Citrix XenServer: Overview

The Problem

To fully safeguard against the majority of hardware failure scenarios would cost more money than most schools have budget for:

• How does a school overcome the sudden loss of an important server during the exam season?
• What is your school's disaster recover plan and could it be actioned within minutes instead of hours, or even days?
• Do you have "one server per function" within school?
• Would a server problem impact on multiple critical services across the school?
• How are you managing your servers and at what cost?

The Solution

Citrix XenServer™ is the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven, virtualisation platform that delivers the critical features of live migration and centralised multi-server management at zero cost of entry. XenServer is an open and powerful server virtualisation solution that radically reduces server costs by transforming static and complex servers into more dynamic, easy to manage ICT service delivery centres.

By providing features like live migration, shared storage support and centralised multi-server management (even in the free entry-level version), XenServer enables any school, no matter their size or budget, to immediately take advantage of the power of server virtualisation for the benefit of the students and staff with clear future proofing.

Easy set-up and administration - XenServer has a unique management architecture that eliminates single points of failure. No need to purchase separate management system like vCenter or SystemsCenter VMM. ICT staff can manage hundreds of virtual machines with ease. Fully-automated rolling upgrades and updates, even when moving to a new major version, means you can simply click, sit back and watch.

The global standard for cloud - The Xen hypervisor, the heart of XenServer, is the most prolific public and private cloud hypervisor. XenServer has been adopted by over half of the Fortune 500. Also, Xen Project and XenServer power well over 80 percent of public clouds and hosting providers today. Amazon uses Xen Project Hypervisor for the Amazon Web Services platform, and key XenServer service provider customers include Rackspace, 1&1 Internet, SoftLayer and Korea Telecom.

What makes XenServer different? - Citrix XenServer utilizes the Xen Project hypervisor as a core component of its architecture to provide stable and elastic abstraction of the underlying infrastructure. Xen Project technology is widely acknowledged as the fastest and most secure virtualization platform in the industry.

Best for VDI, desktop and application delivery - XenServer delivers the best-in-class performance for application and desktop virtualization with an integrated virtualization platform for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. XenServer maximizes VM density, reduces infrastructure storage costs with the In-Memory Read-Cache feature and enhances the end-user experience with industry-leading features such as vGPU and GPU pass-thru.