Addon
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custom |
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Unique Feature 1
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Add-On not supported by this product
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Add-On not supported by this product
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Add-On not supported by this product
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General
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- Fully Supported
- Limitation
- Not Supported
- Information Only
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Pros
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- + - XenServer it is OpenSource based
- + - It is highly optimized for XenApp and XenDesktop workloads
- + - Leader in virtual delivery of 3D professional graphics
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- + mature and feature-rich offering
- + great ecosystem & support
- + skills prevelant
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Cons
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- - - Less features in free edition. See http://bit.ly/2ddQiVL
- - - Niche product
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- - needs clear strategy for public cloud future
- - comprehensive capability but can become expensive
- - NSX leading SDN solution but skills scarce
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Content |
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The VIRTUALIST (Gica Livada) and Enzo Raso (Citrix)
Content created by Gica Livada from THE VIRTUALISTt: http://www.thevirtualist.org/ with help from Enzo Rasso (Citrix)
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THE VIRTUALIST
Content created by THE VIRTUALIST
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Content created by Virtualizationmatrix; (Contributors: Sean Cohen, Yaniv Dary, Raissa Tona, Larry W. Bailey)
Content created by Virtualizationmatrix
Thanks to Sean Cohen, Raissa Tona, Yaniv Dary and Larry W. Bailey for content contribution and review.
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Assessment |
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XenServer 7.5 Standard Edition includes Citrix support. XenServer 7.5 extends alignment with XenApp and XenDesktop release cycles while the expanded XenServer Enterprise entitlement ensures you can leverage unique app and desktop performance integrations only available with XenServer. For Standard vs Enterprise edition, please check: http://bit.ly/2ddQiVL
NEW
Citrix released XenServer version 7.5 on June 1st 2018, this release added new features:
- quadrupling the XenServer pool size, from 16 to 64 hosts!
- increased the maximum size of virtual disks from 2TB to 16TB!
- new option for GFS2 Storage Repositories as an experimental feature
Citrix entered the Hypervisor market with the acquisition of XenSource - the main supporter of the open source Xen project - in Oct 2007. The Xen project continues to exist, see https://www.xenproject.org/
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vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus - Click Here For Overview
vSphere is the collective term for VMwares virtualization platform, it includes the ESX hypervisor as well as the vCenter Management suite and associate components. vSphere is considered by many the industrys most mature and feature rich virtualization platform and had its origins in the initial ESX releases around 2001/2002.
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RHV 3.5 - Click Here For Details
NEW
Red Hat Virtualization is Red Hats server and technical workstation virtualization platform. It consists of the management product RHV-M (manager) and RHV-H (hypervisor) - a purpose built, slim hypervisor based on KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) - also referred to as Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) also contains KVM based virtualization capabilities, typically referred to as Red Hat Enterprise Linux Hosts. RHV-M can manage RHV-H hosts as well as RHEL hypervisor hosts running KVM (but make sure to check version compatibilities). All listed features apply to both, RHV-H and RHEL host - unless pointed out otherwise.
Red Hat Virtualization is Microsoft SVVP (Server Virtualization Validation Program) Certified and RHV-M can manage Windows guests.
Vendor Messaging:
- Red Hat Virtualization is a complete virtualization management solution for virtualized servers and technical workstations.
- Red Hat Virtualization aims to provide performance advantages, competitive pricing, and a trusted, stable environment.
- Building on Red Hat Virtualization hypervisor and the popular oVirt open virtualization management project, Red Hat Virtualization positions itself as strategic virtualization alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms.
- Red Hat Virtualization provides common underlying services and management technologies for traditional virtualization workloads while also providing an on-ramp to high-level cloud functionality based on OpenStack.
With Red Hat Virtualization, you can:
* Take advantage of existing people skills and investments
* Decrease TCO and accelerate ROI
* Automate time-consuming and complicated manual tasks
* Standardize storage, infrastructure, and networking services on OpenStack (tech-preview)
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XenServer 7.5 Release date May 2018
Xens first public release was in 2003, becoming part of Novell SUSE 10 OS in 2005 (later also Red hat). In Oct 2007 Citrix acquired XenSource (the main maintainer of the Xen code) and released XenServer under the Citrix brand.
For more info check http://bit.ly/2BT5apc
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Release Dates:
vSphere 6.5 : November 15th 2016
vSphere 6.5 is VMwares 6th generation of bare-metal enterprise virtualization software, from ESX1.x (2001/2), 2.x (2003) to Virtual Infrastructure 3 (2006), in May 2009 to vSphere 4.x. The ESXi architecture (small-footprint) became available in Dec 2007. vSphere 5 was announced July 2011 with GA August 2011 and was the first vSphere release converged on ESXi only, vSphere 5.1 was released 10th Sep 2012, vSphere 5.5 on Sep 22nd 2013, vSphere 6 on Feb 2nd 2015, vSphere 6.5 on November 15th 2016
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RHV 3.5 released in Feb 2015 - (RHV 3.4 - June 2014, RHV 3.3 - January 2014, RHV 3.2 - June 2013, RHV 3.1 - Dec 2012, RHV 2.1 - Nov 2009, 2.2: Aug 2010, RHV 3.0: Jan 2012)
NEW
Qumranet, a technology startup began the development of KVM and was subsequently acquired by Red Hat in 2008. Red Hats first release was v 2.1 in 2009 with an update in 2010 which included the virtual technical workstation capabilities. The 3.0 release in 2012 was a major milestone in porting the RHV-M manager from .NET to Java (and fully open-sourcing) alongside other improvements.
RHV 3.1 removed all requirements of any Windows-based infrastructure, but still support Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication, administration, VDI, etc. RHV 3.1 also provided a RESTful API for integration.
Since RHV 3.2, Red Hat has provided many feature enhancements, improvements in scale, enhanced reliability and integration points (hooks, OpenStack etc) documented in the matrix.
While not as large as e.g. the VMware and Microsoft ecosystem there are a large number of ISVs with products currently integrated into RHV, including Acronis for Backup/DR/Migration, Symantec Storage Foundation and Tintri for Storage, BMC TrueSight for capacity optimization, Igel, Wyse and other thin client vendors have SPICE (RHVs remote viewing protocol) integrated in some of their product offerings. Major OEM hardware vendors like IBM and HP support RHV (e.g. IBM has part numbers for all of RHVs subscription offerings). Additionally RHV enables third party plug-ins Recent plug-ins include:
- BMC connector for RHV-M REST API to collect data for managing RHV boxes without having to install an agent.
- HP OneView for Red Hat Virtualization (OVRHV) UI plug-in that that allows you to seamlessly manage your HP ProLiant infrastructure from within RHV Manager and provides actionable, valuable insight on underlying HP hardware (HP Insight Control plug-in is also available).
- NetApp Virtual Console enables rapid cloning of NetApp virtual machines, and allows NFS storage discovery, provisioning and modification from within Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Symantec Storage Foundation that delivers storage Quality of Service (QoS) at the application level and maximizes your storage efficiency, availability and performance across operating systems. This includes Symantec Cluster Server provides automated disaster recovery functionality to keep applications up and running. Cluster Server enables application specific fail-over and significantly reduces recovery time by eliminating the need to restart applications in case of a failure.
- Tenable Network Securitys Nessus Audit for RHV-M which queries the RHV API and reports that information within a Nessus report.
- Ansible RHV module that allows you to create new instances, either from scratch or an image, in addition to deleting or stopping instances on the RHV platform.
Visit marketplace.redhat.com/RHV to learn more about these plug-ins and RHV’s ecosystem of partner
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Pricing |
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Open Source (free) or two commercial editions, pricing for Standard Edition is: Annual: $763 / socket, Perpetual: $1525/ socket - both including 1 year of software maintenance.
For commercial editions (Standard or Enterprise) XenServer is licensed on a per-CPU socket basis. For a pool to be considered licensed, all XenServer hosts in the pool must be licensed. XenServer only counts populated CPU sockets.
All customers who have purchased any edition of XenApp or XenDesktop have an entitlement to use all XenServer 7.3 features
In XenServer 7.x, customers should allocate product licenses using a Citrix License Server, as with other Citrix components. From version 6.2.0 onwards, XenServer (other than via the XenDesktop licenses) is licensed on a per-socket basis. Allocation of licenses is managed centrally and enforced by a standalone Citrix License Server, physical or virtual, in the environment. After applying a per-socket license, XenServer will display as Citrix XenServer Per-Socket Edition.
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Ent+ :
$3,495/socket + S&S 1Y: $734 (B) or $874 (Prod)
vSphere is licensed per physical CPU (socket, not core), without restrictions on the amount of physical cores or virtual RAM configured. There are also no license restrictions on the number of virtual machines that a (licensed) host can run.
S&S basic or production (1Year example) - Production (P): 24 Hours/Day 7 Days/Week 365 Days/Year; Basic (B):12 Hours/Day Monday-Friday. Subscription and Support is mandatory. Details and other packages (Acceleration Kits Essential Kits are available). Details here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf and here http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing
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Yes (included in RHV hypervisor subscription)
The RHV-M management component is included in the RHV subscription model (i.e. single part number for both, hypervisor and management)
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Free (XenCenter)
Citrix XenCenter is the Windows-native graphical user interface for managing Citrix XenServer. It is included for no additional cost (open source as well as commercial versions).
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$5,995(Std) + $1,259(B) or $1,499 (P)
vCenter Server
Centralized visibility, proactive management and extensibility for VMware vSphere from a single console
VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing your VMware vSphere environments, so you can automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure with confidence.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server.html
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Yes, combined RHEL and RHV offering 26% savings
Red Hat offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Virtualization (a combined solution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization) that offers a 26% savings over buying each product separately. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Virtualization is the ideal platform for virtualized Linux workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Virtualization enables organization to virtualize mission-critical
applications while delivering unparalleled performance, scalability, and security features. See details here: http://red.ht/KBgLO5
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Bundle/Kit Pricing
Details
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Yes
XenServer is included for free with all XenApp and XenDesktop editions media kit
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yes
Kits:
- VMware vSphere Remote Office Branch Office Editions
- VMware vSphere Essentials Kits
- VMware vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management Acceleration Kits
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RHV: No (RHEL: 1/4/unlimited)
RHV subscriptions include the RHV-H hypervisor and RHV-Manager, they do not include the rights to use RHEL as the guest operating system in the virtual machines being managed by RHV.
The customer would purchase this separately by buying a RHEL for Virtual Datacenter subscription.
Please note that RHEL hosts generate additional subscription costs that are not included with RHV (see https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/ for details). RHEL hosts are priced by sockets (2, 4), number of virtual guests included (1, 4, unlimited) and subscription levels (Standard/Premium).
Or, the customer can buy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Virtualization which includes both RHV and RHEL for use as the guest operating System. http://red.ht/1lT1fww
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Guest OS Licensing
Details
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No
A demo Linux VM is include, there are no guest OS licenses included with the XenServer license. Guest OSs need to be therefore licensed separately.
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No
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Yes (RHV-M)
RHV-M - the Red Hat Virtualization Manager with a web-driven UI is central management console.
RHV 3.5 is based entirely on Open Source Software, with no dependencies on proprietary server infrastructures or web browsers. A centralized management system with a search-driven graphical interface supporting up to hundreds of hosts and thousands of virtual machines. The fully featured enterprise management system enables customers to centrally manage their entire virtual environments, which include virtual datacenters, clusters, hosts, guest virtual servers and technical workstations, networking, and storage.
RHV-M is also localized in various languages including: French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and English.
From RHV 3.3 there is full support for integrated external applications plug-ins from HP, Symantec, and NetApp – Learn more through the RHV marketplace - http://marketplace.redhat.com/RHV
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VM Mobility and HA
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VM Mobility |
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Live Migration of VMs
Details
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Yes XenMotion
XenMotion is available in all versions of XenServer and allows you to move a running VM from one host to another host, when the VMs disks are located on storage shared by both hosts. This allows for pool maintenance features such as Workload Balancing (WLB), High Availability (HA), and Rolling Pool Upgrade (RPU) to automatically move VMs. These features allow for workload leveling, infrastructure resilience, and the upgrade of server software, without any VM downtime. Storage can only be shared between hosts in the same pool, as a result, VMs can only be moved within the same pool.
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Yes (vMotion)
vMotion
- Cross vSwitch vMotion (all versions)
- Cross vCenter vMotion (n/a for Standard)
- Long Distance vMotion (n/a for Standard)
- Cross Cloud vMotion (n/a for Standard)
- Encryption vMotion (n/a for Standard)
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Yes (except with CPU pass-through)
Each cluster is configured with a minimal CPU type that all hosts in that cluster must support (you specify the CPU type in the RHV-M GUI when creating the cluster). Guests running on hosts within the cluster all run on this CPU type, ensuring that every guest can be live migrated to any host within the cluster. This cannot be changed after creation without significant disruption. All hosts in a cluster must run the same CPU type (Intel or AMD).
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Migration Compatibility
Details
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Yes (Heterogeneous Pools)
XenServer 5.6 introduced Heterogeneous Pools which enables live migration across different CPU types of the same vendor (requires AMD Extended Migration or Intel Flex Migration), details here: http://bit.ly/1ADu7Py.
This capability is maintained in XenServer 7.5
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Yes (EVC)
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility - enabled on vCenter cluster-level, utilizes Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration functionality available with most newer CPUs (but cannot migrate between Intel and AMD), Details here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005764
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Yes
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Yes
Enabled through XenCenter
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Yes
NEW
Maintenance mode is a core feature to prepare a host to be shut down safely.
vSphere 6.5: Faster Maintenance Mode and Evacuation Updates.
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Yes (LB) - Built-in (CPU) and Scheduler for custom
Yes - a policy engine determines the specific host on which a virtual machine runs. The policy engine decides which server will host the next virtual machine based on whether load balancing criteria have been defined, and which policy is being used for that cluster. RHV-M will use live migration to move virtual machines around the cluster as required.
From RHV-M 3.3 a new scheduler handles virtual machine placement, allowing users to create new scheduling policies, and also write their own logic in Python and include it in a policy.
- The new scheduler serves scheduling requests for running or migrating virtual machines according to a policy.
- The scheduling policy also includes load balancing functionality.
- Scheduling is performed by applying hard constraints and soft constraints to get the optimal host for that request at a given point of time
- The infrastructure allowing users to extend the new scheduler, is based on a service called ovirt-scheduler-proxy. The services purpose is for RHV admins to extend the scheduling process with custom python filters, weight functions and load balancing modules.
- Every cluster has a scheduling policy. Prior to 3.3, there were only three main policies - None, Even distribution, and Power saving - and now administrators can create their own policies or use the built-in policies which were extended to support new capabilities such as shutting down servers for power saving policy.
The load balancing process runs once every minute for each cluster in a data center. You can disable automatic migration for individual vm or pin them to specific hosts.
You can choose to set the policy as either even distribution or power saving, but NOT both.
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Automated Live Migration
Details
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No, Workload Balancing
Workload Balancing (WLB) which was reintroduced in 6.5 is now enhanced with XenServer 7.x. Available in Enterprise edition.
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Yes (DRS) - CPU, Mem
NEW
vSphere 6.5
VM Distribution: Enforce an even distribution of VMs.
Memory Metric for Load Balancing: DRS uses Active memory + 25% as its primary metric.
CPU over-commitment: This is an option to enforce a maximum vCPU:pCPU ratios in the cluster.
Network Aware DRS - system look at the network bandwidth on the host when considering making migration recommendations.
Storage IO Control configuration is now performed using Storage Policies and IO limits enforced using vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO).
Storage Based Policy Management (SPBM) framework, administrators can define different policies with different IO limits, and then assign VMs to those policies.
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Yes (Power Saving)
When Power saving is enabled in a cluster it distributes the load in a way that consolidates virtual machines on a subset of available hosts. This enables surplus hosts that are not in use to be powered down, saving power. You can set the threasholds in the RHV-M GUI to specify the Minimum Service Level a host is permitted to have.
You must also specify the time interval in minutes that a host is permitted to run below the minimum service level before remaining virtual machines are migrated to other hosts in the cluster - as long as the maximum service level set also permits this.
LIMITATIONS:
- You can enable either Load Balancing or Power Savings on a cluster but not both concurrently.
- Currently only CPU utilization is considered.
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No Workload Balancing
Power management is part of XenServer Workload Balancing (WLB) available in Enterprise edition.
Background: Power Management introduced with 5.6 was able to automatically consolidate workloads on the lowest possible number of physical servers and power off unused hosts when their capacity is not needed. Hosts would be automatically powered back on when needed.
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Yes (DPM)
Distributed Power Management - enables to consolidate virtual machines onto fewer hosts and power down unused capacity - reducing power and cooling. This can be fully automated where servers are powered off when not needed and powered back on when workload increases.
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Yes
NEW
Storage Live Migration is officially supported since RHV 3.2 that allowed migration of virtual machine disks to different storage devices while the virtual machine is running.
RHV 3.3 added the ability to do it to several disks of the same vm concurrently.
RHV 3.4 added the ability to do cold move between any two storage domains in the same DC (e.g., NFS and iSCSI) and Storage Live Migration between types of file domains (NFS/POSIX/Gluster) or block domains (FCP/iSCSI).
RHV 3.5 added the option to move an entire storage domain between DCs or even between setups.
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Storage Migration
Details
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Yes (Storage XenMotion)
Storage XenMotion in XenServer 7.x now works with the VM in any power state (stopped, paused or running)
XenServer 6.1 introduced the long awaited (live) Storage XenMotion capability
Storage XenMotion allows storage allocation changes while VMs are running or moved from one host to another including scenarios where a) VMs are NOT located on storage shared between the hosts (shared nothing live migration) and (b) hosts are not even in the same resource pool. This enables system administrators to:
- Live migration of a VM disk across shared storage targets within a resource pool (e.g. move between LUNs when one is at capacity);
- Live migration of a VM disk from one storage type to another storage type within a resource pool (e.g. perform storage array upgrades)
- Live migration of a VM disk to or from local storage on a XenServer host within a resource pool (reduce deployment costs by using local storage)
- Rebalance or move VMs between XenServer pools (for example moving a VM from a development environment to a production environment);
Starting with XenServer 6.1, administrators initiating XenMotion and Storage XenMotion operations can specify which management interface
transfers should occur over. Through the use of multiple management interfaces, the virtual disk transfer can occur with less impact on both core XenServer operations and VM network utilization.
Citrix supports up to 3 concurrent Storage XenMotion operations. The maximum number for (non-CDROM) VDIs per VM = six. Allowed Snapshots per VM undergoing Storage XenMotion = 1.
Technical details here: http://bit.ly/2lNgACU
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Yes (Live Storage vMotion)
Storage vMotion allows to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files (e.g. across heterogeneous storage arrays) without vm downtime. Storage DRS handles initial vmdk placement and gives migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster. The migration is performed using storage vMotion.
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200 hosts/cluster
That is the supported maximum number of hosts per RHV DataCenter and also per cluster (the theoretical KVM limit is higher).
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HA/DR |
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64 hosts / resource pool
NEW
64 Hosts per Resource Pool.
Please see XenServer 7.5 Configuration Limits document http://bit.ly/2rcrjZx
Note: the maximum pool size, for Free edition is now restricted to 3 Hosts.
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max 64 nodes / 8000 vm per cluster
Up to 64 nodes can be in a DRS/HA cluster, with a maximum of 8000 vm/cluster
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Yes (HA)
High availability is an integrated feature of RHV and allows for virtual machines to be restarted in case of a host failure.
HA has to be enabled on a virtual machine level. You can specify levels of priority for the vm (e.g. if resources are restrained only high priority vm are being restarted). Hosts that run highly available vm have to be configured for power management (to ensure accurate fencing in case of host failure).
Fencing Details: When a host becomes non-responsive it potentially retains the lock on the virtual disk images for virtual machines it is running. Attempting to start a virtual machine on a second host could cause data corruption. Fencing allows RHV-M to safely release the lock (using a fence agent that communicates with the power management card of the host) to confirm that a problem host has truly been rebooted.
RHV-M gives a non-responsive host a grace period of 30 seconds before any action is taken in order to allow the host to recover from any temporary errors.
Note: The RHV-M manager needs to be running for HA to function (unlike e.g. VMware HA or Hyper-V HA that do not rely on vCenter / VMM for the failover capability), also HA can not be enabled on the cluster level.
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Integrated HA (Restart vm)
Details
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Yes
XenServer High Availability protects the resource pool against host failures by restarting virtual machine. HA allows for configuration of restart priority and failover capacity. Configuration of HA is simple (effort similar to enabling VMware HA).
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Yes (VMware HA)
NEW
vSphere 6.5 Proactive HA detect hw condition evacuate host before failure (plugin provided OEM vendors)
Quarantine mode - host is placed in quarantine mode if it is considered in degraded state
Simplified vSphere HA Admission Control - 'Percentage of Cluster Resources' admission control policy
vSphere 6.0
- Support for Virtual Volumes – With Virtual Volumes a new type of storage entity is introduced in vSphere 6.0.
- VM Component Protection – This allows HA to respond to a scenario where the connection to the virtual machine’s datastore is impacted temporarily or permanently.
“Response for Datastore with All Paths Down”
“Response for Datastore with Permanent Device Loss”
- Increased scale – Cluster limit has grown from 32 to 64 hosts and to a max of 8000 VMs per cluster
- Registration of “HA Disabled” VMs on hosts after failure.
VMware HA restarts virtual machines according to defined restart priorities and monitors capacity needs required for defined level of failover.
vSphere HA in vSphere 5.5 has been enhanced to conform with virtual machine-virtual machine anti-affinity rules. Application availability is maintained by controlling the placement of virtual machines recovered by vSphere HA without migration. This capability is configured as an advanced option in vSphere 5.5.
vSphere 5.5 also improved the support for virtual Microsoft Failover Clustering (cluster nodes in virtual machines) - note that this functionality is independent of VMware HA and requires the appropriate Microsoft OS license and configuration of a Microsoft Failover Cluster. Microsoft clusters running on vSphere 5.5 now support Microsoft Windows Server 2012, round-robin path policy for shared storage, and iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for shared storage.
While not obvious to the user - with vSphere 5, HA has been re-written from ground-up, greatly reducing configuration and failover time. It now uses a one master - all other slaves concept. HA now also uses storage path monitoring to determine host health and state (e.g. useful for stretched cluster configurations).
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Yes (HA, WatchDog)
RHV supports watchdog device for linux guests that restarts virtual machines in case of OS failure. High availability (in addition to monitoring physical hosts) also monitors all virtual machines, so if the virtual machines operating system crashes, a signal is sent to automatically restart the virtual machine, but this is with host change.
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Automatic VM Reset
Details
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No
There is no automated restart/reset of individual virtual machines e.g. to protect against OS failure
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Yes (VMware HA)
NEW
vSphere 6.5 - Orchestrated Restart - VMware has enforced the VM to VM dependency chain, for a multi-tier application installed across multiple VMs.
Uses heartbeat monitoring to reset unresponsive virtual machines.
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No
There is no live lock-step mirroring support in RHV (aka Fault Tolerance in VMware) - although the theoretical capability is available in KVM. Red Hat tends to points out that the limitations around this technology (inability to take e.g. snap shots, perform a live storage migrate, limited guest vCPU support, high bandwidth/processing requirements) can make it inappropriate for enterprise implementation).
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VM Lockstep Protection
Details
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No
While XenServer can perform VM restart in case of a host failure there is no integrated mechanism to provide zero downtime failover functionality.
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Yes (Fault Tolerance) 4 vCPUs.
NEW
vSphere 6.5 FT has more integration with DRS and enhanced Network (lower the network latency)
Fault Tolerance brings continuous availability protection for VMs with up to 4 vCPUs in Enterprise Plus and Standard is 2 vCPUs.
Uses a shadow secondary virtual machine to run in lock-step with primary virtual machine to provide zero downtime protection in case of host failure.
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: Satellite
There is no integrated application level monitoring or restart of services/vm in case of application failures.
You can e.g. use Symantec Cluster Server to mitigate this.
This is possible using Satellite 6.
This is a Fee-based Add-On; Details - http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/satellite
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Application/Service HA
Details
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No
There is no application monitoring/restart capability provided with XenServer
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App HA
vSphere 6.5 Proactive HA detect hw condition evacuate host before failure (plugin provided OEM vendors)
Quarantine mode - host is placed in quarantine mode if it is considered in degraded state
Simplified vSphere HA Admission Control - 'Percentage of Cluster Resources' admission control policy
VMware HA restarts virtual machines according to defined restart priorities and monitors capacity needs required for defined level of failover.
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No (yes with Symantec Storage Foundation - Fee-Based Add-On)
There is no natively provided Site Failover capability in RHV.
You can e.g. use Symantec Storage Foundation to mitigate this.
Since RHV 3.2 Red Hat supports a third-party plug-in framework, enabling third parties to integrate new features and actions directly into the RHV Manager user interface.
RHV-M 3.5 fully supports a Symantec Storage Foundation plug-in that provides disaster recovery in case of a failure.
Symantec Storage Foundation offers push button disaster recovery orchestration and features completely automated failover of a Red Hat Virtualization environment over to a disaster recovery site. This includes guests, guest network reconfiguration, and storage reconfiguration. It is designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery for databases, custom applications, and complete multi-tiered applications across physical and virtual environments over any distance.
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Replication / Site Failover
Details
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Integrated Disaster Recovery (no storage array control)
XenServer 6 introduced the new Integrated Site Recovery (maintained in 7.3), replacing the StorageLink Gateway Site Recovery used in previous versions. It utilizes the native remote data replication between physical storage arrays and automates the recovery and failback capabilities. The new approach removes the Windows VM requirement for the StorageLink Gateway components and it works now with any iSCSI or Hardware HBA storage repository (rather only the restricted storage options with StorageLink support). You can perform failover, failback and test failover. You can configure and operate it using the Disaster Recovery option in XenCenter. Please note however that Site Recovery does NOT interact with the Storage array, so you will have to e.g. manually break mirror relationships before failing over. You will need to ensure that the virtual disks as well as the pool meta data (containing all the configuration data required to recreate your vims and vApps) are correctly replicated to your secondary site.
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Yes (vSphere Replication)
DR Orchestration (Vendor Add-On: VMware SRM)
NEW
vSphere Replication is VMware’s proprietary hypervisor-based replication engine designed to protect running virtual machines from partial or complete site failures by replicating their VMDK disk files.
This version extends support for the 5 minute RPO setting to the following new data stores: VMFS 5, VMFS 6, NFS 4.1, NFS 3, VVOL and VSAN 6.5.
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Yes
In RHV-H you can upgrade and reinstall a Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor host from an ISO image centrally stored on the Red Hat Virtualization Manager. Upgrading and reinstalling means that you are stopping and restarting the host. This can be either done manually by entering maintenance mode for the individual hosts or using a automated process of scheduling and applying updates to the cluster by setting hosts to maintenance mode in round-robin fashion (like e.g. with VMware Update Manager).
In RHEL Hypervisor hosts Patching is done via the normal patching processes via RHN or Satellite. Reboot can either be done manually or scheduled in round-robin fashion.
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Management
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General |
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Central Management
Details
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Yes (XenCenter)
XenCenter is the central Windows-based multi-server management application (client) for XenServer hosts (including the open source version).
It is different to other management apps (e.g. SCVMM or vCenter) which typically have a management server/management client architecture where the management server holds centralized configuration information (typically in a 3rd party DB). Unlike these management consoles, XenCenter distributes management data across XenServer servers (hosts) in a resource pool to ensure there is no single point of management failure. If a management server (host) should fail, any other server in the pool can take over the management role. XenCenter is essentially only the client.
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Yes (vCenter Server Standard)
NEW
vCenter Server Standard
Centralized visibility, proactive management and extensibility for VMware vSphere from a single console
VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing your VMware vSphere environments, so you can automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure with confidence.
Available as Windows or Apliance VCSA with embeded or separate PSC.
- Simplified architecture (integrated vCenter Server Appliance, Update Manager included all-in-one), no Windows/SQL licensing
- Native High Availability (HA) of vCenter for the appliance is built-in – Automatic failover (Web Client may require re-login)
- Native Backup and Restore of vCenter appliance – Simplified backup and restore with a new native file-based solution. Restore the vCenter Server configuration to a fresh appliance and stream backups to external storage using HTTP, FTP, or SCP protocols.
- New HTML5-based vSphere Client that is both responsive and easy to use (Based on our new Clarity UI)
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Third-party plug-in framework
NEW
RHV focuses on managing the virtual infrastructure and can also manage RHSS.
Also, RHV-M 3.3 (and onwards) integrates with 3rd party applications including:
- BMC connector for RHV-M REST API to collect data for managing RHV boxes without having to install an agent.
- HP OneView for Red Hat Virtualization (OVRHV) UI plug-in that that allows you to seamlessly manage your HP ProLiant infrastructure from within RHV Manager and provides actionable, valuable insight on underlying HP hardware (HP Insight Control plug-in is also available).
- NetApp Virtual Console enables rapid cloning of NetApp virtual machines, and allows NFS storage discovery, provisioning and modification from within Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Symantec Storage Foundation that delivers storage Quality of Service (QoS) at the application level and maximizes your storage efficiency, availability and performance across operating systems. This includes Symantec Cluster Server provides automated disaster recovery
functionality to keep applications up and running. Cluster Server
enables application specific fail-over and significantly reduces
recovery time by eliminating the need to restart applications in case of
a failure.
- Tenable Network Securitys Nessus Audit for RHV-M which queries the RHV API and reports that information within a Nessus report.
- Ansible RHV module that allows you to create new instances, either from scratch or an image, in addition to deleting or stopping instances on the RHV platform.
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Virtual and Physical
Details
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Limited (plug-ins)
XenCenter focusses on managing the virtual infrastructure (XenServer host and the associated virtual machines).
XenServer 7.0 saw the introduced of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) integration pack (via a Comtrade acquisition). This enabling the management and monitoring of XenServer hosts and VMs and is available for no additional charge for XenServer 7.x Enterprise Edition users (see http://bit.ly/2cXr14v for details)
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Limited (plug-ins)
vCenter and associated components focus on management of virtual infrastructure - physical (non-virtualized) infrastructure will typically require separate management.
However, one can argue that there are increasingly aspects of physical management (bare metal host deploy, vCenter Operations capabilities, vCenter monitoring of physical hosts etc. but the core focusses on the virtual aspects).
Additionally, VMware encourages 3rd party vendors to provide management plug-ins for the vCenter Client (classic or web) that can manage peripheral components of the environment (3rd party storage, servers etc.).
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Yes (AD and IPA)
RHV offers the choice to either integrate with Microsoft Active Directory or use Red Hat IPA (based upon open technologies and standards) with support for LDAP and Kerberos, centrally managed identity, single sign-on services, high availability directory services or Red Hat Directory Services (RHDS).
RHV provides a range of pre-configured or default roles, from the Superuser or system administration of the platform, to an end user with permissions to access a single virtual machine only. Additional roles can be added and customized to suit the end user environment.
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RBAC / AD-Integration
Details
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Yes (hosts/XenCenter)
XenServer 5.6 introduced Role Based Access Control by allowing the mapping of a user (or a group of users) to defined roles (a named set of permissions), which in turn have the ability to perform certain operations. RBAC depends on Active Directory for authentication services. Specifically, XenServer keeps a list of authorized users based on Active Directory user and group accounts. As a result, you must join the pool to the domain and add Active Directory accounts before you can assign roles.
There are 6 default roles: Pool Admin, Pool Operator, VM Power Admin, VM Admin, VM Operator and Read Only - which can be listed and modified using the xe CLI.
Details here: http://bit.ly/2rHyEE6
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Yes (vCenter and ESXi hosts)
Platform Services Controller (PSC) deals with identity management for administrators and applications that interact with the vSphere platform.
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No (native)
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: CloudForms)
No - RHV exclusively manages Red Hat based environments.
Yes with Red Hat CloudForms - users can manage multiple hypervisor vendors. Details here: http://red.ht/I8JG3E (additional cost, not included in RHV subscription)
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Cross-Vendor Mgmt
Details
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No (native)
Yes (Vendor Add-On: CloudPlatform)
XenCenter only manages Citrix XenServer hosts.
Comments:
- Citrixs Desktop Virtualization product (XenDesktop, fee based add-on) supports multiple hypervisors (ESX, XenServer, Hyper-V)
- The Citrix XenServer Conversion Manager in 6.1 now enables batch import of VMs created with VMware products into a XenServer pool to reduce costs of converting to a XenServer environment).
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vRealize Automation (Vendor Add-On)
VMware vRealize Automation automates the delivery of personalized infrastructure, applications and custom IT services.
This cloud automation software lets you deploy across a multi-vendor hybrid cloud infrastructure, giving you both flexibility and investment protection for current and future technology choices.
http://www.vmware.com/mena/products/vrealize-automation.html
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Yes (RHV-M, Power User Portal)
Yes, RHV-M is Java based and is accessed through a web browser GUI, RESTful API with session support, Linux CLI, Python SDK, Java SDK.
RHV also offers a Power User Portal, a web-based access portal for user (Red Hat positions it as an entry-level Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) user portal to: Create, edit and remove virtual machines, Manage virtual disks and network interfaces, Assign user permissions to virtual machines, Create and use templates to rapidly deploy virtual machines, Monitor resource usage and high-severity events, Create and use snapshots to restore virtual machines to a previous state.
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Browser Based Mgmt
Details
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Not directly with XenCenter but possible with XenOrchestra (Open Source)
More info: https://bit.ly/1gcmTYN
Web Self Service (retired with the launch of XenServer 6.2) was a lightweight portal which allowed individuals to operate their own virtual machines without having administrator credentials to the XenServer host. For large infrastructures, OpenStack is a full orchestration product with far greater capability; for a lightweight alternative, xvpsource.org offers a free open source product.
Related Citrix products have browser based access, for example Storefront (next generation of Web Interface)
XenOrchestra is a web interface to visualize and administrate your XenServer (or XAPI enabled) hosts. No agent is requiered to make it work. It aims to be easy to use on any device supporting modern web technologies (HTML 5, CSS 3, JavaScript) such as your desktop computer or your smartphone. More info: https://bit.ly/1gcmTYN
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Yes (vSphere Web Client, HTML5 Web Client)
NEW
vSphere Client - new version of the HTML5-based vSphere Client that will run alongside the vSphere Web Client. The vSphere Client is built right into vCenter Server 6.5 (both Windows and Appliance) and is enabled by default.
vSphere Web Client - improvements will help with the overall user experience. (Home screen reorganized, Performance improvements, Live refresh for power states, tasks.)
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Yes (extended functionality with CloudForms - Fee-Based Add On)
RHV has comprehensive data warehouse with a stable API and reports package that provides a suite of pre-configured reports that enable you to monitor and analyse the system at data center, cluster and host levels.
It also provides dashboards in the UI to monitor the system in these different levels.
CloudForms - offers cloud and virtualization operations management advance capabilities:
Note that CloudForms is an additional Fee-Based offering not covered by the RHV subscription!
Features of the cloud and virtualization operations management capabilities:
- delivering IaaS with self-service
- service catalogs, automated provisioning and life cycle management
- monitoring and optimization of infrastructure resources and workloads
- metering, resource quotas, and chargeback
- proactive management, advanced decision support, and intelligent automation through predictive analytics
- provides visibility and reporting for governance, compliance, and management insight
- Enforces enterprise policies in real-time, ensuring cloud security, reliability, and availability
- IT process, task, and event automation.
Details here: www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudforms
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Adv. Operation Management
Details
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No
There is no advanced operations management tool included with XenServer.
Additional Info:
XenServers Integration Suite Supplemental Pack allows inter-operation with Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM). SCOM enables monitoring of host performance when installed on a XenServer host.
Both of these tools can be integrated with your XenServer pool by installing the Integration Suite Supplemental Pack on each of your XenServer hosts.
For virtual desktop environments Citrix EdgeSight is a performance and availability management solution for XenDesktop, XenApp and endpoint systems. EdgeSight monitors applications, devices, sessions, license usage, and the network in real time, allowing users to quickly analyze, resolve, and proactively prevent problems.
EdgeSight is actually discontinued and replaced by Citrix Director http://bit.ly/2lKLpaE
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Limited (native) - vCenter Operations
Full (with Vendor Add-On: vRealize Operations)
VMware vRealize Operations. Optimize resource usage through reclamation and right sizing, cross-cluster workload placement and improved planning and forecasting. Enforce IT and configuration standards for an optimal infrastructure.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-operations.html
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Yes (Live Migration - unlimited concurrent migrations, 3 by default)
Yes, live migration is fully supported with unlimited concurrent migrations (depending only on available resources on other hosts and network speed). By default limited to 3 concurrent outgoing migrations and each live migration event is limited to a maximum transfer speed of 32 MiBps.
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Updates and Backup |
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Hypervisor Upgrades
Details
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The XenCenter released with XenServer 7.0 allows updates to be applied to all versions of XenServer (commercial and free)
With XenServer 7.0 patching and updating via the XenCenter management console (enabling automated GUI driven patch application and upgrades) is supported with the comercial and free XenServer versions.
XenServer 6 introduced the Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard. The Wizard simplifies upgrades to XenServer 6.x by performing pre-checks with a step-by-step process that blocks unsupported upgrades. You can choose between automated or semi-automated, where automated can use a network based XenServer update repository (which you have to create) while semi-automated requires local install media. There are still manual steps required for both approaches and no scheduling functionality or online repository is integrated.
Indroduced in Xenserver 7.1, live patching enables customers to install some Linux kernel and Xen hypervisor hotfixes without having to reboot the hosts. Such hotfixes will consist of both a live patch, which will be applied to the memory of the host, as well as a hotfix that updates the files on disk. This reduces maintenance costs and downtime. When applying an update using XenCenter, the Install Update wizard checks whether the hosts need to be rebooted after the update is applied and displays the result on the Prechecks page. This enables customers to know the post-update tasks well in advance and schedule the application of hotfixes accordingly.
XenServer Live Patching is available for XenServer Enterprise Edition customers, or those who have access to XenServer through their XenApp/XenDesktop entitlement.
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Yes (Update Manager)
NEW
VMware Update Manager (VUM) is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance.
VUM is using own postgress db, can benefit from VCSA native HA and Backup.
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Yes (Red Hat Network)
Updates to the virtual machines are typically performed as in the physical environment, providing only limited capabilities. For Red Hat virtual machines updates can be downloaded from the Red Hat Network. For Windows virtual machines you would apply the relevant MS update mechanisms. There is no specific integrated function in RHV-M to update virtual machines or templates.
Centralized patching mechanism for Red Hat machines is possible via Satellite.
This is a Fee-based Add-On; Details - http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/satellite
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No
There is no integrated update engine for guest OS of the virtual machines within Standard Edition of XenServer 7.5
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Limited (Update Manager)
With vSphere 5 update manager discontinued patching of guest operating systems. It does however provide upgrades of VMware Tools, upgrades of the virtual machine hardware for virtual machines and upgrades of virtual appliances.
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Yes; Including RAM
RHV 3.1 introduced the new ability to take Live Snapshots of VMs and has an enhanced Snapshot management interface (maintained with 3.3).
New in RHV 3.3: Snapshots now include the state of a virtual machines memory as well as disk. In addition a new Create Snapshot button has been added to the action panel of the Virtual Machines tab, and as a context menu item when a virtual machine is selected.
New in RHV 3.4: The admin portal now allows to preview, commit and manage snapshots of individual disks within a VM.
New in RHV 3.5: Ability to Live Merge snapshots, allowing to remove intermediate snapshots while VM is running
Taking a snapshot in RHV involves the following possible actions:
- Creation (obviously)
- Previews (involves previewing a snapshot to determine whether or not to restore the system to this snapshot - when it is previewed, a new (COW) preview layer is copied from the snapshot being previewed. The guest interacts with the preview instead of the actual snapshot volume. The preview can then be committed to restore the
guest data to the state captured in the snapshot or alternatively the admin can select Undo to discard the preview layer of the viewed snapshot.
- Deletion (deleting a restoration point that is no longer required)
Notes for Live Snapshots:
- VM with a guest agent that supports quiescing can ensure filesystem consistency across live snapshots. Red Hat Network registered Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests can install the qemu-guest agent to enable quiescing before snapshots (VDSM uses libvirt to communicate with the agent to prepare for a snapshot).
- All live snapshots are attempted with quiescing enabled. If the snapshot command fails because there is no compatible guest agent present, the live snapshot is re-initiated without the use-quiescing flag.
Please note: When a virtual machine is reverted with quiesced filesystems, it boots cleanly with no filesystem check required.
Reverting the previous snapshot using an un-quiesced filesystem however requires a filesystem check on boot.
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Yes
You can take regular snapshots, application consistent point-in-time snapshots (requires Microsoft VSS) and snapshots with memory of a running or suspended VM. All snapshot activities (take/delete/revert) can be done while VM is online.
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Yes
VMware snapshots can be taken and committed online (including a snapshot of the virtual machine memory).
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Backup API
From RHV 3.3 there is a API set for third-party tools that offer backup, restore, and replication.
For backup, a snapshot of a virtual machines disk is created then attached to a virtual appliance. For restore, disks are attached to a virtual appliance, the data is restored to the disks, then the disks are attached to a virtual machine.
Tools are from enterprise companies such as Tintri, Acronis, Symantec, etc. From RHV 3.3 there is configuration support for add/edit/delete storage connections to enable multi-pathing, hardware changes, simpler failover to remote sites, and array-based replication.
RHV-M 3.5 fully supports Acronis Backup & Recovery that provides image-based backup, disaster recovery (recover the whole VM) and data protection (recover selected files).
This is a Fee-based Add-On; Details - http://marketplace.redhat.com/RHV/10085-Acronis-Backup-Recovery-11-5-Virtual-Edition-for-RHV-11-5
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Backup Integration API
Details
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Limited
In Standard edition there is no specific backup framework for integration of 3rd party backup solutions as such however the XenServer API allows for scripting (e.g. utilizing XenServer snapshots) and basic integration with 3rd party backup products and scripting (e.g. utilizing XenServer snapshots) e.g. PHD backup
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Yes (vStorage API Data Protection)
vStorage API for Data Protection: Enables integration of 3rd party backup products for centralized backup.
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No
There is no integrated backup in RHV Manager.
Use traditional backup methods to protect your virtual machines and hosts (e.g. backup agents for network based backups in individual virtual machines and RHEL hosts). However you can of course export virtual machines and templates onto the export domain (NFS).
Background: Export domains are temporary storage repositories that are used to copy and move images between data centers and RHV environments. They can be used to backup virtual machines. An export domain can be moved between data centers, however, it can only be active in one data center at a time. Support for export storage domains backed by storage on anything other than NFS is being deprecated - new export storage domains must be created on NFS storage.
Additionally a tool for backing up and restoring RHV Manager database and certificates is available.
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Integrated Backup
Details
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No (Retired)
Citrix retired the Virtual Machine Protection and Recovery (VMPR) in XenServer 6.2. VMPR was the method of backing up snapshots as Virtual Appliances.
Alternative backup products are available from Quadric Software, SEP, and Unitrends
Background:
With XenServer 6, VM Protection and Recovery (VMPR) became available for Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum Edition customers.
XenServer 5.6 SP1 introduced a basic XenCenter-based backup and restore facility, the VM Protection and Recovery (VMPR) which provides a simple backup and restore utility for your
critical vims. Regular scheduled snapshots are taken automatically and can be used to restore VMs in case of disaster. Scheduled snapshots can also be automatically archived to a remote CIFS or NFS share, providing an additional level of security.
Additionally the XenServer API allows for scripting of snapshots. You can also (manually or script) export and import virtual machines for backup purposes.
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Yes (vSphere Data Protection) - Replication of backup data, granular backup and scheduling
vSphere® Data Protection is a backup and recovery solution designed for vSphere environments. Powered by EMC Avamar, it provides agent-less, image-level virtual machine backups to disk. It also provides application-aware protection for business-critical Microsoft applications (Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint) along with WAN-efficient, encrypted backup data replication. vSphere Data Protection is fully integrated with vCenter Server and vSphere Web Client.
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: Satellite 6)
RHV-H or RHEL hosts can be installed using traditional methods either interactively (from ISO, USB flash media) or automated (PXE). There is however no integrated capability to deploy RHV centrally (e.g. using deployment templates and custom images) to bare metal hosts using the RHV management (like VMwares auto deploy or SCVMMs bare metal deploy).
This is possible using Satellite 6 using Foreman.
This is a Fee-based Add-On; Details - http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/satellite
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Deployment |
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Automated Host Deployments
Details
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No
There is no integrated host deployment mechanism in XenServer - manual local or network repository based deployments are required.
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Yes (Auto Deploy)
NEW
Auto Deploy is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance.
Integration with VCSA 6.5 can benefit from navive HA or Backup
Configurable trough GUI interface of web client.
Can manage 300+ hosts
Post boot scripts allow for aditional automation.
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Yes, CloudInit and Glance support - NEW
NEW
In RHV by default, virtual machines created from templates use thin provisioning.
In the context of templates, thin provisioning of vm means copy on write (aka linked clone or difference disk) rather than a growing file system that only takes up the storage space that it actually uses (usually referred to as thin provisioning). All virtual machines based on a given template share the same base image as the template and must remain on the same data domain as the template. Do NOT delete the template if you have created virtual machines in this way from it as the vm depend on the existence of the base image!
You can however specify to deploy the vm from template as clone - which means that a full copy of the vm will be deployed. When selecting to clone you can then select thin (sparse) or pre-allocated provisioning of the full clone. Deploying from template as clone results in independence from the base image but space savings associated with using copy on write approaches are lost.
Important: The image used to create templates for RHV must be generalized e.g. using the Sysprep tool (for Windows) or sys-unconfig (for Linux). This approach is similar to the deployment with e.g. SCVMM (different to VMware, where the generalization and customization of the vm is done on deployment, allowing for a quick, direct conversion of a template to a vm and vice versa). With RHV, changes to the template image require a deployment, applying changes/updates with subsequent generalization, then a conversion back into a template.
While not the same as a classic template, RHV 3.3 introduced support for cloud-init, which facilitates the provisioning of virtual machines by performing the initial setup of networking, SSH keys, timezones, user data injection, and more.
In RHV 3.5 support was added consume (use), export and share images with Glance. Glance image services include discovering, registering, and retrieving virtual machine images.
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Yes
Templates in XenServer are either the included pre-configured empty virtual machines which require an OS install (a shell with appropriate settings for the guest OS) or you can convert an installed (and e.g. sysprep-ed) VM into a custom template.
There is no integrated customization of the guest available, i.e. you need to sysprep manually.
You can NOT convert a template back into a VM for easy updates. You deploy a VM from template using a full copy or a fast clone using copy on write.
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Yes (Content Library)
Content Library – Provides simple and effective management for VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts for vSphere Admins – collectively called “content” – that can be synchronized across sites and vCenter Servers.
vSphere 6.5 - possibility to Mount ISO, Customize VM from within the content library, Update an existing template with a new version.
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: CloudForms Deployables)
There is no integrated functionality in RHV that allows you to deploy a multi-vm construct from a single template (like e.g. with vSphere vApp or VMM Service Templates).
Comment: CloudForms (fee based cloud offering) has components called Deployable - defined as an Application deployment definition that contains one or more assemblies and meta-data configuration; this configuration specializes a deployment by qualifying it for a specific targeted infrastructure. A Deployable is essentially made of one or more Assemblies with configuration data. Each Assembly is made of one or more Templates and configuration. Each Template lists the software and configuration data. An Assembly optionally indicates the services that it defines or requires. Some of the configuration data may be defined a the time of instance launch.
See http://red.ht/122cnOE for details.
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Tiered VM Templates
Details
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vApp
XenServer 6 introduced vApps - maintained with v 6.5 and 7.x
A vApp is logical group of one or more related Virtual Machines (VMs) which can be started up as a single entity in the event of a disaster.
The primary functionality of a XenServer vApp is to start the VMs contained within the vApp in a user predefined order, to allow VMs which depend upon one another to be automatically sequenced. This means that an administrator no longer has to manually sequence the startup of dependent VMs should a whole service require restarting (for instance in the case of a software update). The VMs within the vApp do not have to reside on one host and will be distributed within a pool using the normal rules.
This also means that the XenServer vApp has a more basic capability than e.g. VMwares vApp or MSs Service Templates which contain more advanced functions.
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Yes (vApp/OVF)
Open Virtualization Format (OVF)
vApp is a collection of virtual machines (VMs) and sometimes other vApps that host a multi-tier application, its policies and service levels.
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: Satellite)
There is no ability in RHV to capture or centrally apply settings to hosts (or a group of hosts) in order to ensure standard settings on deployment or to check for compliance of hosts with certain settings.
You can add the new Foreman provider in the administration portal, and use the add Hosts window to select a host provided by Foreman on Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
This is a Fee-based Add-On; Details - http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/satellite
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No
There is no integrated capability to create host templates, apply or check hosts for compliance with certain setting.
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Yes (Host Profiles)
NEW
Host profiles eliminates per-host, manual, or UI-based host configuration and maintain configuration consistency using a reference configuration which can be applied or used to check compliance status.
vSphere 6.5 new features: Filters, Bookmarks
Host customizations (answer files) for offline customization
Copy settings between profiles
New pre-check, Compliance view enhancements
Remediation (DRS integrated), Parallel remediation
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No
While RHV supports different types of storage, there is no integrated ability in RHV that allows classification of storage (e.g. by performance or other properties) in order to enable intelligent placement of workloads onto appropriate storage classes.
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No
There are is no ability to associate storage profiles to tiers of storage resources in XenServer (e.g. to facilitate automated compliance storage tiering)
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Yes (Storage Based Policy Management)
Using the Storage Based Policy Management (SPBM) framework, administrators can define different policies with different IO limits, and then assign VMs to those policies. This simplifies the ability to offer varying tiers of storage services and provides the ability to validate policy compliance.
The policy-driven control plane is the management layer of the VMware software-defined storage model, which automates storage operations through a standardized approach that spans across the heterogeneous tiers of storage in the virtual data plane.
Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) is VMware’s implementation of the policy-driven control plane which provides common management over:
- vSphere Virtual Volumes - external storage (SAN/NAS)
- Virtual SAN – x86 server storage
- Hypervisor-based data services – vSphere Replication or third-party solutions enabled by the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering.
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Yes (Quota, Devices SLA, CPU Shares)
NEW
RHV 3.5 includes quota support and Service Level Agreement (SLA) for storage I/O bandwidth, network interfaces and CPU QoS\shares:
- Quota provides a way for the Administrator to limit the resource usage in the System. Quota provides the administrator a logic mechanism for managing resources allocation for users and groups in the Data Center.
This mechanism allows the administrator to manage, share and monitor the resources in the Data Center from the engine core point of view.
- vNIC profile allows the user to limit the inbound and outbound network traffic in virtual NIC level.
- CPU profile limits the CPU usage of a virtual machine.
- Disk profile limit the bandwidth usage to allocate the bandwidth in a better way on limited connections.
- CPU shares is a user defined number that represent a relative metric for allocating CPU capacity. It defines how often a virtual machine will get a time slice of a CPU when there is no CPU idle time.
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Other |
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No
A resource pool in XenServer is hierarchically the equivalent of a vSphere or Hyper-V cluster. There is no functionality to sub-divide resources within a pool.
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Yes
vSphere supports hierarchical resource pools (parent and child pools) for CPU and memory resources on individual hosts and across hosts in a cluster. They allow for resource isolation and sharing between pools and for access delegation of resources in a cluster. Please note that DRS must be enabled for resource pool functionality if hosts are in a cluster. If DRS is not enabled the hosts must be moved out of the cluster for (local) resource pools to work.
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V2V, P2V & Partners
Whilst there is no integrated capability to perform physical to virtual migrations in RHV itself, Red Hat provide p2v tools to customers to export existing physical machines to a virtual infrastructure whilst ensuring that relevant changes are made to the new guest, e.g. Paravirtualization drivers.
Red Hat also partners with 3rd partys e.g. Acronis to perform v2v and p2v migrations. RHV provides the virt-v2v tool, enabling you to convert and import virtual machines created on other systems such as Xen, KVM and VMware ESX. virt-v2v is available on Red Hat Network (RHN) in the Red Hat Enterprise Virt V2V Tool, details here: http://red.ht/zFpc6i
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No (XenConvert: retired), V2V: yes
XenConvert was retired in XenServer 6.2
XenConvert allowed conversion of a single physical machine to a virtual machine. The ability to do this conversion is included in the Provisioning Services (PVS) product shipped as part of XenDesktop. Alternative products support the transition of large environments and are available from PlateSpin.
Note: The XenServer Conversion Manager, for converting virtual machines (V2V), remains fully supported and available for Enterprise edition only.
Background:
XenConvert supported the following sources: physical (online) Windows systems OVF, VHD, VMDK or XVA onto these targets: XenServer directly, vhd, OVF or PVS vdisk
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Yes (vCenter Converter)
VMware vCenter Converter transforms your Windows- and Linux-based physical machines and third-party image formats to VMware virtual machines.
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter.html
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User Portal
RHVs web-based Power User Portal (introduced with RHV 3.0 and maintained with 3.5) is positioned by Red Hat as an entry-level Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) user portal.
It allows the user to: create, edit and remove virtual machines, manage virtual disks and network interfaces, assign user permissions to virtual machines, create and use templates to rapidly deploy virtual machines, monitor resource usage and high-severity events, create and use snapshots to restore virtual machines to a previous state. In conjunction with the quota functionality in RHV administrators can restrict resources consumed by the users (but there is no integrated request approval or granular resource assignment based on e.g. subsets of the resources through private clouds).
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Self Service Portal
Details
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No (Web Self Service: retired in XS6.2)
Web Self Service was a lightweight portal which allowed individuals to operate their own virtual machines without having administrator credentials to the XenServer host.
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No (native)
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: vCloud Suite, vRealize Automation)
Self-Service Portal functionality is primarily provided by components in VMwares vCloud Suite or vRealize Automation - a comprehensive cloud portfolio with a single purchase enabled with a per-processor licensing metric.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-suite.html
http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-automation.html
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: CloudForms)
There is no orchestration tool/engine provided with RHV.
Use Red Hat CloudForms (fee-based vendor add-on) to provide orchestration.
This functionality is achieved with Red Hat Cloudforms (Fee-Based Add-ON), now part of RHCI. With CloudForms, resources are automatically and optimally used via policy-based workload and resource orchestration, ensuring service availability and performance. You can simulate allocation of resources for what-if planning and continuous insights into granular workload and consumption levels to allow chargeback, showback, and proactive planning and policy creation. For details: http://red.ht/1h7DR9T.
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Orchestration / Workflows
Details
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Yes (Workflow Studio)
Workflow Studio provides a graphical interface for workflow composition in order to reduce scripting. Workflow Studio allows administrators to tie technology components together via workflows. Workflow Studio is built on top of Windows PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation. It natively supports Citrix products including XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer and NetScaler.
Available as component of XenDesktop suite, Workflow Studio was retired in XenDesktop 7.x
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Yes (vRealize Orchestrator)
vRealize Orchestrator is included with vCenter Server Standard and allows admins to capture often executed tasks/best practices and turn them into automated workflows (drag and drop) or use out of the box workflows. An increasing number of plug-ins is available to enable automation of tasks related to related products.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-orchestrator.html
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SELinux, iptables, VLANs, Port Mirroring
The RHV Hypervisor has various security features enabled. Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and the iptables firewall are fully configured and on by default. SELinux and sVirt adds security policy in kernel for effective intrusion detection, isolation and containment (SELinux is essentially a set of patches to the Linux kernel and some utilities to incorporate a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture into the major subsystems of the kernel. e.g. with SELinux you can give each qemu process a different SELinux label to prevent a compromised qemu from attacking other processes and also allows you to label the set of resources that each process can see , so that a compromised qemu can only attack its own disk images.)
Advanced network security features like VLAN tagging and port mirroring are part of RHV, but there are no additional security-specific add-ons included with RHV (e.g. to address advanced fire-walling, edge security capabilities or Anti-Virus APIs).
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Basic (NetScaler - Fee-Based Add-On)
XenServer uses netfilter/iptables firewalling. There are no specific frameworks or APIs for antivirus or firewall integration.
The fee-based NetScaler provides various (network) security related capabilities through e.g.
- NetScaler Gateway: secure application and data access for Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenMobile)
- NetScaler AppFirewall: secures web applications, prevents inadvertent or intentional disclosure of confidential information and aids in compliance with information security regulations such as PCI-DSS. AppFirewall is available as a standalone security appliance or as a fully integrated module of the NetScaler application delivery solution and is included with Citrix NetScaler, Platinum Edition.
Details here: http://bit.ly/17ttmKk
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Yes (ESXi Firewall, vShield Endpoint, VM Encryption)
new in vSphere 6.5:
- VM Encryption (n/a for Standard)
- vMotion Encryption (n/a for Standard)
- ESXi Secure Boot,
- Virtual Machine Secure Boot,
- Enhanced Logging
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Agent-based (RHEL), CIM, SNMP
It is possible to use OEM vendor supplied tools, e.g. hardware monitoring utilities / agents, provided that the RHEL-based hypervisor is used.
RHV-H does not provide the tools and libraries that various tools depend upon but has basic CIM support for Systems Management. While it will not offer customizations delivered by dedicated OEM CIM providers, CIM management is available in RHV-H (RHV-H cannot be customized today to include third party CIM support). Red Hat uses the open source libcmpiutil as the CIM provider in RHV-H.
RHV-M integrates with 3rd party plug-ins that can provide systems management. For example HP OneView for Red Hat Virtualization (OVRHV) UI plug-in that that allows you to seamlessly manage your HP ProLiant infrastructure from within RHV Manager and provides actionable, valuable insight on underlying HP hardware (HP Insight Control plug-in is also available).
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Systems Management
Details
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Yes (API / SDKs, CIM)
XenServer includes a XML-RPC based API, providing programmatic access to the extensive set of XenServer management features and tools. The XenServer API can be called from a remote system as well as local to the XenServer host. Remote calls are generally made securely over HTTPS, using port 443.
XenServer SDK: There are five SDKs available, one for each of C, C#, Java, PowerShell, and Python. For XenServer 6.0.2 and earlier, these were provided under an open-source license (LGPL or GPL with the common linking exception). This allows use (unmodified) in both closed-and open-source applications. From XenServer 6.1 onwards the bindings are in the majority provided under a BSD license that allows modifications.
Citrix Project Kensho provided a Common Information Model (CIM) interface to the XenServer API and introduces a Web Services Management (WSMAN) interface to XenServer. Management agents can be installed and run in the Dom0 guest.
Details here: http://bit.ly/2rHMhTI
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vSphere’s REST API, PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, ESXCLI, Datacenter CLI
vSphere’s REST APIs have been extended to include VCSA and VM based management and configuration tasks. There’s also a new way to explore the available vSphere REST APIs with the API Explorer. The API Explorer is available locally on the vCenter server.
PowerCLI is now 100% module based, the Core module now supports cross vCenter vMotion by way of the Move-VM cmdlet.
The VSAN module has been bolstered to feature 13 different cmdlets which focus on trying to automate the entire lifecycle of VSAN.
ESXCLI, now features several new storage based commands for handling VSAN core dump procedures, utilizing VSAN’s iSCSI functionality, managing NVMe devices, and other core storage commands. NIC based commands such as queuing, coalescing, and basic FCOE tasks.
Datacenter CLI (DCLI), which is also installed as part of vCLI, can make use of all the new vSphere REST APIs!
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KVM with RHV-H or RHEL - details here
With RHV 3.5 virtualization hosts must run version 6.5, or later (of either): Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server.
RHV is based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and the oVirt open virtualization management platform (project started at Red Hat and released to the open source community). KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20.
RHV hosts can be either based on full Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 based systems with KVM enabled or purpose built RHV-H (hypervisor) hosts. RHV-H is a bare metal, image-based, small-footprint (
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Network and Storage
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Storage |
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Supported Storage
Details
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DAS, SAS, iSCSI, NAS, SMB, FC, FCoE, openFCoE
XenServer data stores are called Storage Repositories (SRs), they support IDE, SATA, SCSI (physical HBA as well as SW initiator) and SAS drives locally connected, and iSCSI, NFS, SMB, SAS and Fibre Channel remotely connected.
Background: The SR and VDI abstractions allow advanced storage features such as Thin Provisioning, VDI snapshots, and fast cloning to be exposed on storage targets that support them. For storage subsystems that do not inherently support advanced operations directly, a software stack is provided based on Microsofts Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)
specification which implements these features.
SRs are storage targets containing virtual disk images (VDIs). SR commands provide operations for creating, destroying, resizing, cloning, connecting and discovering the individual VDIs that they contain.
Reference XenServer 7.5 Administrators Guide: http://bit.ly/2rHyEE6
Also refer to the XenServer Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for more details.
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DAS, NFS, FC, iSCSI, FCoE (HW&SW), vFRC, SDDC
vSphere 6.5 adds:
- Virtual SAN 6.5
- Virtual Volumes 2.0 (VVOL)
- VMFS 6
Support for 4K Native Drives in 512e mode
SE Sparse Default
Automatic Space Reclamation
Support for 512 devices and 2000 paths (versus 256 and 1024 in the previous versions)
CBRC aka View Storage Accelerator
vSphere 6.0 adds:
- Virtual SAN 6.0
- Virtual Volumes (VVOL)
- NFS 4.1 client
- NFS and iSCSI IPV6 support
- Storage Based Policy Management (SPBM) now available in all vSphere editions
- SIOC IOPS Reservations
- vSphere Replication
- Support for 2000 virtual machines per vCenter Server
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Yes (FC, iSCSI)
Multipathing in RHV provides:
1) Redundancy (provides failover protection).
2) Improved Performance (spreads I/O operations over the paths, by default in a round-robin fashion but also supports other methods including Asynchronous Logical Unit Access (ALUA). This applies to block devices (FC, iSCSI), although the equivalent functionality can be achieved with a sufficiently robust network setup for network attached storage.
RHV Manage Storage Connections feature (Multipath & DR) adds the ability to add/edit/delete storage connections to enable:
- Multipathing management
- Hardware changes
- Simpler failover to remote sites for array-based replication by quickly switching to work with another storage that holds a backup/sync of the contents of the current storage in case of primary storage failure
- Supports for the following storage types: NFS, Posix, local & iSCSI.
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Yes (limited for SAS)
Dynamic multipathing support is available for Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage arrays (round robin is default balancing mode). XenServer also supports the LSI Multi-Path Proxy Driver (MPP) for the Redundant Disk Array Controller (RDAC) - by default this driver is disabled. Multipathing to SAS based SANs is not enabled, changes must typically be made to XenServer as SAS drives do not readily appear as emulated SCSI LUNs.
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Yes (enhanced APD and PDL) PDL AutoRemove
vSphere uses natively integrated multi-path capability or can take advantage of vendor specific capabilities using vStorage APIs for Multipathing.
By default, ESXi provides an extensible multipathing module called the Native Multipathing Plug-In (NMP). Generally, the VMware NMP supports all storage arrays listed on the VMware storage HCL and provides a default path selection algorithm based on the array type. The NMP associates a set of physical paths with a specific storage device, or LUN. The specific details of handling path failover for a given storage array are delegated to a Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP). The specific details for determining which physical path is used to issue an I/O request to a storage device are handled by a Path Selection Plug-In (PSP). SATPs and PSPs are sub plug-ins within the NMP module. With ESXi, the appropriate SATP for an array you use will be installed automatically. You do not need to obtain or download any SATPs.
PDL AutoRemove: Permanent device loss (PDL) is a situation that can occur when a disk device either fails or is removed from the vSphere host in an uncontrolled fashion. PDL detects if a disk device has been permanently removed. When the device enters this PDL state, the vSphere host can take action to prevent directing any further, unnecessary I/O to this device. With vSphere 5.5, a new feature called PDL AutoRemove is introduced. This feature automatically removes a device from a host when it enters a PDL state.
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SPM and support for shared FS; manual SPM role assigment
A host known as the Storage Pool Manager (SPM) manages access between hosts and storage.
The SPM host is the only node that has full access within the storage pool; the SPM can modify the images data, and meta-data and the pools meta-data.
In RHV 3.3 ability was added to manually assigned or re-assigned the Storage Pool Manager role to hosts, using the administration portal or via the REST API.
Additionally RHV has the capability of using any shared file system that the Linux kernel supports (support varies depending on vendor and implementation). For example, IBMs GPFS could be used as a backing store for virtual machines, configured as a POSIX file system for the Storage Domain. Other shared file systems like GFS, future versions of GlusterFS (Red Hat Storage) are considerations, as well. This provides maximum flexibility between traditional NAS (NFS), direct-to-block (standard RHV FC/iSCSI/SAS) and shared file systems (POSIX).
Background: Prior to Red Hat Virtualization 3.1, SPM exclusivity (ensuring the existence of a single arbitrator to avoid data corruption) was maintained and tracked using a feature called safelease. Safe lease only maintained exclusivity of one resource, the SPM role.
Sanlock provides the same functionality, but treats the SPM role as one of the resources that can be locked while allowing additional resources to be locked. Applications that require resource locking can register with Sanlock.
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Shared File System
Details
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Yes (SR)
XenServer uses the concept of Storage Repositories (disk containers/data stores). These SRs can be shared between hosts or dedicated to particular hosts. Shared storage is pooled between multiple hosts within a defined resource pool. All hosts in a single resource pool must have at least one shared SR in common. NAS, iSCSI (Software initiator and HBA are both supported), SAS, or FC are supported for shared storage.
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Yes (VMFS v6)
NEW
VMwares clustered file system, allowing for concurrent access of multiple hosts for live migration, file based locking (to ensure data consistency), dynamic volume resizing etc.
new in VMFS 6
Support for 4K Native Drives in 512e mode
SE Sparse Default
Automatic Space Reclamation
Support for 512 devices and 2000 paths (versus 256 and 1024 in the previous versions)
CBRC aka View Storage Accelerator
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Yes
Booting from SAN is possible, provided that the HBA(s) present this ability to the BIOS. In other words, provided the OS can be booted via the LUN(s) provided by the HBA(s) then there should be no problem. When extra LUN(s) are presented to the hypervisors to use as shared storage, RHV will only allow un-used LUNs to be accepted into the storage domain, therefore its possible to both boot from SAN and use the same storage paths for shared storage in RHV.
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Yes (iSCSI, FC, FCoE)
XenServer 7.x adds Software-boot-from-iSCSI for Cisco UCS
Yes for XenServer 6.1 and later (XenServer 5.6 SP1 added support for boot from SAN with multi-pathing support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI HBAs)
Note: Rolling Pool Upgrade should not be used with Boot from SAN environments. For more information on upgrading boot from SAN environments see Appendix B of the XenServer 7.5 Installation Guide: http://bit.ly/2sK4wGn
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Yes (FC, iSCSI, FCoE and SW FCoE)
Boot from iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported
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Yes
The RHV-H hypervisor is able to be installed onto USB storage devices or solid state disks. (The initial boot/install USB device must be a separate device from the installation target).
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No
While there are several (unofficial) approaches documented, officially no flash drives are supported as boot media for XenServer 7.x.
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Yes
Boot from USB is supported
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RAW, Qcow2
RHV supports two storage formats: RAW and QCOW2
In an NFS data center the Storage Pool manager (SPM) creates the virtual disk on top of a regular file system as a normal disk in preallocated (RAW) format. Where sparse allocation is chosen additional layers on the disk will be created in thinly provisioned Qcow2 (sparse) format.
For iSCSI and SAN (block), the SPM creates a Volume group (VG) on top of the Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) provided. During the virtual disk creation, either a preallocated format (RAW) or a thinly provisioned Qcow2 (sparse) format is created
Background: QCOW (QEMU copy on write) decouples the physical storage layer from the virtual layer by adding a mapping between logical and physical blocks. This enables advanced features like snapshots. Creating a new snapshot creates a new copy on write layer, either a new file or logical volume, with an initial mapping that points all logical blocks to the offsets in the backing file or volume. When writing to a QCOW2 volume, the relevant block is read from the backing volume, modified with the new information and written into the new snapshot QCOW2 volume. T hen the map is updated to point to the new place.
Benefits QCOW2 offers over using RAW representation include:
- Copy-on-write support (volume only represents changes to a disk image).
- Snapshot support (volume can represent multiple snapshots of the images history).
RAW
The RAW storage format has a performance advantage over QCOW2 as no formatting is applied to images stored in the RAW format (reading and writing images stored in RAW requires no additional mapping or reformatting work on the host or manager. When the guest file system writes to a given offset in its virtual disk, the I/O will be written to the same offset on the backing file or logical volume. Note: Raw format requires that the entire space of the defined image be preallocated (unless using externally managed thin provisioned LUNs from a storage array).
A virtual disk with a preallocated (RAW) format has significantly faster write speeds than a virtual disk with a thin provisioning (Qcow2) format. Thin provisioning takes significantly less time to create a virtual disk. T he thin provision format is suitable for non-IO intensive virtual machines.
Reference here: http://red.ht/1hOwQLz
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Virtual Disk Format
Details
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vhd, raw disk (LUN)
XenServer supports file based vhd (NAS, local), block device-based vhd (FC, SAS, iSCSI) using a Logical Volume Manager on the Storage Repository or a full LUN (raw disk)
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vmdk, raw disk (RDM)
VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format (vmdk) and RAW Disk Mapping (RDM) - essentially a raw disk mapped to a proxy (making it appear like a VMFS file system)
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Default max virtual disk size is 8TB (but its configurable in RHV DB)
The default maximum supported virtual disk size is 8TB in RHV 3.5 (but its configurable in RHV DB)
With the added the virtio-scsi support in 3.3, Red Hat also supports now 16384 logical units per target.
File level disk size remains unlimited by VDSM, the limits of the underlying filesystem do however apply.
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2TB (16TB with GFS2)
NEW
For XenServer 7.5 the maximum virtual disk sizes are:
- NFS: 2TB minus 4GB
- LVM (block): 2TB minus 4 GB
Reference: http://bit.ly/2rcrjZx
Experimental support for GFS2 Storage Repositories in XenServer 7.5, effectevely increased the maximum size of virtual disks from 2TB to 16TB
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64TB
vSphere is increasing the maximum size of a virtual machine disk file (VMDK) from 2TB - 512 bytes to the new limit of 64TB. The maximum size of a virtual Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is also increasing, from 2TB - 512 bytes to 64TB in physical compatibility and 62TB in virtual compatibility. Virtual machine snapshots also support this new size for delta disks that are created when a snapshot is taken of the virtual machine.
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Yes
During the virtual disk creation, either a preallocated format (RAW) or a thinly provisioned Qcow2 (sparse) format can be specified.
A preallocated virtual disk has reserved storage of the same size as the virtual disk itself. The backing storage device (file/block device) is presented as is to the virtual machine with no additional layering in between. This results in better performance because no storage allocation is required during runtime. On SAN (iSCSI, FCP) this is achieved by creating a block device with the same size as the virtual disk. On NFS this is achieved by filling the backing hard disk image file with zeros. Pre-allocating storage on an NFS storage domain presumes that the backing storage is not Qcow2 formatted and zeroes will not be deduplicated in the hard disk image file. (If these assumptions are incorrect, do not select Preallocated for NFS virtual disks).
For sparse virtual disks backing storage is not reserved and is allocated as needed during runtime. This allows for storage over commitment under the assumption that most disks are not fully utilized and storage capacity can be utilized better. This requires the backing storage to monitor write requests and can cause some performance issues. On NFS backing storage is achieved simply by using files. On SAN this is achieved by creating a block device smaller than the virtual disks defined size and communicating with the hypervisor to monitor necessary allocations. This does not require support from the underlying storage devices.
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Thin Disk Provisioning
Details
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Yes (Limitations on block)
XenServer supports 3 different types of storage repositories (SR)
1) File based vhd, which is a local ext3 or remote NFS filesystems, which supports thin provisioning for vhd
2) Block device-based vhd format (SAN based on FC, iSCSI, SAS) , which has no support for thin provisioning of the virtual disk but supports thin provisioning for snapshots
3) LUN based raw format - a full LUN is mapped as virtual disk image (VDI) so to is only applicable if the storage array HW supports that functionality
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Yes
Thin provisioning allowing for disk space saving through allocation of space based on usage (not pre-allocation).
VMFS6 - Automatic Space Reclamation
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Yes (via Hooks)
N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is a function available with some Fibre Channel devices. NPIV shares a single physical N_Port as multiple N_Port IDs. NPIV provides similar functionality for Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs) that SR-IOV provides for network interfaces. With NPIV, virtualized guests can be provided with a virtual Fibre Channel initiator to Storage Area Networks (SANs).
Note: NPIV is supported via the scripted hooks mechanism, in which many additional advanced features can be implemented. Future versions of RHV will include access to such features via the graphical user interface.
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No
There is no NPIV support for XenServer
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Yes (RDM only)
NPIV requires RDM (Raw Disk Mapping), it is not supported with VMFS volumes. NPIV requires supported switches (not direct storage attach).
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Yes
In RHV by default, virtual machines created from templates use thin provisioning. In the context of templates, thin provisioning of vm means copy on write (aka linked clone or difference disk) rather than a growing file system that only takes up the storage space that it actually uses (usually referred to as thin provisioning). All virtual machines based on a given template share the same base image as the template and must remain on the same data domain as the template.
You can however specify to deploy the vm from template as clone - which means that a full copy of the vm will be deployed. When selecting to clone you can then select thin (sparse) or pre-allocated provisioning of the full clone. Deploying from template as clone results in independence from the base image but space savings associated with using copy on write approaches are lost.
A virtual disk with a preallocated (RAW) format has significantly faster write speeds than a virtual disk with a thin provisioning (Qcow2) format. Thin provisioning takes significantly less time to create a virtual disk. The thin provision format is suitable for non-IO intensive virtual machines.
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Yes - Clone on boot, clone, PVS, MCS
XenServer 6.2 introduced Clone on Boot
This feature supports Machine Creation Services (MCS) which is shipped as part of XenDesktop. Clone on boot allows rapid deployment of hundreds of transient desktop images from a single source, with the images being automatically destroyed and their disk space freed on exit.
General cloning capabilities: When cloning VMs based off a single VHD template, each child VM forms a chain where new changes are written to the new VM, and old blocks are directly read from the parent template. When this is done with a file based vhd (NFS) then the clone is thin provisioned. Chains up to a depth of 30 are supported but beware performance implications.
Comment: Citrixs desktop virtualization solution (XenDesktop) provides two additional technologies that use image sharing approaches:
- Provisioning Services (PVS) provides a (network) streaming technology that allows images to be provisioned from a single shared-disk image. Details: http://bit.ly/2d0FrQp
- With Machine Creation Services (MCS) all desktops in a catalog will be created off a Master Image. When creating the catalog you select the Master and choose if you want to deploy a pooled or dedicated desktop catalog from this image.
Note that neither PVS (for virtual machines) or MCS are included in the base XenServer license.
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No (native)
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: vCloud Suite, vRealize Automation)
VMwares virtual image sharing technology (vComposer or linked clones) is supported with VMwares virtual desktop solution (Horizon View).
This functionality had been extended to vCloud Director, vRealize Automation, but is not a functionality included in the vSphere editions without vCD.
Both Horizon View and vCD (as part of the vCloud Suites) are fee-based Add-Ons.
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: Red Hat Storage)
There is no native software based replication included in the base RHV product.
However, there is support for managing Red Hat Storage volumes and bricks using Red Hat Virtualization Manager. Red Hat Storage is a software-only, scale-out storage solution that provides flexible unstructured data storage for the enterprise.
Red Hat Storage Console (RHS-C) of Red Hat Storage Server (RHS) for On-Premise provides replication via the native capabilities of RHS, with integration in the RHV-M interface.
RHS-C extends RHV-M 3.x and oVirt Engine technology to manage Red Hat Trusted Storage Pools with management via the Web GUI, REST API and (future) remote command shell.
Note that Red Hat Storage is a fee-based add-on.
A Getting Started with Red Hat Virtualization 3.4 and Red Hat Storage 3 guide is avaiable here: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3/pdf/Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage/Red_Hat_Storage-3-Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage-en-US.pdf
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SW Storage Replication
Details
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No
There is no integrated (software-based) storage replication capability available within XenServer
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Yes (vSphere Replication)
vSphere Replication is VMware’s proprietary hypervisor-based replication engine designed to protect running virtual machines from partial or complete site failures by replicating their VMDK disk files.
This version extends support for the 5 minute RPO setting to the following new data stores: VMFS 5, VMFS 6, NFS 4.1, NFS 3, VVOL and VSAN 6.5.
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FS-Cache
FS-Cache is a persistent local cache that can be used by file systems to take data retrieved from over the network and cache it on local disk.
This helps minimize network traffic for users accessing data from a file system mounted over the network (for example, NFS).
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IntelliCache
XenServer 6.5 introduced a read caching feature that uses host memory in the new 64-bit Dom0 to reduce IOPS on storage networks, improve LoginVSI scores with VMs booting up to 3x Faster. The read cache feature is available for XenDesktop & XenApp Platinum users who have an entitlement to this feature.
Within XenServer 7.0 LoginVSI scores of 585 have been attained (Knowledge Worker workload on Login VS 4.1)
IntelliCache is a XenServer feature that can (only!) be used in a XenDesktop deployment to cache temporary and non-persistent operating-system data on the local XenServer host. It is of particular benefit when many Virtual Machines (VMs) all share a common OS image. The load on the storage array is reduced and performance is enhanced. In addition, network traffic to and from shared storage is reduced as the local storage caches the master image from shared storage.
IntelliCache works by caching data from a VMs parent VDI in local storage on the VM host. This local cache is then populated as data is read from the parent VDI. When many VMs share a common parent VDI (for example by all being based on a particular master image), the data pulled into the cache by a read from one VM can be used by another VM. This means that further access to the master image on shared storage is not required.
Reference: http://bit.ly/2d8Bxpm
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Yes (vSphere Flash Read Cache)
vSphere 5.5 introduced the vSphere Flash Read Cache that enables the pooling of multiple Flash-based devices into a single consumable vSphere construct called vSphere Flash Resource.
vSphere hosts can use the vSphere Flash Resource as vSphere Flash Swap Cache, which replaces the Swap to SSD feature previously introduced with vSphere 5.0. It provides a write-through cache mode that enhances virtual machines performance without the modification of applications and OSs.
At its core Flash Cache enables the offload of READ I/O from the shared storage to local SSDs, reducing the overall I/O requirements on your shared storage.
Documented maxima with vSphere 6.5:
- Virtual flash resource per host: 1
- Maximum cache for each virtual disk: 400GB
- Cumulative cache configured per host (for all virtual disks): 2TB
- Virtual disk size: 16TB
- Virtual host swap cache size: 4TB
- Flash devices (disks) per virtual flash resource: 8
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No (native);
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: Red Hat Storage)
Red Hat Storage Console (RHS-C) of Red Hat Storage Server (RHS) for On-Premise provides replication via the native capabilities of RHS, with integration in the RHV-M interface.
RHS-C extends RHV-M 3.x and oVirt Engine technology to manage Red Hat Trusted Storage Pools with management via the Web GUI, REST API and (future) remote command shell.
Note that Red Hat Storage is a fee-based add-on.
A Getting Started with Red Hat Virtualization 3.4 and Red Hat Storage 3 guide is avaiable here:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3/pdf/Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage/Red_Hat_Storage-3-Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage-en-US.pdf
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No
There is no specific Storage Virtualization appliance capability other than the abstraction of storage resources through the hypervisor.
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No (native)
Yes (with Vendor Add-On: vSAN 6.5)
VMware vSAN extend virtualization to storage with an integrated hyper-converged solution.
new in vSAN 6.5
Virtual SAN iSCSI Service (MS Cluster support)
2-Node Direct Connect (cross-connect two VSAN hosts with a simple ethernet cable)
512e drive support
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Third-party plug-in framework - e.g. NetApp Virtual Console
There is no specific storage API (similar to e.g. VMwares VAAI / VASA) in RHV that utilizes array specific capabilities for virtualization purposes (e.g. offload, storage classification etc.). However RHVs REST API does allow storage specific calls. The APIs are continually being enhanced in the community.
RHV 3.2 introduced a plug-in framework (maintained with 3.5). This enables third parties to integrate new features and actions directly into the RHV Manager user interface. New menu items, panes, and dialog boxes allow users to access the new functionality the same way they use Red Hat Virtualizations native functionality. One example is the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC). VSC provides integrated virtual storage management, including rapid domain provisioning and cloning of hundreds of virtual machines, while enabling Red Hat administrators to access and execute all of these capabilities using the standard RHV management interface.
RHV 3.3 introduced a Backup API can also be leveraged with array cloning & replication for DR.
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Storage Integration (API)
Details
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Integrated StorageLink (deprecated)
Integrated StorageLink was retired in XenServer 6.2.
Background: XenServer 6 introduced Integrated StorageLink Capabilities. It replaces the StorageLink Gateway technology used in previous editions and removes the requirement to run a VM with the StorageLink components. It provides access to use existing storage array-based features such as data replication, de-duplication, snapshot and cloning. Citrix StorageLink allows to integrate with existing storage systems, gives a common user interface across vendors and talks the language of the storage array i.e. exposes the native feature set in the storage array. StorageLink also provides a set of open APIs that link XenServer and Hyper-V environments to third party backup solutions and enterprise management frameworks. There is a limited HCL for StorageLink supporting arrays. Details: http://bit.ly/2DvcCXY
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Yes (VASA, VAAI and VAMP)
VMware provides various storage related APIs in order to enhance storage functionality and integration between storage devices and vSphere.
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Yes (Quota, Storage I/O SLA)
NEW
RHV 3.5 includes quota support and Service Level Agreement (SLA) for storage I/O bandwidth:
- Quota provides a way for the Administrator to limit the resource usage in the system including vDisks. Quota provides the administrator a logic mechanism for
managing disks size allocation for users and groups in the Data Center.
- Disk profile limit the bandwidth usage to allocate the bandwidth in a better way on limited connections.
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Basic
Virtual disks on block-based SRs (e.g. FC, iSCSI) have an optional I/O priority Quality of Service (QoS) setting. This setting can be applied to existing virtual disks using the xe CLI.
Note: Bare in mind that QoS setting are applied to virtual disks accessing the LUN from the same host. QoS is not applied across hosts in the pool!
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Yes (Storage IO Control )
In vSphere 6.5 Storage IO Control has been reimplemented by leveraging the VAIO framework. You will now have the ability to specify configuration details in a VM Storage Policy and assign that policy to a VM or VMDK. You can also create a Storage Policy Component yourself and specify custom shares, limits and a reservation.
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Neutron Integration (Tech Preview) + various new enhancements - click for details
NEW
New in RHV 3.3. is the initial (tech preview) support for OpenStack Neutron as a network provider on Red Hat Virtualization Manager. OpenStack Neutron can provide networking capabilities for consumption by hosts and virtual machines.
The integration includes:
• Advanced engine for network configuration.
• open vSwitch distributed virtual switching support.
• Ability to centralize network configurations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (not included).
RHV 3.4 extended the integration with Neutron as follows:
• Leverage Neutron IPAM by configuring subnets on external networks.
• Apply Neutron security groups to VM interfaces by assigning the 'SecurityGroups' custom property to relevant vNIC Profiles.
RHV 3.5 introduces a Neutron virtual appliance, to more easily get up-and-running with a Neutron server.
Also new in 3.3. are the following network features:
- simplified management network setup procedure
- New migration network role ( grant the migration role to a cluster network, separating migration data to the designated migration network, to prevent migration traffic from choking other networks)
- Virtual machine NIC-specific parameters (this enables a range of connection options, including: Create a host NIC via Mellanox UFM and connect it directly to a virtual NIC; use OpenStacks Neutron to connect a virtual NIC to one of its defined networks; pass non-standard quality of service (QoS) settings for a virtual NIC)
- Network QoS using virtual NIC profiles (users can now limit the inbound and outbound network traffic on a virtual NIC level by applying profiles which define attributes such as port mirroring, quality of service (QoS) or custom properties)
- Multiple network gateways per host (define a gateway for each logical network on a host)
- Refresh host network configuration (allows the administrator to obtain updated network configuration such as available NICs)
- Improved bond support (add new bonds from the administration portal, in addition to the five predefined bonds for each host
New in 3.4:
- Automatic propagation of network attribute changes to active hypervisors (instead of having to synchronize each host manually).
- Network labels to ease complex hypervisor networking configurations, comprising many networks.
- Predictable vNIC ordering inside guest OS for newly-created VMs.
- Hypervisors now recognize hotplugged network interfaces.
New in 3.5:
- Notifications in case of bond/NIC changing link state (e.g. link failure).
- Ability to configure custom properties on hypervisor network devices; specifically configuring advanced bridge and ethtool options.
- Support for bigger MAC address ranges.
- Dedicated network connectivity log on hypervisors to ease investigation in case of 'disaster'.
- Add a warning when unplugging a vNIC.
- Add warnings when meddling with the display network.
- Properly display arbitrarily-named hypervisor VLAN devices in the management console.
Advanced networking can also be achieved with RHEL OpenStack Platform. Starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, the Open vSwitch kernel module is included as an enabler for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Open vSwitch is only supported in conjunction with Red Hat products containing the accompanying user space packages. Without theses packages, Open vSwitch will not function.
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Networking |
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Advanced Network Switch
Details
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Yes (Open vSwitch) - vSwitch Controller
The Open vSwitch is fully supported
The vSwitch brings visibility, security, and control to XenServer virtualized network environments. It consists of a virtualization-aware switch (the vSwitch) running on each XenServer and the vSwitch Controller, a centralized server that manages and coordinates the behavior of each individual vSwitch to provide the appearance of a single vSwitch.
The vSwitch Controller supports fine-grained security policies to control the flow of traffic sent to and from a VM and provides detailed visibility into the behavior and performance of all traffic sent in the virtual network environment. A vSwitch greatly simplifies IT administration within virtualized networking environments, as all VM configuration and statistics remain bound to the VM even if it migrates from one physical host in the resource pool to another.
Details in the XenServer 7.3 vSwitch Controller Users Guide: http://bit.ly/2r1WuaS
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Yes (vDS)
vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) spans multiple vSphere hosts and aggregates networking to a centralized datacenter-wide level, simplifying overall network management (rather than managing switches on individual host level) allowing e.g. the port state/setting to follow the vm during a vMotion (Network vMotion) and facilitates various other advanced networking functions - including 3rd party virtual switch integration.
Each vCenter Server instance can support up to 128 VDSs, each VDS can manage up to 2000 hosts.
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Yes
RHV 3.0 had significantly enhanced the GUI to simplify the network setup and also introduced extended bonding (NIC teaming) support that are maintained in RHV 3.1: 1) Active / Backup, 2) Load Balancing, 4) Link aggregation, 5) Adaptive transmit, Custom (Specify advanced options) - there is no Mode 3 listed
RHV 3.3 added improved bond support (add new bonds from the administration portal, in addition to the five predefined bonds for each host.
Details:
Mode 1 (active-backup policy) sets all interfaces to the backup state while one remains active. Upon failure on the active interface, a backup interface replaces it as the only active interface in the bond. The MAC address of the bond in mode 1 is visible on only one port (the network adapter), to prevent confusion for the switch. Mode 1 provides fault tolerance and is supported in Red Hat Virtualization.
Mode 2 (XOR policy) selects an interface to transmit packages to based on the result of an XOR operation on the source and destination MAC addresses multiplied by the modulo slave count. This calculation ensures that the same interface is selected for each destination MAC address used.
Mode 2 provides fault tolerance and load balancing and is supported in Red Hat Virtualization.
Mode 4 (IEEE 802.3ad policy) creates aggregation groups for which included interfaces share the speed and duplex settings. Mode 4 uses all interfaces in the active aggregation group in accordance with the IEEE 802.3ad specification and is supported in Red Hat Virtualization.
Mode 5 (adaptive transmit load balancing policy) ensures the outgoing traffic distribution is according to the load on each interface and that the current interface receives all incoming traffic. If the interface assigned to receive traffic fails, another interface is assigned the receiving role instead. Mode 5 is
supported in Red Hat Virtualization.
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Yes (incl. LACP - New)
XenServer 6.1 added the following functionality, maintained with XenServer 6.5 and later:
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support: enables the use of industry-standard network bonding features to provide fault-tolerance and load balancing of network traffic.
- Source Load Balancing (SLB) improvements: allows up to 4 NICs to be used in an active-active bond. This improves total network throughput and increases fault tolerance in the event of hardware failures. The SLB balancing algorithm has been modified to reduce load on switches in large deployments.
Background:
XenServer provides support for active-active, active-passive, and LACP bonding modes. The number of NICs supported and the bonding mode supported varies according to network stack:
• LACP bonding is only available for the vSwitch, while active-active and active-passive are available for both the vSwitch and Linux bridge.
• When the vSwitch is the network stack, you can bond either two, three, or four NICs.
• When the Linux bridge is the network stack, you can only bond two NICs.
XenServer 6.1 provides three different types of bonds, all of which can be configured using either the CLI or XenCenter:
• Active/Active mode, with VM traffic balanced between the bonded NICs.
• Active/Passive mode, where only one NIC actively carries traffic.
• LACP Link Aggregation, in which active and stand-by NICs are negotiated between the switch and the server.
Reference: http://bit.ly/2d8uA7C
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Yes (up to 32 NICs)
vSphere has integrated NIC teaming capabilities. To utilize NIC teaming, two or more network adapters must be uplinked to a virtual switch (standard or distributed).
The key advantages of NIC teaming are:
- Increased network capacity for the virtual switch hosting the team.
- Passive failover in the event one of the adapters in the team goes down
There are various NIC load balancing (e.g. based on originating port, source MAC or IP hash) and failover detection algorithms (link status, Beacon probing).
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Yes
With RHV the Network Interfaces tab of the details pane shows VLAN information for the edited network interface. In the VLAN column newly created VLAN devices are shown, with names based on the network interface name and VLAN tag.
Background: RHV VLAN aware and able to tag and redirect VLAN traffic, however VLAN implementation requires a switch that supports VLANs.
At the switch level, ports are assigned a VLAN designation. A switch applies a VLAN tag to traffic originating from a particular port, marking the traffic as part of a VLAN, and ensures that responses carry the same VLAN tag. A VLAN can extend across multiple switches. VLAN tagged network traffic on a switch is completely undetectable except by machines connected to a port designated with the correct VLAN. A given port can be tagged into multiple VLANs, which allows traffic from multiple VLANs to be sent to a single port, to be deciphered using software on the machine that receives the traffic.
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Yes (limited for mgmt. and storage traffic)
NEW
VLANs are supported with XenServer. To use VLANs with virtual machines use switch ports configured as 802.1Q VLAN trunk ports in combination with the XenServer VLAN feature to connect guest virtual network interfaces (VIFs) to specific VLANs (you can create new virtual networks with XenCenter and specify the VLLAN IDs).
XenServer 6.1 removed a previous limitation which caused VM deployment delays when large numbers of VLANs were in use. This improvement enables administrators using XenServer 6.x and later to deploy hundreds of VLANs in a XenServer pool quickly.
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Yes
Support for VLANs, VLAN tagging with distributed or standard switch. Private VLANs (sub-VLANs) are supported with the virtual distributed switch only
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No
There is no PVLAN support in RHV
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No
XenServer does not support PVLANs.
Please refer to the Citrix XenServer Design: Designing XenServer Network Configurations guide for details on network design and security considerations http://bit.ly/2n2aWwW
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Yes
Private VLANs (sub-VLANs) are supported with the virtual distributed switch.
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Guests fully, hypervisors partially
RHV currently uses IPv4 for internal communications and does not use/support IPv6. Using IPv6 at the virtual machine level is fully supported though, provided that youre using a guest operating system thats compatible.
With RHV 3.2 the manager UI now reports IPV6 addresses in addition to IPV4 addresses
RHV 3.5 introduces network custom properties, which may be used to assign IPV6 addresses to host interfaces using the vdsm-hook-ipv6 hook; see https://www.mail-archive.com/users@ovirt.org/msg22375.html.
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Yes (guests only)
XenServer 6.1 introduced formal support for IPv6 in XenServer guest VMs (maintained with 7.2). Customers already used it with e.g. 6.0 but the 6.1 release notes list this as new official feature: IPv6 Guest Support: enables the use of IPv6 addresses within guests allowing network administrators to plan for network growth.
Full support for IPv6 (i.e. assigning the host itself an IPv6 address) will be addressed in the future.
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Yes
vSphere supports IPv6 for all major traffic types.
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Yes (with hooks)
Hooks (ability to launch pre-built scripts) allow for advanced KVM technology to be supported from the Red Hat Virtualization Manager interface. Pre-built hooks include SR/IOV: Allows bypassing the hypervisor for certain network and disk I/O for near-native speed. There is no capability to configure SR-IOV devices directly through the RHV-M interface though (other than launching the hook).
Comment: Evaluated amber - as Sample scripts have been developed that include SR-IOV configuration.
Please note: The creation and use of VDSM hooks to trigger modification of virtual machines based on custom properties specified in the Administration Portal is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization hosts. The use of VDSM Hooks on virtualization hosts running Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor (RHV-H) is not currently supported.
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SR-IOV
NEW
Experimental support for SR-IOV-capable networks cards delivers high performance networking for virtual machines, catering for workloads that need this type of direct access.
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Yes (SR-IOV and VMDirectPath)
vSphere 6.5 SR-IOV support for 1024 Virtual Functions.
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Yes
The network management UI in RHV allows you to set the MTU for network interfaces (jumbo frames).
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Yes
You can set the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) for a XenServer network in the New Network wizard or for an existing network in its Properties window. The possible MTU value range is 1500 to 9216.
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Yes
vSphere supports jumbo frames for network traffic including iSCSI, NFS, vMotion and FT
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TOE
Currently, RHV hypervisors support TOE. Due to the way that RHV provides networking access to the virtual machines, using technologies such as TSO/LRO/GRO are currently unsupported. This is set to change when Open vSwitch is supported in upcoming versions.
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Yes (TSO)
TCP Segmentation Offload can be enabled, see http://bit.ly/13e9WLi
By default, Large Receive Offload (LRO) and Generic Receive Offload (GRO) are disabled on all physical network interfaces. Though unsupported, you can enable it manually http://bit.ly/2djwZiZ
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Yes (TSO, NetQueue, iSCSI)
Supports TCP Segment Offloading, NetQueue (VMwares implementation of Intels VMDq and iSCSI HW offload (for a limited number of HBAs).
No TOE support (you can use TOE capable adapters in vSphere but the TOE function itself will not be used)
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Yes (vNIC Profile)
RHV 3.3. added the ability to control Network QoS using virtual NIC profiles through the RHV-M interface.
Users can now limit the inbound and outbound network traffic on a virtual NIC level by applying profiles which define attributes such as port mirroring, quality of service (QoS) or custom properties.
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Yes (outgoing)
QoS of network transmissions can be done either at the vm level (basic) by setting a ks/sec limit for the virtual NIC or on the vSwitch-level (global policies). With the DVS you can select a rate limit (with units), and a burst size (with units). Traffic to all virtual NICs included in this policy level (e.g. you can create vm groups) is limited to the specified rate, with individual bursts limited to the specified number of packets. To prevent inheriting existing enforcement the QoS policy at the VM level should be disabled.
Background:
To limit the amount of outgoing data a VM can send per second, you can set an optional Quality of Service (QoS) value on VM virtual interfaces (VIFs). The setting lets you specify a maximum transmit rate for outgoing packets in kilobytes per second.
The QoS value limits the rate of transmission from the VM. As with many QoS approaches the QoS setting does not limit the amount of data the VM can receive. If such a limit is desired, Citrix recommends limiting the rate of incoming packets higher up in the network (for example, at the switch level).
Depending on networking stack configured in the pool, you can set the Quality of Service (QoS) value on VM virtual interfaces (VIFs) in one of two places-either a) on the vSwitch Controller or b) in XenServer (using theCLI or XenCenter).
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Yes (NetIOC)
vSphere 6.x Network I/O Control (NIOC) Version 3
- Ability to reserve bandwidth at a VMNIC
- Ability to reserve bandwidth at a vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) Portgroup
Network I/O control enables you to specify quality of service (QoS) for network traffic in your virtualized environment. NetIOC requires the use of a virtual distributed switch (vDS). It allows to prioritize network by traffic type and the creation of custom network resource pools.
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Yes (Port Mirroring); toggle through vNIC profile
RHV 3.1 introduced port mirroring capabilities (maintained in 3.5).
It is now possible to configure the virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC) of a virtual machine to run in promiscuous mode. This allows the virtual machine to monitor all traffic to other vNICs exposed by the host on which it runs. Port mirroring copies layer 3 network traffic on given a logical network and host to a virtual interface on a virtual machine. This virtual machine can be used for network debugging and tuning, intrusion detection, and monitoring the behavior of other virtual machines on the same host and logical network.
RHV 3.3. adds the ability to create a Virtual Network Interface Controller (VNIC) profile to toggle port monitoring. There are also the vendor-supplied UI plug-ins to RHV-M, e.g. the Nagios community plugin.
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Traffic Monitoring
Details
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Yes (Port Mirroring)
The XenServer vSwitch has Traffic Mirroring capabilities. The Remote Switched Port Analyzer (RSPAN) policies support mirroring traffic sent or received on
a VIF to a VLAN in order to support traffic monitoring applications. Use the Port Configuration tab in the vSwitch Controller UI to configure policies that apply to the VIF ports.
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yes (Port Mirroring)
Port mirroring is the capability on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on a switch port to a network-monitoring device connected to another switch port. Port mirroring is also referred to as Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) on Cisco switches. Distributed Switch provides a similar port mirroring capability that is available on a physical network switch. After a port mirror session is configured with a destination -a virtual machine, a vmknic or an uplink port-the Distributed Switch copies packets to the destination.
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Yes (virtio), Mem Balloon optimization and error messages
The virtio-balloon driver allows guests to express to the hypervisor how much memory they require. The balloon driver allows the host to efficiently allocate and memory to the guest and allow free memory to be allocated to other guests and processes. Guests using the balloon driver can mark sections of the guests RAM as not in use (balloon inflation). The hypervisor can free the memory and use the memory for other host processes or other guests on that host. When the guest requires the freed memory again, the hypervisor can reallocate RAM to the guest (balloon deflation).
This includes:
- Memory balloon optimization (Users can now enable virtio-balloon for memory optimization on clusters. All virtual machines on cluster level 3.2 and higher includes a balloon device, unless specifically removed. When memory balloon optimization is set, MoM will start ballooning to allow memory overcommitment, with the limitation of the guaranteed memory size on each virtual machine.
- Ballooning error messages (When ballooning is enabled for a cluster, appropriate messages now appear in the Events tab)
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Hypervisor
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General |
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Hypervisor Details/Size
Details
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XenServer 7.1: Xen 4.7 -based
XenServer is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor. XenServer 7.5 runs on the Xen 4.7 hypervisor and adds support for 'live-patching' of the Xen hypervisor, allowing issues to be patched without requiring a host reboot. Xen 4.7 also includes various performance improvements, and updates to the virtual machine introspection code (surfaced in XenServer as Direct Inspect).
XenServer uses paravirtualization and hardware-assisted virtualization, requiring either a modified guest OSs or hardware assisted CPUs (more commonly seen as its less restrictive and hardware assisted CPUs like Intel VT/AMD-V have become standard). The device drivers are provided through a 64-bit Linux-based guest (CentOS) running in a control virtual machine (Dom0).
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Virtual Hardware version 13
VMware developed/proprietary bare-metal hypervisor, which with vSphere 5 onwards is only available as ESXi (small foot-print without Console OS). The hypervisor itself is < 150MB. Device drivers are provided with the hypervisor (not with the Console OS or dom0/parent partition as with Xen or Hyper-V technologies).
ESX is based on binary translation (full virtualization) but also uses aspects of para-virtualization (device drivers, VMware tools and the VMI interface for para-virtualization) and supports hardware assisted virtualization aspects.
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No limit stated
The RHV Hypervisor is not limited by a fixed technology (or marketed) restriction. Red Hat lists no Limit for the maximum ratio of virtual CPUs per host.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Deployment_and_Administration_Guide/chap-Overcommitting_with_KVM.html
In reality the specifications of the underlying hardware, nature of the workload in the vm and the overall restriction of 160 logical CPUs per host will determine the limit. RHV has been publicly demonstrated (see SPECvirt) to run over 550 VMs with a mix of SMP vCPU VMs showing that they can scale beyond the previously (RHV 3.0) supported 512 vCPUs per host.
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Host Config |
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Max Consolidation Ratio
Details
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1000 VMs per host
Citrix has listed the new scalability limits for XenServer 7.5 within the published configuration limits document https://bit.ly/2rcrjZx
- Concurrent VMs per host (Windows or Linux): 1000
- Concurrent protected VMs per host with HA enabled: 500
Disclaimers are:
- The maximum number of VMs/host supported is dependent on VM workload, system load, and certain environmental factors. Citrix reserves the right to determine what specific environmental factors affect the maximum limit at which a system can function. For systems running over 500 VMs, Citrix recommends allocating 8GB RAM and 8 exclusively pinned vCPUs to dom0, and setting the OVS flow-eviction-threshold to 8192.
The maximum amount of logical physical processors supported differs by CPU. Please consult the XenServer Hardware Compatibility List for more details on the maximum amount of logical cores supported per vendor and CPU.
Each plugged VBD or plugged VIF or Windows VM reduces this number by 1
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1024 VMs
vSphere 6.5 Maximums
- 64 hosts per cluster
- 8000 VMs per cluster
- 576 CPUs
- 12 TB of RAM
- 1024 VMs per host
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160 (logical)
With 8 socket with 10 cores each and Hyper-Threading enabled you can use up to 160 logical CPUs.
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288 (logical)
XenServer 7.5 supports up to 288 Logical CPUs (threads) e.g. 8 socket with 18 cores each and Hyper-Threading enabled = 288 logical CPUs
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576 physical
Hosts will support up to 576 physical CPUs (Dependent on hardware at launch time).
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unlimited
there is no license restriction for the max number of cores per CPU
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Max Cores per CPU
Details
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unlimited
The XenServer license does not restrict the number of cores per CPU
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unlimited
unlimited (since vSphere 5)
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4TB
Max amount of physical RAM installed in host and recognized by RHV is 4TG (4000GB).
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Max Memory / Host
Details
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5TB
XenServer supports a maximum of 5TB per host, if a host has one or more paravirtualized guests (Linux VMs) running then a maximum of 128 GB RAM is supported on the host
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12TB
vSphere 6.5 Maximums
- 64 hosts per cluster
- 8000 VMs per cluster
- 576 CPUs
- 12 TB of RAM
- 1024 VMs per host
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160 vCPU per VM
The maximum supported number of virtual CPUs per vm (please note that the actual number depends on the type of the guest operating system (i.e. technical workstation and older OSs might not support the maximum number).
Maximum topology limits are 16 sockets and 16 cores/socket.
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VM Config |
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32
XenServer 7.5 supports 32vCPUs for Windows and Linux VMs. Actual numbers vary with the guest OS version (e.g. license restrictions).
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128 vCPU
128 vCPU
Maximum number of virtual CPUs configurable for the vm and presented to the guest operating system - supported numbers vary greatly with specific guest OS version, please check!
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4TB
Maximum amount of configured virtual RAM for an individual vm is 4TB (4000GB).
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1.5TB
A maximum of 1.5TB is supported for guest OSs, actual number varies greatly with guest OS version so please check for specific guest support.
The maximum amount of physical memory addressable by your operating system varies. Setting the memory to a level greater than the operating system supported limit, may lead to performance issues within your guest. Some 32-bit Windows operating systems can support more than 4 GB of RAM through use of the physical address extension (PAE) mode. The limit for 32-bit PV Virtual Machines is 64GB. Please consult your guest operating system Administrators Guide and the XenServer Virtual Machine Users Guide for more details.
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6TB
NEW
6TB
amount of vRAM configurable in a virtual machine (presented to the guest OS)
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No (serial console via hooks possible)
Presence of the serial port can be configured per virtual machine. But there is no interface to access them.
However VDSM hooks can be used to get serial console access to virtual machine consoles (where graphical access is not possible) - http://www.ovirt.org/Features/Serial_Console_in_CLI
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No
You can not configure serial ports (as virtual hardware) for your VM
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32 ports
32 ports
Virtual machine serial ports can connect to physical host port, output file, named pipes or network.
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Via remote-connection client or hooks
You can not pass-through any host USB devices directly to the virtual machine with RHV-H. If utilizing RHEL with KVM as your hypervisor, customization hooks can be leveraged to directly attached devices to the VM from the host.
However, using RHVs technical workstation virtualization solution (RHV-D) you can pass-through USB devices from client devices (e.g. technical workstation) via the SPICE protocol capabilities.
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Yes
NEW
XenServer 7.5 includes USB pass-through support. USB pass-through enables more use cases for your virtual environment, such as accessing USB storage devices directly from within the VMs, and running software that requires USB licensing dongles.
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Yes (USB 1.x, 2.x and 3.x) with max 20 USB devices per vm
vSphere supports a USB (host) controller per virtual machine. USB 1.x, 2.x and 3.x supported. One USB host controller of each version 1.x, 2.x, or 3.x can be added at the same time.
A maximum of 20 USB devices can be connected to a virtual machine (Guest operating systems might have lower limits than allowed by vSphere)
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Yes (disk, NIC, CPU)
NEW
RHV 3.1 added the ability to hot-add both Network Interface Cards as well as Virtual Disk Storage in the virtual machine (maintained with 3.5). New in 3.5 is hot-add CPU (but not removal). The RHV roadmap has publicly disclosed intentions to support hot-plug of memory in the future.
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Yes (disk, NIC)
XenServer supports adding of disks and network adapters while the VM is running - hot plug requires the specific guest OS to support these functions - please check for specific support with your OS vendor.
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Yes (CPU, Mem, Disk, NIC, PCIe SSD)
vSphere adds the ability to perform hot-add and remove of SSD devices to/from a vSphere host.
VMware Hot add (Memory and CPU) and hot plug (NIC, disks) requires the guest OS to support these functions - please check for specific support.
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No
no GPU acceleration available
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Graphic Acceleration
Details
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Yes
Citrix XenServer is leading the way in the virtual delivery of 3D professional graphics applications and workstations. Its offerings include GPU Pass-through (for NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs) as well as hardware based
GPU sharing with NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ and Intel GVT-g™.
XenServer 7.5 customers can use AMD MxGPU on 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016 VMs.
Details: http://bit.ly/2sJOcW4
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Yes (NVIDIA vGPU)
GRID vGPU is a graphics acceleration technology from NVIDIA that enables a single GPU (graphics processing unit) to be shared among multiple virtual desktops. When NVIDIA GRID cards (installed in an x86 host) are used in a desktop virtualization solution running on VMware vSphere® 6.x, application graphics can be rendered with superior performance compared to non-hardware-accelerated environments. This capability is useful for graphics-intensive use cases such as designers in a manufacturing setting, architects, engineering labs, higher education, oil and gas exploration, clinicians in a healthcare setting, as well as for power users who need access to rich 2D and 3D graphical interfaces.
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DAS, iSCSI, NFS (v4), FC, FCoE, SAS, POSIX;
Virtio SCSI, GlusterFS support, online vDisk resize
NEW
RHV 3.5 added the following Storage features:
- Detaching and moving data domains, with their contained disks and associated VMs between Data Centers or even RHV setups.
- Customizing mount options for NFS domains.
RHV 3.4 added the following Storage features:
- Support for read-only VM disks.
- Mixing domains of different types (e.g. NFS and iSCSI) in a single Data Center.
RHV 3.3 added the following Storage features:
- Virtio-SCSI support (Virtio-SCSI is a new para-virtualized SCSI controller device which provides similar performance as the virtio-blk device, while improving scalability, supporting standard SCSI command sets and device naming, allowing for SCSI device passthrough)
- GlusterFS support (RHV supports native GlusterFS-based storage domains and data center types)
- Enable online virtual drive resize (Resize virtual disks while they are in use by one or more virtual machines without the need of pausing, hibernating or rebooting the guests, by specifying an Extend size by(GB) value. Disks Block Alignment scan (This feature provides a way to find the virtual disks with misaligned partitions, check if a virtual disk, the filesystem installed on it, and its underlying storage are aligned).
- Disk Hook (Adding VDSM hooking points before and after disks hot plug and hot unplug. The feature allows users to add their own functionality before hot-plugging and hot-unplugging disks).
Besides the full support for live Storage Migration RHV 3.2 added a few minor storage related functions, including the ability to perform a storage domain scan (Scan storage domain for new orphaned images and import images into storage domain) and the ability to delete VMs without deleting the virtual disks.
New in RHV 3.1 was the ability to attach any block device to a virtual machine (Direct LUN Support), the directlun VDSM hook script is no longer required perform this task. Another new feature is the ability to configure Cross Storage Domain Virtual Machines i.e. a virtual machine which has disks on multiple different storage domains. Previously all disks for a virtual machine had to be stored on the same storage domain. Support for NFS 4 had also been added.
In RHV storage is logically grouped into storage pools, which are comprised of three types of storage domains: data (vm and snap shots) , export (temporary storage repository that is used to copy and move images between data centers and RHV instances), and ISO. Although specifically mentioned, most SAS and FCoE devices are presented to the kernel in the same way and are therefore utilized by device-mapper-multipath. RHV uses device-mapper-multipath to gather available disk information so most SAS and FCoE devices are supported for use with RHV provided that the standard FC option is selected when looking for available storage in RHV.
The data storage domain is the only one required by each data center and exclusive to a single data center. Export and ISO domains are optional, but require NFS.
Storage domains are shared resources and can be implemented using NFS, iSCSI or the Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP). On NFS, all virtual disks, templates, and snapshots are simple files. On SAN (iSCSI/FCP), block devices are aggregated into a logical entity called a Volume Group (VG). This is done using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and presents high performance I/O.
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Memory |
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Dynamic / Over-Commit
Details
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Yes (DMC)
XenServer 5.6 introduced Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) that enables dynamic reallocation of memory between VMs. This capability is maintained in 7.x.
XenServer DMC (sometimes known as 'dynamic memory optimization', 'memory overcommit' or 'memory ballooning') works by automatically adjusting the memory of running VMs, keeping the amount of memory allocated to each VM between specified minimum and maximum memory values, guaranteeing performance and permitting greater density of VMs per server. Without DMC, when a server is full, starting further VMs will fail with 'out of memory' errors: to reduce the existing VM memory allocation and make room for more VMs you must edit each VMs memory allocation and then reboot the VM. With DMC enabled, even when the server is full, XenServer will attempt to reclaim memory by automatically reducing the current memory allocation of running VMs within their defined memory ranges.
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Yes (Memory Ballooning)
vSphere uses several memory optimization techniques, mainly to over-commit memory and reclaim unused memory: Ballooning, memory compression and transparent page sharing. Last level of managing memory overcommit is hypervisor swapping (not desired).
When physical host memory is over-committed (e.g. the host has a total of 128GB of RAM but a total of 196GB are allocated to virtual machines), the memory balloon driver (vmmemctl) collaborates with the server to reclaim pages that are considered least valuable by the guest operating system. When memory is tight (i.e. all virtual machines are requesting their maximum memory allocation to be used), the guest operating system determines which pages to reclaim and, if necessary, swaps them to its own virtual disk.
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Yes (KSM)
Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM) reduces references to memory pages from multiple identical pages to a single page reference. This helps with optimization for memory density.
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Memory Page Sharing
Details
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No
XenServer does not feature any transparent page sharing algorithm.
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Yes (Transparent Page Sharing)
vSphere uses several memory techniques: Ballooning, memory compression and transparent page sharing. Last level of managing memory overcommit is hypervisor swapping (not desired).
A good example is a scenario where several virtual machines are running instances of the same guest operating system, have the same applications or components loaded, or contain common data. In such cases, a host uses a proprietary transparent page sharing technique to securely eliminate redundant copies of memory pages. As a result, higher levels of over-commitment can be supported.
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Yes
RHV-3.0 introduced a new feature (maintained with 3.5) called transparent huge pages, where the Linux kernel dynamically creates large memory pages (2MB versus 4KB) for virtual machines, improving performance for VMs that require them (newer OSs generations tend to benefit less from larger pages)
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No
There is no support for large memory pages in XenServer
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Yes
Large Memory Pages for Hypervisor and Guest Operating System - in addition to the usual 4KB memory pages ESX also makes 2MB memory pages available.
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Yes
RHV supports Intel EPT and AMD-RVI
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HW Memory Translation
Details
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Yes
Yes, XenServer supports Intel EPT and AMD-RVI, see http://bit.ly/2r2ezp0
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Yes
Yes, vSphere leverages AMD RVI and Intel EPT technology for the MMU virtualization in order to reduce the virtualization overhead associated with page-table virtualization
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Yes
The Red Hat Virtualization Manager interface allows you to import and export virtual machines (and templates) stored in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF).
This feature can be used in multiple ways:
- Moving virtual resources between Red Hat Virtualization environments.
- Move virtual machines and templates between data centers in a single Red Hat Virtualization environment.
- Backing up virtual machines and templates.
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Interoperability |
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Yes, incl. vApp
XenServer 6 introduced the ability to create multi-VM and boot sequenced virtual appliances (vApps) that integrate with Integrated Site Recovery and High Availability. vApps can be easily imported and exported using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. There is full support for VM disk and OVF appliance imports directly from XenCenter with the ability to change VM parameters (virtual processor, virtual memory, virtual interfaces, and target storage repository) with the Import wizard. Full OVF import support for XenServer, XenConvert and VMware.
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Yes
vCenter can export and import vm, virtual appliances and vApps stored in OVF. vApp is a container comprised of one or more virtual machines, which uses OVF to specify and encapsulate all its components and policies
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Comprehensive
RHV takes advantage of the native hardware certification of the Redhat Enterprise Linux OS. The RHV Hypervisor (RHV-H) is certified for use with all hardware which has passed Red Hat Enterprise Linux certification except where noted in the Requirements chapter of the installation guide http://red.ht/1hOZEDA
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Improving
XenServer has an improving HCL featuring the major vendors and technologies but compared to e.g. VMware and Microsoft the list is somewhat limited - so check support first. Links to XenServer HCL and XenServer hardware verification test kits are here: http://hcl.xensource.com/
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Very Comprehensive (see link)
vSphere has a very comprehensive and well documented set of hardware components.
For compatible systems and devices see http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
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Limited
NEW
RHV supports the most common server and technical workstation OSs, current support includes:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-Bit x86,
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 64-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 64-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012 64-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows XP 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows 7 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows 7 64-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows 8 32-Bit x86.
- Microsoft Windows 8 64-Bit x86.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 32-Bit x86.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 64-Bit x86.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 32-Bit x86.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 64-Bit x86.
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Good
NEW
All major:
- Microsoft Windows 10
- Microsoft Windows Server 2016
- Ubuntu 14.14, 16.04
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3, SLED 11SP3, SLES 11 SP4, SLES 12, SLED 12, SLED 12 SP1
- Scientific Linux 5.11, 6.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, 6.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2
- Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, 6.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2
- Oracle UEK 6.5
- CentOS 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, 6.5, 7.0, 7.1, 7.3
- Debian 7.2, 8.0
Refer to the XenServer 7.5 Virtual Machine User Guide for details: http://bit.ly/2rHOmPh
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Very Comprehensive (see link)
Very comprehensive - vSphere 6.5 is compatible with various versions of: Asianux, Canonical, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OS/2, Microsoft (MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT4, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012 incl. R2, XP, Vista, Win7, 8), Netware, Oracle Linux, SCO OpenServer, SCO Unixware, Solaris, RHEL, SLES and Apple OS X server.
Details: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCategory=software
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Container Support
Details
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Yes
Docker support for XenServer is a feature of XenServer 6.5 SP1 or later and is delivered as a supplimental pack named 'xs-container' which also includes support for CoreOS and cloud-drives.
More info: http://bit.ly/2mM2vde
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Yes
NEW
vSphere Integrated Containers
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REST API, Python CLI, Hooks, SDK
RHV exposes several interfaces for interacting with the virtualization environment. These interfaces are in addition to the user interfaces provided by the
Red Hat Virtualization Manager Administration, User, and Reports Portals. Some of the interfaces are supported only for read access or only when it has been explicitly requested by Red Hat Support.
Supported Interfaces (Read and Write Access):
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API: With the release of RHV-3 Red Hat introduced a new Representational State Transfer (REST) API. The REST API is useful for developers and administrators who aim to integrate the functionality of a Red Hat Virtualization environment with custom scripts or external applications that access the API via standard HTTP. The REST API exposed by the Red Hat Virtualization Manager is a fully supported interface for interacting with Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Python Software Development Kit (SDK): This SDK provides Python libraries for interacting with the REST API. The Python SDK provided by the RHVm-sdk-python package is a fully supported interface for interacting with Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Java Software Development Kit (SDK): This SDK provides Java libraries for interacting with the REST API. The Java SDK provided by the RHVm-sdk-java package is a fully supported interface for interacting with Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Linux Command Line Shell: The command line shell provided by the RHVm-cli package is a fully supported interface for interacting with the Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- VDSM Hooks: The creation and use of VDSM hooks to trigger modification of virtual machines based on custom properties specified in the Administration Portal is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization hosts. The use of VDSM Hooks on virtualization hosts running Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor is not currently supported.
Additional Supported Interfaces (Read Access)
Use of these interfaces for write access is not supported unless explicitly requested by Red Hat Support:
- Red Hat Virtualization Manager History Database
- Libvirt on Virtualization Hosts
Unsupported Interfaces
Direct interaction with these interfaces is not supported unless your use of them is explicitly requested by Red Hat Support:
- The vdsClient Command
- Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor Console
- Red Hat Virtualization Manager Database
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Yes (SDK, API, PowerShell)
The Software Development Kit provides the architectural overview of the APIs and use of SDK tools provided: http://bit.ly/2rSZ83K
The XenServer 7.3 management API is documented in detail here: http://bit.ly/2rHMhTI
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Web Services API/SDK, CIM, Perl, .NET, Java SDKs, Client Plug-In API, vSphere Clip, vMA
VMware provides several public API and Software Development Kits (SDK) products. You can use these products to interact with the following areas:
- host configuration, virtualization management and performance monitoring (vSphere Web Services API provides the basis for VMware management tools - available through the vSphere Web Services SDK). VMware provides language-specific SDKs (vSphere SDKs for Perl, .NET, or Java)
- server hardware health monitoring and storage management (CIM interface compatible with the CIM SMASH specification, storage management through CIM SMI-S and OEM/IHV packaged CIM implementations)
- extending the vSphere Client GUI (vSphere Client Plug-In API)
- access and manipulation of virtual storage - VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK with library of C functions and example apps in C++)
- obtaining statistics from the guest operating system of a virtual machine (vSphere Guest SDK is a read-only programmatic interface for monitoring virtual machine statistics)
- scripting and automating common administrative tasks (CLIs that allow you to create scripts to automate common administrative tasks. The vSphere CLI is available for Linux and Microsoft Windows and provides a basic set of administrative commands. vSphere PowerCLI is available on Microsoft Windows and has over 200 commonly-used administrative commands.
Details Here: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/developer/
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REST API
RHV provides its RESTful API for external integration into cloud platforms, for example, ManageIQs cloud management interface.
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CloudStack APIs, support for AWS API and OpenStack
Citrix CloudPlatform uses a RESTful CloudStack API. In addition to supporting the CloudStack API, CloudPlatform supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API. Future cloud API standards from bodies such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) will be implemented as they become available.
Details on the CloudPlatform API here: http://bit.ly/2slkJ7R
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vCloud API
vCloud API - provides support for developers who are building interactive clients of VMware vCloud Director using a RESTful application development style.
VMware provides a comprehensive vCloud API Programming Guide. vCloud API clients and vCloud Director servers communicate over HTTP, exchanging representations of vCloud objects. These representations take the form of XML elements. You use HTTP GET requests to retrieve the current representation of an object, HTTP POST and PUT requests to create or modify an object, and HTTP DELETE requests to delete an object.
The guide is intended for software developers who are building VMware Ready Cloud Services, including interactive clients of VMware vCloud Director. The guide discusses Representational State Transfer (REST) and RESTful programming conventions, the Open Virtualization Format Specification, and VMware Virtual machine technology.
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RHCI: CloudForms, OpenStack, RHV; OpenShift (Fee-Based Add-Ons)
NEW
Comment: Due to the variation in actual cloud requirements, different deployment model (private, public, hybrid) and use cases (IaaS, PaaS etc.) the matrix will only list the available products and capabilities. It will not list evaluations (green, amber, red) rather than providing the information that will help you to evaluate it for YOUR environment.
Overview:
IaaS (private and hybrid)
In July 2013 Red Hat announced Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) -a single-subscription offering that bundles and integrates the following products:
- RHV - Datacenter virtualization hypervisor and management for traditional (ENTERPRISE) workloads
- Cloud-enabled Workloads: RHEL OpenStack - scalable, fault-tolerant platform for developing a managed private or public cloud for CLOUD-ENABLED workloads
- Red Hat CloudForms - Cloud MANAGEMENT and ORCHESTRATION across multiple hypervisors and public cloud providers
Please find more details here - http://red.ht/1oKMZsP
PaaS:
Red Hat also offers OpenShift (PaaS), as on-promise technology as well as available as online (public cloud) offering by Red Hat. Details here - http://red.ht/1LRn7ol
There are a number of public and hybrid (on-premise or cloud) offerings that Red Hat positions as complementary like Red Hat Storage Server (scale-out storage servers both on-premise and in the Amazon Web Services public cloud). Details are here: http://red.ht/1ug7XTY
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Extensions
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Cloud |
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CloudPlatform; OpenStack
Note: Due to the variation in actual cloud requirements, different deployment model (private, public, hybrid) and use cases (IaaS, PaaS etc) the matrix will only list the available products and capabilities. It will not list evaluations (green, amber, red) rather than providing the information that will help you to evaluate it for YOUR environment.
After the acquisition of Cloud.com in July 2011, Citrix has centered its cloud capabilities around its CloudPlatform suite.
Citrix CloudPlatform (latest release 4.5.1) powered by Apache CloudStack - is an open source cloud computing platform that pools computing resources to build public, private, and hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. CloudPlatform manages the network, storage, and compute nodes that make up a cloud infrastructure. Use CloudPlatform to deploy, manage, and configure cloud computing environments.
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VMware Cloud Foundation
NEW
VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform that brings together VMware’s vSphere, vSAN and NSX into a natively integrated stack to deliver enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for the private and public cloud.
https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation.html
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VDI Included in RHV; HTML5 support (Tech Preview)
There is one single SKU for RHV that includes server and technical workstation virtualization.
Red Hats Enterprise Virtualization includes an integrated connection broker as well as the ability to manage VDI users via external (LDAP-based) directory services. It is often referred to as RHV-D (technical workstation). The same interface is used to manage both server and technical workstation images (unlike most other solutions like e.g. VMware View, Citrix Xentechnical workstation).
Please note that VDI is an additional charge to the server product and cannot be purchased separately (i.e. without purchasing RHV for servers).
Red Hat Virtualization for technical workstations (RHV-D) consists of:
- Red Hat Hypervisor
- Red Hat Virtualization Manager (RHV-M) as centralized management console with management tools that administrators can use to create, monitor, and maintain their virtual technical workstations (same interface as for server management)
- SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) - remote rendering protocol. There is initial support for the SPICE-HTML5 console client is offered as a technology preview. This feature allows users to connect to a SPICE console from their browser using the SPICE-HTML5 client.
- Integrated connection broker-a web-based portal from which end-users can log into their virtual technical workstations
Note: VDI related capabilities are NOT listed as Fee-Based Add-Ons (no purchase of additional VDI management software is required or licenses involved to enable the VDI management capability).
However, you will require relevant client access licensing to run virtual machines with Windows OSs, see http://bit.ly/1cBdgAm for details
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Desktop Virtualization |
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Citrix Desktop Virtualization (XenDesktop & XenApp 7.6 - NEW; ViaB; associated products)
Citrix is by many perceived to own the most comprehensive portfolio for desktop virtualization alongside with the largest overall market share.
Citrixs success in this space is historically based on its Terminal Services-like capabilities (Hosted SHARED Desktops i.e. XenApp aka Presentation Server) but Citrix has over time added VDI (Hosted Virtual Desktops), mobility management (XenMobile), networking (NetScaler), cloud for Service Providers hosting desktop/apps (CloudPlatform) and other comprehensive capabilities to its portfolio (separate fee-based offerings).
Citrixs FlexCast approach promotes the any type of virtual desktop to any device philosophy and facilitates the use of different delivery technologies (e.g. VDI, application publishing or streaming, client hypervisor etc.) depending on the respective use case (so not a one fits all approach).
XenDesktop 7.x history:
- Citrixs announcement of Project Avalon in 2011 promised the integration of a unified desktop / application virtualization capability into its CloudPlatform product. This was then broken up into the Excalibur Project (unifying XenDesktop and XenApp in the XenDesktop 7.x product) and the Merlin Release aiming to provide multi-tenant clouds to manage virtual desktops and applications.
- XenDesktop 7.1 added support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1, and new Studio configuration of server-based graphical processing units (GPUs) considered an essential hardware component for supporting virtualized delivery of 3D professional graphics applications.
- In Jan 2014 Citrix announced that XenApp is back as product name, rather than using XenDesktop to refer to VDI as well as desktop/application publishing capabilities, also see http://gtnr.it/14KYg4b
- With XenDesktop 7.5 Citrix announced the capability to provision application and or desktop workloads to public and or private cloud infrastructures (Citrix CloudPlatform, Amazon and (later) Windows Azure. Wake-on-LAN capability has been added to Remote PC Access and AppDNA is now included in the product.
-With XenDesktop 7.6 includes new features like: session prelaunch and session linger; support for unauthenticated (anonymous) users and connection leasing makes recently used applications and desktops available even when the Site database in unavailable.
VDI in a Box: Citrix also has VDI in a Box (ViaB) offering (originating in the Kaviza acquisition) - a simple to deploy, easy to manage and scale VDI solution targeting smaller deployments and limited use cases.
In reality ViaB box scales to larger (thousaunds of users) environments but has (due to its simplified nature and product positioning) restricted use cases compared to the full XenDesktop (There is no direct migration path between ViaB and XenDesktop). ViaB can for instance not provide advanced Hosted Shared Desktops (VDI only), no advanced graphics capabilities (HDX3DPro), has limited HA for fully persistent desktops, no inherent multi-site management capabilities.
Overview here: http://bit.ly/1fXeA38
Recommended Read for VDI Comparison (Ruben Spruijts VDI Smackdown): http://www.pqr.com/downloadformulier?file=VDI_Smackdown.pdf
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VMware Horizon 7 (Vendor Add-On)
VMware Horizon 7
Deliver virtual or hosted desktops and applications through a single platform with VMware Horizon 7
http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon.html
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No, Possible via Red Hat Storage
NEW
Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011 opening up the integration of the scale-out GlusterFS NAS filesystem for storage virtualization capabilities (now integrated in Red Hat Storage).
Red Hat Storage is a software-only, scale-out storage solution that provides flexible unstructured data storage for the enterprise.
There is support for managing Red Hat Storage volumes and bricks using Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
Red Hat Storage Console (RHS-C) of Red Hat Storage Server (RHS) for On-Premise provides replication via the native capabilities of RHS, with integration in the RHV-M interface.
RHS-C extends RHV-M 3.x and oVirt Engine technology to manage Red Hat Trusted Storage Pools with management via the Web GUI, REST API and (future) remote command shell.
Note that Red Hat Storage is a fee-based add-on.
A Getting Started with Red Hat Virtualization 3.4 and Red Hat Storage 3 guide is avaiable here:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Storage/3/pdf/Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage/Red_Hat_Storage-3-Configuring_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_with_Red_Hat_Storage-en-US.pdf
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1 |
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no
There is no specific Storage Virtualization appliance capability other than the abstraction of storage resources through the hypervisor.
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vSAN 6.5 (Vendor Add-On)
VMware vSAN 6.5 extend virtualization to storage with an integrated hyper-converged solution.
http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san.html
comparison: https://www.whatmatrix.com/comparison/SDS-and-HCI
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3rd Party
At this time RHV focuses on the management of the virtual and cloud infrastructure.
Partner solutions offer insight into the services running on top of the virtual infrastructure, with integration into RHV.
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2 |
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Application Management
Details
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Vendor Add-On: XenDesktop
Citrix Director
The performance monitoring and trouble shooting aspect of Application Management in the context of Citrix is mostly applicable to XenDesktop 7 Director and XenDesktop 7 EdgeSight
- Desktop Director is a real-time web tool, used primarily for the Help Desk agents. In XenDesktop 7, Directors new troubleshooting dashboard provides the real-time health monitoring of your XenDesktop 7 site.
- In XenDesktop 7, EdgeSight provides two key features, performance management and network analysis.
With XenDesktop 7, Director (the real-time assessment and troubleshooting tool is included in all XenDesktop 7 editions.
The new EdgeSight features are included in both XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum editions entitlements however these features are based on the XenDesktop 7 platform. The environment must be XenDesktop 7 in order to leverage the new Director.
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App Volumes
App Volumes is a portfolio of application and user management solutions for Horizon, Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, and RDSH virtual environments.
https://www.vmware.com/products/appvolumes.html
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sVirt & Security Partnerships
Red Hats RHV partner ecosystem has security partnerships with SourceFire, Catbird, and other security-focused products and solutions. This is in addition to RHVs integrated sVirt capability.
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3 |
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Vendor Add-Ons: NetScaler Gateway, App Firewall, CloudBridge, Direct Inspection API
NetScaler provides various (network) security related capabilities through e.g.
- NetScaler Gateway: secure application and data access for Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenMobile)
- NetScaler AppFirewall: secures web applications, prevents inadvertent or intentional disclosure of confidential information and aids in compliance with information security regulations such as PCI-DSS. AppFirewall is available as a standalone security appliance or as a fully integrated module of the NetScaler application delivery solution and is included with Citrix NetScaler, Platinum Edition.
Details here: http://bit.ly/17ttmKk
CloudBridge:
Initially marketed under NetScaler CloudBridge, Citrix CloudBridge provides a unified platform that connects and accelerates applications, and optimizes bandwidth utilization across public cloud and private networks.
CloudBridge encrypts the connection between the enterprise premises and the cloud provider so that all data in transit is secure.
http://bit.ly/17ttSYA
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NSX (Vendor Add-On)
VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center.
http://www.vmware.com/products/nsx.html
NSX embeds networking and security functionality that is typically handled in hardware directly into the hypervisor. The NSX network virtualization platform fundamentally transforms the data center’s network operational model like server virtualization did 10 years ago, and is helping thousands of customers realize the full potential of an SDDC.
With NSX, you can reproduce in software your entire networking environment. NSX provides a complete set of logical networking elements and services including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, VPN, QoS, and monitoring. Virtual networks are programmatically provisioned and managed independent of the underlying hardware.
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Vendor Add-On: CloudForms
NEW
Red Hat Cloudforms (separate product) or sold as part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) provides enterprises operational management tools including monitoring, chargeback, governance, and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure such as Red Hat Virtualization, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and VMware and OpenStack.
The CloudForms Management Engine enables context aware, model-driven automation and orchestration of administrative, operational, and self-service activities in enterprise cloud environments. Automation can be driven across a wide spectrum of scenarios including discovery, state changes, performance and trending, event-based, scheduled, via web-services integration or on-demand through an extensible web-based management portal.
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4 |
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Workflow / Orchestration
Details
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Workflow Studio (incl.)
Workflow Studio is included with this license and provides a graphical interface for workflow composition in order to reduce scripting. Workflow Studio allows administrators to tie technology components together via workflows. Workflow Studio is built on top of Windows® PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation. It natively supports Citrix products including XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer and NetScaler.
Available as component of XenDesktop suite, Workflow Studio was retired in XenDesktop 7.x
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vRealize Orchestrator
vRealize Orchestrator is included with vCenter Server Standard and allows admins to capture often executed tasks/best practices and turn them into automated workflows (drag and drop) or use out of the box workflows.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-orchestrator.html
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Plugin - Symantec Storage Foundation (Fee-Based Add-On)
fully supports a Symantec Storage Foundation plug-in that provides disaster recovery in case of a failure.
Symantec Storage Foundation Plugin provides automated disaster recovery and site recovery functionality for RHV:
- Automate virtual machine failovers to multiple secondary sites with push button disaster recovery that includes guest, guest network, storage reconfiguration and restart.
- Enables other nodes to take predefined actions when a monitored application fails, for instance to take over and bring up applications elsewhere in the cluster.
- Supports heterogeneous array replication such as (Hitachi, EMC & Symantec).
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5 |
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Integrated Site Recovery (incl.)
XenServer 6 introduced the Integrated Site Recovery (maintained in 7.x), utilizing the native remote data replication between physical storage arrays and automates the recovery and failback capabilities. The new approach removes the Windows VM requirement for the StorageLink Gateway components and it works now with any iSCSI or Hardware HBA storage repository. You can perform failover, failback and test failover. You can configure and operate it using the Disaster Recovery option in XenCenter. Please note however that Site Recovery does NOT interact with the Storage array, so you will have to e.g. manually break mirror relationships before failing over. You will need to ensure that the virtual disks as well as the pool meta data (containing all the configuration data required to recreate your vims and vApps) are correctly replicated to your secondary site.
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Site Recovery Manager (Vendor Add-On)
VMware Site Recovery Manager
Perform frequent non-disruptive testing to ensure IT disaster recovery predictability and compliance. Achieve fast and reliable recovery using fully automated workflows and complementary Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) solutions.
http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager.html
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Vendor Add-On: CloudForms
NEW
RHV includes enterprise reporting capabilities through a comprehensive management history database, which any reporting application utilizes to generate a range of reports at data center, cluster and host levels.
For charge-back, RHV has -party integrated solutions like e.g. IBMs Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM) which can convert the metrics RHVs enterprise reports provide into fiscal chargeback numbers.
Red Hat Cloudforms fee add-on or sold as part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) provides enterprises operational management tools including monitoring, chargeback, governance, and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure such as Red Hat Virtualization, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and VMware and OpenStack and provides the capability for cost allocation with usage and chargeback by determining who is using which resources to allocate costs, create and implement chargeback models.
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6 |
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Vendor Add-On: CloudPortal Business Manager, CloudStack Usage Server (Fee-Based Add-Ons)
The workload balancing engine (WLB) was introdcued within XenServer 5.6 FP1 introduced support for simple chargeback and reporting. The chargeback report includes, amongst other data, the following: the name of the VM, and uptime as well as usage for storage, CPU, memory and network reads/writes. You can use the Chargeback Utilization Analysis report to determine what percentage of a resource (such as a physical server) a specific department within your organization used.
see http://bit.ly/2sK6siq
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vRealize Business (Vendor Add-On)
VMware vRealize Business Enterprise is an IT financial management (ITFM) tool that provides transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services, enabling the CIO to align IT with the business and to accelerate IT transformation.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-business.html
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Vendor Add-Ons: Load Balancer, High Performance
- Red Hat has networking related products like the Load-Balancer Add-On for RHEL (http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/rhel/RHEL6_Add-ons_datasheet.pdf) and the RHEL High-Performance Network Add-On (delivers remote direct memory access - RDMA- over Converged Ethernet - RoCE) that can add value to virtualization and cloud environments.
- Common SDN solution integration is available with Neutron integration on 3.3 (tech preview)
- Cisco UCS (VM-FEX) integration
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7 |
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Network Extensions
Details
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NSX (Vendor Add-on)
VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center.
http://www.vmware.com/products/nsx.html
NSX embeds networking and security functionality that is typically handled in hardware directly into the hypervisor. The NSX network virtualization platform fundamentally transforms the data center’s network operational model like server virtualization did 10 years ago, and is helping thousands of customers realize the full potential of an SDDC.
With NSX, you can reproduce in software your entire networking environment. NSX provides a complete set of logical networking elements and services including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, VPN, QoS, and monitoring. Virtual networks are programmatically provisioned and managed independent of the underlying hardware.
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NSX (Vendor Add-on)
VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center.
http://www.vmware.com/products/nsx.html
NSX embeds networking and security functionality that is typically handled in hardware directly into the hypervisor. The NSX network virtualization platform fundamentally transforms the data center’s network operational model like server virtualization did 10 years ago, and is helping thousands of customers realize the full potential of an SDDC.
With NSX, you can reproduce in software your entire networking environment. NSX provides a complete set of logical networking elements and services including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, VPN, QoS, and monitoring. Virtual networks are programmatically provisioned and managed independent of the underlying hardware.
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NSX (Vendor Add-on)
VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center.
http://www.vmware.com/products/nsx.html
NSX embeds networking and security functionality that is typically handled in hardware directly into the hypervisor. The NSX network virtualization platform fundamentally transforms the data center’s network operational model like server virtualization did 10 years ago, and is helping thousands of customers realize the full potential of an SDDC.
With NSX, you can reproduce in software your entire networking environment. NSX provides a complete set of logical networking elements and services including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, VPN, QoS, and monitoring. Virtual networks are programmatically provisioned and managed independent of the underlying hardware.
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