: feature in the hardware. Right? So it's trusted. Platform. It's kind of a big deal from a security perspective. But the question is, what do you do

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Geremy Meyers: if it's a virtual machine and you don't have quote unquote hardware. Well, you kind of do right? So that's the whole idea. Behind this is the the virtual Tpm, so for customers who want to go to Windows 11, which is, by the way, looking for a Tpm. Chip in a piece of hardware. Zen server 8 actually has the virtual version of this, which is a really big deal. It's a virtual tpm, so

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Geremy Meyers: now you can spin up, you know, workloads that are running windows. 11 you know, on the Hypervisor. And

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Geremy Meyers: listen. This is probably by far the number one reason a lot of my customers are looking to upgrade is in Server 8.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, for sure, because you because of the Vtpm capability here.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. So the second new functionality area is an integrated Pvs accelerator. So Pvs, of course, is provisioning services, the ability to stream the operating system to a Vm. The accelerator kind of implied it accelerates the delivery of those workloads, and it's integrated directly into Zen server 8 right.

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Todd Smith: Yep. So so I think. I think the key here, Bill, is that it really taught it really, reduces some of that storage costs, and it increases the performance when it comes to booting a lot of these virtual machines.

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Todd Smith: Because think about it when you're when you're loading the Pvs image into memory. It basically is pulling it out of memory instead of having to pull it across the wire or pull it from from disk

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Todd Smith: extremely fast, gives you one

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Todd Smith: additional benefit out of Pvs, which is that single image management. When you're booting up the the image or booting up the the virtual machine. So that what you know I've

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Todd Smith: we just recently migrated a customer over from their their other hypervisor over to Zen server 600 hosts

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Todd Smith: 600 physical hosts supporting epic as the application delivery

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Todd Smith: in an application delivery model.

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Todd Smith: And you know the performance improvements that they got with with using Zen server they also had the opportunity to boost up some of the hardware as well. So they went with the dell Amd. Chipsets the epyc or epic chipsets and they were seeing 30% improvements in

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Todd Smith: density.

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Todd Smith: So once again, you know, combination of solutions here. So you got Pvs to accelerate the disk image or the booting of the image. You've got better hardware. You've got a a faster processor out there in a in a new hypervisor on there as well. That's been optimized for the Citrix workloads really drove home. You know the success that they're seeing.

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Bill Sutton: Absolutely.

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Geremy Meyers: Todd, what is the difference? I'm gonna put you on the spot here. You know why? Because you're an old ardent guy, and this has really nothing to do with ardent, but says in server question, It's a hypervisor question.

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Todd Smith: And then she said, old Ardenska.

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Geremy Meyers: You know what I don't want to use the old Ardens.

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Todd Smith: Because you're 39 again.

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Geremy Meyers: I thought that Pbs accelerator had been a feature of Hypervisor for a while. What is difference between.

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Todd Smith: It wasn't.

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Geremy Meyers: Resort.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, it really wasn't integrated into the Hypervisor itself. So it kind of ran as a standalone. Utility

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Todd Smith: required its own separate servers and things like that. And it had. It was really relying on the network and the speed of the disk

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Todd Smith: to really get that functionality and that improvement in efficiency.

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Todd Smith: but it has been completely integrated into the hypervisor itself.

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Geremy Meyers: But no.

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Todd Smith: Once again an additional authorization.

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Geremy Meyers: So right now it's a part of Dom 0. So the control, the the piece that control all of Zen server right? And one of the things it does really well, is it caches a lot of those

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Geremy Meyers: reads in memory? Right? So what is faster than the network? Well, memory is disk is, the memory is, too. And so the idea is, you can cache in memory. You can actually fail it over to local fast local disk as well, so that you know, maybe on the 1st machine that is reading the Pbs disk off the network.

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Geremy Meyers: The next machine is not reading off the network. Now, if it can find that bit locally, it'll read it locally.

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Todd Smith: And you just mentioned a very critical piece as well. Jeremy, is the fact that it's running in Dom 0, which is more secure than if it's running in a guest Vm, or even a service. Vm.

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Todd Smith: the fact that it's running in Dom 0 means that it could be it. It doesn't have the ability to kind of disrupt have a guest vm, disrupt other guest vms, so from a from a performance perspective, from a security perspective and from an operational perspective. It's it's all

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Todd Smith: adding value to that.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. But

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Bill Sutton: one key thing that I think customers and users need to re, remember is, I think, and historically, I may be wrong here, Todd or Jeremy, correct me if I'm if I am wrong.

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Bill Sutton: But Dom 0 typically is, is, doesn't have a whole lot of storage allocated to it. So you need to make sure you follow the requirements for the Pvs accelerator and increase the size of Dom 0. The the customer that we're doing this for now is use is going to use this. It's being implemented right now. And that was one consideration. But they had Nvme drives in their hosts.

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Bill Sutton: Really high speed. Nvme drive. So this is ideal. Doesn't mean you always have to have those. But this was a particularly ideal scenario for leveraging the integrated Pvs accelerator.

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Geremy Meyers: Very cool.

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Bill Sutton: Next, on the new functionality areas is added support for Nagios. I probably said that wrong and Snmp, these are essentially, as I understand it monitoring, reporting type utilities around metrics or metrics from the from the hypervisor. Either you guys want to comment on this.

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Todd Smith: So we've we've had.

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Todd Smith: we, we've had basic support for snp traps. Typically on the public level. These are specific. Now that can interact with a lot of the lights out management systems that are in there. Right? So being able to manage the actual hardware Zen server can actually contribute information into those management platforms and accept information from those management platforms. So both Nagios and Snp really kind of expand that capabilities.

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Bill Sutton: Really good.

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Bill Sutton: and the last one on the new functionality, and which I've got some experience with is Zen conversion manager. And essentially what this is. It's it's a

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Bill Sutton: it's a Vm or is it part of Dom 0? I forget now I should know.

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Geremy Meyers: To be him.

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Bill Sutton: I think it's a BS, yeah.

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Bill Sutton: it's a Vm. And but it will allow I've I've used it in my personal home lab I had. I had vmware and I basically, I just connected to vcenter and tell it which vms, I want to convert. And it does the conversion. Now there are some, some tweaks. I I found that it's easier. It it works easier if you remove the Vm tools before you do it. Before you run the the conversion but if you do that, it's it for me. Anyways, it was clean. You guys got any thoughts on this.

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Geremy Meyers: So I've been told, and I've not seen this firsthand

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Geremy Meyers: but it looks like the conversion manager will actually do that uninstall for you now, Bill. So whereas you

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Geremy Meyers: oh, why don't wanna

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Geremy Meyers: do that in advance? Now, as a part of that conversion, it will uninstall the vmware tools and then give you the option on the fly.

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Geremy Meyers: to install the vms into the image as well.

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Bill Sutton: Oh, okay.

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Bill Sutton: I was trying to remember.

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Todd Smith: And I think I think this is what yet yet again, you know, we didn't hear an awful lot of information, or a lot of, you know, material coming out of the Zen Server team for the past couple of years. But now, all of a sudden, there's been a

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Todd Smith: significant set of improvements. We used to have to rely on a lot of 3rd party tools to do some of the conversion activities.

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Todd Smith: You know, you would have to go from a physical or from a virtual back down to a physical and recapture the image. Kind of like the old plate spin days. If you remember those guys?

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Bill Sutton: Oh, yeah.

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Todd Smith: You know, you'd have to do a V to P, and then P to V

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Todd Smith: type of type of move migration this tool is going to be revolutionary, and the timing is almost perfect on this right, because everyone's looking at, you know, spreading out the the number of hypervisors, different Hypervisors for a variety of different reasons, we need to have

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Todd Smith: better operations. Some of the Hypervisors are more streamlined for one type of workload versus another. There's the, you know the cost of renewals and things like that, that kind of factor into it. So I think almost every customer

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Todd Smith: doing some type of

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Todd Smith: investigation or Poc to to try out zen server, or look at alternatives. And you know not only the people looking at Zen server as replacement for vmware, but also, you know, they're also looking to potentially. Look at where zen server fits in with some of the other Hypervisors out there as well. So hyper-v and Hv. And things like that.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: for sure. So the next area of the blog is, talks about keeping the hypervisor up to date or keeping it current.

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Bill Sutton: I know the old way of doing this, and and Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 and Prior was often difficult. It wasn't impossible, but keeping things, making sure that the individual fixes were the right ones, and you've got the right mix among all your hosts. This has now been modified, and they're leveraging a content delivery network to keep it up the pools up to date, I know in my lab every so often I'll see it. It'll say there's updates. And literally, it's

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Bill Sutton: really simple. You just simply say, next, next you you get to look at what you've what it's trying to apply.

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Bill Sutton: It'll do all the evacuating and moving of the machines and all of those types of things for you. That, it applies them and reboots them. And it's actually, you know again. I only have 2

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Bill Sutton: 2 hosts in my little lab, but I found updating them to be very simple and seamless. You guys have thoughts on this.

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Geremy Meyers: That is, that's really slick it. It makes that process much, much faster. I'll also tell you that I have had 2 or 3 customers reach out and say, Well, what do I do? I got a machine that's offline, or I gotta. I gotta pull the servers that are offline. You know. What? What are my options there? I didn't realize at the time, but we didn't have the option to do offline Updates. Now we have as of, I want to say, October or November, whenever that release was

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Geremy Meyers: let's just say, you don't have access to the Internet, you can still download and do offline updates as well. Which is pretty handy.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: Another thing they've done here apparently is, is

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Bill Sutton: new features to simplify the way you get Pbs images from Vmware to Zen server as well as

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Bill Sutton: terraform support. So the infrastructure as code, the ability to to to run scripts or run terraform scripts

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Bill Sutton: and build machines in a manner where they're all the same and uniform. Any thoughts on this section, guys.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And and I think the critical thing here is that you know more and more customers especially, that are running large operational environments. You know, the the key here is

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Todd Smith: working with the orchestration tools that are out there. Right? Terraform obviously, is one of the leading ones out there we write a lot of net scalar scripting, for with terraform we doing, we've done an awful lot of our scripting and operate support. Sorry the operations and management piece of it has been doing a lot of it's coming out of out of terraform scripting.

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Todd Smith: So this adds into that right because everyone's looking to turn it into, you know, a

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Todd Smith: an automation process as much as possible.

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Bill Sutton: Right?

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. This also mentions anti affinity support. 2025 support. And then this this one I've I recently saw an article about this

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Bill Sutton: citrix aware Zen server, which I found interesting. And basically, from what I can tell and what I've read, you can.

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Bill Sutton: This may only apply currently to on premises workloads. But you can connect this, connect the Zen Center

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Bill Sutton: to your your Citrix environment and see information about the status of your delivery controllers. Certain of your your Mcs machines things of that nature really kind of neat. I haven't tried this out yet, but really looks like a kind of a nice

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Bill Sutton: give you status information from directly from Zen server on some of those those hosts. Right? Guys.

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Todd Smith: And and I think the critical thing here, Bill, is that you know a lot. Almost every single customer is looking to

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Todd Smith: streamline that operations.

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Todd Smith: Yeah.

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Todd Smith: and streamline that operation services that are out there. Right? So using it, instead of having to go bounce between multiple consoles to be able to do those things. It's 1 thing from the administrative level. It's another thing to have the observability stuff the observability capabilities all being integrated. So this is yet another step towards that goal of having you know that single pane of glass to manage your entire environment?

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Todd Smith: both from a help desk perspective, but also from a day to day, operational perspective.

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Geremy Meyers: So one of the things I think you'll notice there's been sort of a trend here if you will. Throughout. The article is.

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Geremy Meyers: I mean. Listen, we. I've had a lot of customers come to me and say 2 things, one either a. We're trying to collapse some costs, and we already own. This, you know, is there a way for us to deploy this

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Geremy Meyers: and number 2? We've got some tooling here that's really meant to migrate off of vmware

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Geremy Meyers: down to so is it a good fit for everything? No, but I think for your citrix workloads. It's a very good fit, so I think it's something you should consider. We have a couple of things buried in this article which I think are fantastic. So there are 2 links out the tech zone articles.

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Geremy Meyers: that will actually kind of walk through what that looks like. Actually, I think it's somewhere else, Bill.

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Geremy Meyers: I think it's the click after the click. But there are a couple of very good articles on how? What that migration looks like from a Pbs non pbs, you know, perspective. And so what I would say is, in fact, I think it was in the Pbs migration from vmware to Zen server, you know there's a few tech zone articles that are built to walk through what that looks like. So you know, I would still say, Hey, you know, maybe reach out to Syntegra

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Geremy Meyers: and have them walk through what that plan looks like. Because again, when you switch hypervisors, you do anything infrastructure related certainly needs the planning. But

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Geremy Meyers: think those text articles will give you a very good idea of what that workflow looks like. And I think you'll be surprised at the work effort. What that used to be many years ago, and what that work effort looks like now is much different. So if you haven't looked at Zen Server in a while, now's a good time to do it, and if you are a Hypervisor customer now, now is definitely the time to go. Look at it.

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Bill Sutton: One last question is in the article, and it's clear on this, what about hardware?

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Bill Sutton: Can you use the same servers? Will Zen server 8 run on the same servers as Citrix Hypervisor, 8.2, and what the article says generally. Yes. The hardware to compat hardware compatibility list is the same.

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Bill Sutton: But I encourage all customers

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Bill Sutton: to go to hcl.zenserver.com and look up their hardware, particularly their storage storage controllers make sure that stuff is on the list

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Bill Sutton: before you start popping in USB sticks and imaging the servers. And even better reach out to Zentegra. We've done some of these. We're doing them right now. We've got consultants and engineers that are really well versed in this, and can help you through the journey to get your environment built on Zen server, your citrix environment built on Zen server and get it performing very well.

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Todd Smith: And Bill, I I think, as we're talking about hardware compatibility. A lot of the hardware vendors have

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Todd Smith: done some done some of the Hcl testing or the some of the compatibility mode testing very quickly, so that that Hcl is is being updated on a pretty regular basis.

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Todd Smith: and if you know, if you find hardware, that's that's not on that list.

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Todd Smith: and it's fairly recent. It's a matter of work, you know. We will work with the

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Todd Smith: with the hardware manufacturers, and you know, certainly customers and partners can work with

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Todd Smith: the hardware manufacturers to get them get them certified.

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Geremy Meyers: Yep. So if you go out to the Hcl. You'll notice a couple of different things. There's a column for version 8.2 Ltsr, one. So pick any of those, Bill, let's just start with cpus. In fact.

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Geremy Meyers: you'll see a column for 8.2 ltsr, you'll also see a separate column

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Geremy Meyers: for 8. Right? And you'll notice that most of the most of both columns have check boxes, meaning it's compatible. But there are a handful here. You know, some of them just not supporting some that that have a sort of a caveat to it. But here's what I'll say. For the most part, things are supported, but like anything like Bill said, you'll want to go through and

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Geremy Meyers: just validated, because when we think about hardware compatibility got customers running hardware that dates back quite a long time, and they've gotten their mileage out of Hypervisor. But

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Geremy Meyers: you know, anytime you do a an infrastructure upgrade. You know, it's sometimes it's a good chance to, you know. Refresh the hardware, too.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, really good advice, for sure.

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Bill Sutton: All right, we're at the end of the article. Any final thoughts? Jeremy Todd.

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Todd Smith: I I think the I think my 1st or my final thought on this would be really if you're going to be doing any type of migration, especially at the Hypervisor level.

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Todd Smith: you know. Take the time, plan ahead. Do your research engage with a partner like Centegra? To really kind of walk you through it. You know, quite frankly, we don't. You know. Most customers don't upgrade hypervisors on a frequent basis. Certainly not like you do a desktop operating system, or even an application it is.

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Todd Smith: It pays to take some time and plan it out and get prepared for it.

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Bill Sutton: For sure. Yep, good advice.

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Bill Sutton: Todd, alright what I'll say is, and I've said it before, probably a hundred times on these blog probably said it just about in every one of our podcasts

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Bill Sutton: is this is just another. Yet another example of citrix, continuing to evolve and and develop on the technology by adding new features and functionality in a, in a product that's included in your universal hybrid multi cloud or your citrix platform license. So if you're you're concerned about the value you're getting out of those licenses. This is just another example of added value at no additional cost. So and I expect to see this to continue right? Guys.

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Geremy Meyers: Absolutely.

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Bill Sutton: Yep, all right. Anything else, any other final thoughts.

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Geremy Meyers: Man. I think that's a mouthful for Monday.

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Bill Sutton: It is a mouthful for a Monday. Exactly. All right. We'll see you next week. Then. Thanks, guys.

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Geremy Meyers: Alright, thanks, Bill, thanks, Todd.

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Todd Smith: Thanks.