Course Overview

In the Citrix XenServer 6.0 course, students are provided with the foundation necessary to effectively install, configure, administer, and troubleshoot XenServer 6.0. Students will also learn how to configure a Provisioning Services 6.0 host, and create and manage vDisks in a XenServer environment. Through the use of hands-on labs, students will acquire the skills needed to configure the Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) as well as Workload Balancing (WLB). Students will also create and manage Windows virtual machines and the resource pools in which they will be placed.

Reviews

• A basic overall knowledge of virtualization technology
• An understanding of computing architecture, including network and storage devices, device drivers and operating systems
• Basic experience installing and administering Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008
• Basic experience installing and administering Linux variants
• Intermediate knowledge of network devices and site architecture, including configuring VLANs
• Basic knowledge of storage terminology and technologies, including partitions, SANs, LUNs, iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS file shares

Module 1: Introduction to XenServer
Module 2: Installing and Configuring XenServer
Module 3: XenServer Networking
Module 4: XenServer Storage Repositories
Module 5: Creating and Managing Virtual Machines
Module 6: Installing and Configuring Provisioning Services
Module 7: Managing vDisks and Target Devices .
Module 8: Implementing Resource Pools
Module 9: Distributed Virtual Switching
Module 10: Workload Balancing
Module 11: Configuring High Availability
Module 12: Managing and Troubleshooting XenServer .

Why are cloud providers choosing XenServer to power their clouds?
Scalability comes from XenServer’s fully replicated architecture across all hosts in an environment. This means there is no management server required to manage a given number of hosts. Should the master host in a pool go down, any other host can be promoted to replace it with no loss of functionality or configuration. In practice, this means cloud providers can freely choose to cluster hosts as required without incurring any additional configuration or management complexity based on cluster size.
While cost is an important factor for every company to consider, it is particularly important when you’re looking at licensing hundreds or even thousands of hosts. Both the open source version of XenServer and the premium version of XenServer that is included as part of your CloudPlatform entitlement, mean cloud providers can get the virtualization layer of their cloud at no cost. These savings can then be turned into additional differentiated service offerings or added savings to their end user.
 *other reasons include open source base, flexibility, VM density and tenant isolation.

XenMotion, what is it and is it free?
A good rule of thumb to find the corresponding feature in XenServer is to replace “v” with “Xen”. XenMotion is our live migration feature that allows you to move VMs from one host in a pool to another provided that the pool has shared storage attached. This has been available in our free version since 2009.
Storage XenMotion is a brand new feature that we released with XenServer 6.1. This feature enables you to move VMs between hosts without the requirement of shared storage which lessens the hardware requirement/expense for both cloud providers using commodity hardware and SMBs with smaller environments. Storage XenMotion is available in our advanced version of XenServer.

Is there an easy way to get support for my environment, even if I’m running on free?
For those of you running a premium edition of XenServer (Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum) we recently changed our support model to offer unlimited, 24×7 support for paid editions of XenServer at about 7% of license cost. What does this mean to the free users out there? Well, it means you can no longer purchase support from Citrix for your XenServer environment. That being said, in addition to the incredible support you can get on the forums, we’ve also introduced a new Citrix Auto Support tool that can do a sanity check of your environment. Simply upload a log file and we’ll check for any issues that we recognize including missing patches, known bugs or configuration errors. This tool can be used for both free or paid editions, so try it out for yourself at http://taas.citrix.com.