Hello, Citrix community!

As we make our way through the last quarter of the year, I wanted to remind the Citrix community of the significant progress the XenServer team has achieved over the last 18 months to make XenServer the awesome hypervisor that it is today!

Have you been hosting your application and desktop virtualization environments on an older version of XenServer? Are you new to XenServer? In either case, you’ll be excited about the new features we’ve unveiled in the latest releases. Let’s take a look!​

For starters, we’ve instrumented automated updates and live patching capabilities that streamline the platform upgrade process, enabling multiple fixes to be installed and applied with a single reboot and, in many cases, with no reboot whatsoever. Together, these features allow our customers to keep their virtual environments up-to-date with minimal to no downtime.

Citrix — a leader in the secure delivery of apps, desktops, and data to any device, over any network — has teamed with our business partner, Bitdefender, a leader in IT Security solutions, to introduce a revolutionary approach to securing virtual workloads. Using XenServer’s DirectInspect APIs, Bitdefender’s Hypervisor Introspection (HVI) engine scans raw memory at the hypervisor layer to detect, protect and remediate against the most sophisticated attacks on an IT environment. This unique approach provides a highly-effective line of defense against viruses, malware, ransomware, and even root kit exploits. What’s more, this advanced security technique complements security mechanisms already in place to further strengthen protection of critical IT environments.

From a performance standpoint, implementing a local caching mechanism within the XenServer hypervisor provides a significant boost in virtual desktop performance, particularly during boot storms. By caching requests for OS image contents in local resources (i.e., memory and storage), XenServer works with Provisioning Services to stream image contents directly to virtual desktops, dramatically reducing resource utilization (network and CPU) while enhancing user productivity.

With expanded support for virtual graphics, you can leverage your investment in hardware from the major graphics vendors and enable GPU-accelerated virtual desktops that effectively support graphics-intensive workloads, a use case that is becoming increasingly popular with each new XenServer deployment.

Designing, developing and delivering features that bring out the best in Citrix virtualization technologies — that’s always been our focus. And it is the driving force behind all of our innovation efforts.

Ready to take XenServer for a spin? Find out all about the latest and greatest features here.