Release Notes for Citrix XenServer Project Boston Beta

This document provides important information about the Citrix XenServer Project Boston Beta Release.

Documentation may be updated or changed after the initial release. Citrix suggests regularly visiting the XenServer Project Boston Beta Program page on My Citrix to learn about updates. Customers will require a MyCitrix account to access this page. If you do not have an account, you can register on the My Citrix home page.

Release notes for Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) are available in the "Installing Windows VMs" and "Installing Linux VMs" chapters of the Citrix XenServer Project Boston Beta Virtual Machine Installation Guide.

Contents

Licensing

New Features

Installation and Upgrades

Known Issues and Errata

Documentation and Support

Licensing

Important: Advanced editions and higher of Citrix XenServer require a Citrix License Server (11.6 or higher) to run. To license these editions, you must configure Citrix Licensing and the licensing settings inside each XenServer host.

• An overview of licensing in XenServer, including required settings, is in the Citrix XenServer Project Boston Beta Installation Guide.
• For information about obtaining license files and installing a license server, go to the Licensing Your Product section on Citrix eDocs.

New Features

We’re pleased to announce availability of the XenServer "Project Boston" Beta. You can download it here. Below is an overview of what’s new in this major XenServer release.

Product simplification. We’ve done a number of things to make the product even easier to deploy and manage. These include:

• XenServer no longer requires Windows-based virtual machines for features such as StorageLink, Site Recovery, and Workload Balancing. In fact, for StorageLink and Site Recovery, no additional management infrastructure is required at all.
• Workload Balancing (and its Historical Reporting features) have been moved to a Linux-based virtual appliance for easy installation and management.
• The Linux supplemental pack has been removed, so there is only 1 base installation ISO. "Linux demo VM" functionality has been moved to a virtual appliance format so it can be easily imported into a host or resource pool. Download the Demo Linux Virtual Appliance from the XenServer Project Boston Beta Program page on My Citrix.

Architectural Changes

• The Boston release is based on the Xen 4.1 hypervisor.
• The Open vSwitch (OVS) is now the default network stack for the product. The OVS was first introduced in XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 as a post-install configuration option, and is the basis for the distributed virtual networking (DVS) features, NIC bonding improvements, and jumbo frames support. Improvements to DVS include a "fail-safe" option and various improvements based on customer feedback from XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1. Note that the legacy Linux bridging stack is still available via a post-install configuration option.
• General network performance has been improved, particularly aggregate host network throughput; internal measures vs. prior XenServer releases show gains of 70-100% in some instances.
• Support for hardware-assisted (SR-IOV) network performance optimizations has been improved, particularly for use with the NetScaler VPX and SDX products.

Tools for Self-Service and building Clouds

• The new Self Service Manager feature enables you to build self-service environments for "private clouds." (Note: Self-Service Manager beta is targeted for availability in approximately 2 weeks). Self-Service Manager includes support for both XenServer as well as VMware vSphere.
• Self-Service Manager is easy to deploy and manage via a simple virtual appliance and web-based UI. It offers multi-tenant support for creating VM "service catalogs" used by delegated administrators to deploy and manage their own applications and resources.
• Virtual Appliance support. Within XenCenter you can create multi-VM virtual appliances, with relationships between the VMs for use with HA and Site Recovery such as boot sequence. Virtual appliances can be easily imported and exported using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard.
• VMDK and VHD import functionality is integrated into XenCenter for interoperability with VMware VMDK and Microsoft VHD disk images.

Microsoft System Center integration

• Starting with the Boston release, you will have the option of managing XenServer hosts and VMs with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012. For more information refer to the Microsoft System Center 2012 beta page.
• System Center Operations Manager 2012 will be able to manage and monitor XenServer hosts and virtual machines.
• System Center integration is available with a special supplemental pack from Citrix, which is targeted for general availability when System Center 2012 ships later this year.

XenDesktop

• Boston is the first XenServer release to include HDX enhancements for optimized user experience with virtual desktops.
• With the Boston release, a physical GPU can be assigned to a VM so the applications running in the guest can leverage GPU instructions ("GPU pass-thru"). This provides significant TCO benefits for the XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro technology used for delivery of CAD and other graphical applications via virtual desktops. With GPU pass-thru, either a single GPU card or a GPU on a multi-GPU card can be assigned to virtual machines.

Guest OS support updates

• Formal guest support for Ubuntu 10.04.
• Updates for support of RHEL 5.6 and SLES 10 SP4.
• Experimental VM templates for Solaris and Ubuntu 10.10.
• RHEL 6 and Debian Squeeze are now fully supported (both are also supported with XenServer 5.6 Service Pack 2).

Other enhancements and improvements

• A "rolling pool upgrade" wizard is provided in XenCenter to enable more reliable upgrades from 5.6 and 5.6 Feature Pack 1.
• High Availability (HA) now supports NFS for storage of the heartbeat disk.
• Host RAM support has been increased to 1 TB.
• VM vCPU and vRAM support is increased e.g. up to 16 vCPUs and 128 GB RAM for Windows; increased Linux vCPU and vRAM support levels vary by distro.
• NIC bonding reliability is improved, and formal support for active/passive bonding has been added.
• XenCenter will be localized into Japanese and Simplified Chinese (these will be generally available a few months following the English release).

Noteworthy changes to existing features

• Lab Manager has been superseded by Self Service Manager. Lab Manager will continue to be supported with XenServer 5.x until September 2013 according to the lifecycle policy posted here.
• StorageLink: With the move from the Windows-based "StorageLink Gateway" to "integrated StorageLink", some StorageLink array support is being retired. Focus for integrated StorageLink support is being placed on arrays with standards-based SMI-S interfaces (e.g. EMC CLARiiON) and those which are widely used with XenServer (NetApp and Dell EqualLogic). Arrays whose StorageLink supportability is being retired will continue to be supported via the standard iSCSI and Hardware HBA Storage Repositories. StorageLink Gateway will continue to be supported with XenServer 5.x until September 2013 according to the lifecycle policy posted here. Note also that the new "rolling pool" upgrade takes care of upgrading from StorageLink Gateway, and performing validation for unsupported arrays.
• Site Recovery: Site Recovery is no longer based on StorageLink. This enables Disaster Recovery support for virtually any iSCSI or FC based array which has replication features, as well as third-party replication scenarios.

Installation and Upgrades

Upgrade to XenServer Project Boston Beta is possible from any version of XenServer 5.6 including 5.6, 5.6 Feature Pack 1, and 5.6 Service Pack 2.

Upgrading XenServer

Fresh Installation of XenServer Project Boston Beta

Known Issues and Errata

This section details known issues with this release and any workarounds that can be applied.

General

• This beta release of Project Boston is not compatible with Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS).
• A Virtual Appliance may enter a state where its allowed operations are not in sync with the power states of its constituent VMs, meaning that the appliance can not be started or shutdown via XenCenter. In this case, a workaround is to perform Virtual Appliance operations via the CLI. [CA-57614]
• On systems with large numbers of NICs and CPUs, some NIC drivers reserve excessive buffers which cause the installer to run low on memory, leading to unpredictable results when attempting to use PXE to install XenServer. For XenServer Project Boston Beta, the PXE command line should include dom0_max_vcpus=2 to limit the number of CPUs available to the installer. [CA-52988]
• Incompatibility between the pxelinux.0 file supplied with syslinux and mboot.c32 provided with XenServer may cause errors which prevents PXE installation of host. To avoid this ensure that you replace both the /boot/mboot.c32 and pxelinux.0 with the versions supplied in the XenServer main.iso:/boot/pxelinux directory. [CA-56995]
• When using Boot From SAN with multipath options, the rolling pool upgrade maybe unable to find the SAN volume. This will result in an error message of the form:
  

  [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
  "/dev/mapper/

  Users can work around this problem by manually adding device_mapper_multipath=enabled to the installer boot command line. [CA-58380]
• If all hosts in an HA-protected pool are powered off, and one slave is rebooted without access to the HA heartbeat storage repository, then the slave will not be manageable. To resolve this, power on the master host.[CA-49870]

Internationalization

• Non-ASCII characters, such as characters with accents, cannot be used in the host console. [CA-40845]
• The root password of the host installer must not contain non-ASCII characters. [CA-47461]

Hardware Compatibility

• The Integrated StorageLink Dell EqualLogic storage type is a preview in this beta release. It may not work with all models and firmware versions of Dell Equallogic arrays. [CA-58455]
• When using Rolling Pool Upgrade, systems which include the HP Smart Array G6 controllers model numbers P212, P410, P410i, P411, P812, P712m P711m may be unable to find the system disk. Currently there is no workaround for this issue. Users using these controllers should not attempt Rolling Pool Upgrade, though rebooting failed hosts will revert to the old installation. [CA-58379]
• Multipath Boot-from-SAN with QLogic iSCSI HBAs does not work in Project Boston Beta. Do not use the installer "multipath" option when installing to a LUN accessed via a QLogic iSCSI HBA. [CA-58511]
• There are known stability issues when running XenServer on the Nehalem range of Intel CPUs, specifically models Xeon E55xx and E56xx. Users can check which CPUs they have in XenCenter. Select a host, click the General tab and then expand the CPUs drop-down list. For more information and workarounds, see CTX127395. [CA-47915]
• When using GPU pass-thru, certain graphics cards, when assigned to a VM, may cause the VM to become unstable. If you experience any such problems, set the other-config:msitranslate parameter to 1 on the affected VM. [CA-55754]

Storage

• On Disaster Recovery failback, a recovered VM may fail to start if its storage was made inaccessible before failover. If this is the case, restart the affected host. [CA-58637]
• Legacy LVM SRs (SRs which support only raw VDIs and do not have a management volume) will not function correctly. On SR attach such SRs will be upgraded to a non-legacy SR.[CA-57162]
• If your resource pool has an existing connection to a CIFS ISO share, subsequent attempts to create a new ISO SR on that same share may fail. [CA-37251]
• Quiesced snapshots are not supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs. [CA-32734]
• If you attempt to include a shared storage device in the list of devices to be incorporated into a host's local SR (in an answerfile that is used to automate XenServer installation), the contents of the shared storage will be destroyed. [CA-41786]

Networking

• Adjusting Windows network settings via xenstore is not supported in this release. [CA-48279]
• When using NFS and UDP, occasional NFS failures can occur with a client side error message displaying "Socket operation on non-socket". This is more likely to happen when multiple file system access occurs on an NFS-mounted file system. Citrix recommends that users use TCP rather than UDP with NFS file systems. [CA-45037]
• Attempts to create a VLAN network will fail when one or more hosts in a pool are offline. To create a VLAN network, ensure all hosts are online. When Workload Balancing is enabled in your environment and hosts are offline, you can work around this limitation by doing one of the following: disable Workload Balancing for the pool and create the VLAN with all hosts powered on, or switch Workload Balancing to Maximum Performance mode, power on all the hosts, and create the VLAN. [CA-34992]
• DHCP lease renewal fails if the DHCP client and DHCP server are both Linux VMs on the same host. This does not affect Windows VMs. If you want to use dhcp3-server and dhcp3-client in Linux VMs which may be sharing the same host, you must disable checksum offload by issuing the command ethtool -K eth0 tx off on the DHCP server VM. [CA-40908]

XenCenter

• Modifying the font size or DPI on the computer on which XenCenter is running can result in the user interface displaying incorrectly. The default font size is 96 DPI; Windows Vista refers to this as "Default Scale" and Windows 7 as "100%". [CA-45514]

Guest OS Support

• The Ubuntu 10.04 kernel has a bug which affects SMP operation when running on a Xen hypervisor. This affects both 32 and 64 bit VMs. Customers should either refrain from creating Ubuntu 10.04 guests with multiple vCPUs, or update the guest kernel. For more information see CTX129472. [CA-57168]
• On Windows Vista guests, the IP addresses of network interfaces are not reported. This is due to a limitation of WMI on Windows Vista. Upgrading to Windows Vista Service Pack1 will resolve this issue. [CA-55952]
• Ubuntu guests can crash due to a bug in the Ubuntu kernel. [CA-56129]
• Windows guests under heavy load, may fail to start to the guest agent. Due to this, in XenCenter, the Virtualization State in the Properties page displays "Tools not installed" and related messages are displayed in the Windows system event log. The workaround is to manually start the Windows guest agent service with the command net start xensvc. [CA-56951]
• Ubuntu 10.04 guests may fail to suspend and report "PM: Device serial8250 failed to suspend late: error -22". [CA-57662]
• A large amount of CPU process time can be taken by the Debian Squeeze Graphical Desktop Environment which uses the Gnome Display Manager daemon. Citrix strongly advises that customers do not to install the Gnome Display Manager gdm3 process, or uninstall it if already installed. [CA-48630]
• Setting the dynamic memory minimum for a VM too low may result in poor performance or stability problems when the VM is starting. If you encounter these problems, Citrix recommends raising the VM dynamic memory minimum value. [CA-37461], [CA-39017]
• A guest operating system which does not support Dynamic Memory Control will not display an error message even if you attempt to configure Dynamic Memory Control on the guest. [CA-34753]
• When running greater than 50 virtual machines per XenServer host, the steps in CTX126531 should be followed to reconfigure Dom0 memory settings. [CA-48485]

Documentation and Support

Finding Documentation

For the most up-to-date product documentation for every Citrix product, visit the Citrix Product Documentation links page or, for many products, Citrix eDocs.

For licensing documentation, go to the Licensing Your Product section on Citrix eDocs.

Getting Support

Citrix provides technical support primarily through Citrix Solutions Advisors. Contact your supplier for first-line support, or use Citrix Online Technical Support to find the nearest Citrix Solutions Advisor.

Citrix offers online technical support services on the Citrix Support Web Site. This site includes links to downloads, the Citrix Knowledge Center, Citrix Consulting Services, and other useful resources.

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