During its Synergy 2010 conference, Citrix announced the availability of XenServer 5.6.
At the launch of this product a name change occurred, the stand alone product'; Essentials for XenServer got replace and rolled into three distinct XenServer offering to align with the other messaging and versions of Citrix products (Advance, Enterprise and Platinum).
Naturally there is still the free truly open source edition too.
There is still Essentials for Hyper-V and you can get your hands on the latest version of XenServer as of 28th May, the key new features are:
In details, the XenServer 5.6 new features are:
- Dynamic Memory
- Automated Workload Balancing
Host Power Management
Role-based Administration
StorageLink Site Recovery
Performance Alerting and Reporting - Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4
- Support for up to 64 logical processors, 256 GB RAM, and 16 NICs per host
- Support for OVF import/export in XenCenter.