The cost of purchasing and managing physical servers has become an overwhelming burden even for the most organized IT administrators. At the same time, the utilization of dedicated physical resources in a "1 server, 1 application" world is miserably low.

By implementing the XenServer server virtualization solution, IT administrators can significantly reduce the number of servers in a datacenter as well as benefit from better utilization of existing hardware resources. They will also be able to deliver faster provisioning of new servers and take advantage of easy-to-implement tools for converting physical and virtual machines (VMs) to new VMs. As a result, XenServer customers can expect a significant decrease in capital costs through reduced demand for hardware. XenServer also lowers  power and cooling expenses, which improves  the IT management process and results in annuity savings.

Additionally, as the number of VMs grows, it is important that IT processes also continue to evolve. Citrix XenServer includes dynamic workload balancing and power management, provisioning services and dynamic memory control to allow IT administrators to maximize application performance while increasing IT efficiency.

Dynamic balancing of computing resources

Determining how many virtual workloads a physical machine can handle is not an easy task. Physical and virtual machine workloads must be constantly monitored to establish the best use of available resources. XenServer includes dynamic workload balancing (WLB), which intelligently optimizes application performance by migrating VMs to the most suitable host in the resource pool. XenServer WLB can also take advantage of embedded hardware features to lower datacenter electricity consumption by dynamically consolidating VMs on fewer systems and then powering off underutilized servers as demand for services fluctuates.

Simplified VM Provisioning

One of the many benefits of server virtualization is the ability to bring new servers on-line in a matter of minutes. The provisioning services in XenServer improves upon this concept by creating a library of boot images that can be streamed to both physical and virtual servers for fast, consistent and reliable application deployments. This helps to reduce deployment time of new services from weeks to hours, saving both time and money in the process.

Maximizing Server Resources

Sharing unused server memory between VMs reduces hardware costs, allows for a greater number of VMs per server host and improves application performance. XenServer includes dynamic memory controls to create a protocol for the optimal use of host memory without compromising server or VM performance.

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