Earlier this year, Aaron Delp helped out all the ESX engineers out there have a better understanding of Microsoft Hyper-V from an ESX standpoint. Aaron has put together another article along the same lines, only this time Citrix XenServer is the focus instead of Hyper-V.

Here is a subset of bullet points (keep in mind that a lot of this information is based on XenServer 4.1 - XenServer 5.0 is out now):

• 6 physical NICS in a server
• XenServer supports Live Migration (think VMotion)
• XenCenter is the management GUI. It provides the management GUI similar to Virtual Center but is a client product that can be loaded on any server, client, etc
• Requires a 64 bit proc to run. Supports up to 32 cores and 128GB
• Sizing of XenServer -> XenServer runs on first core (plan on it using the whole core), Xen will take an average of 580MB - 880MB (128MB at core and 200-742MB for ring 0) for XenServer,16GB for OS, one NIC for “service console”
• A “farm” of servers are called a resource pool. This pool can have up to 16 hosts. One server is the master and the rest are members (think PDC/BDC model in the pre-Active Directory days). The Master holds the configuration for the entire resource pool and has the only writable copy. Member servers are updated every minute on configuration changes
• The pool holds the configuration of all servers. Networking must be similar but not exactly the same (although it is recommended). Network adapters must be in the same order, on the same network, and have the same speed.
• If removing a host from a pool and VM’s are on the local storage, they will be DESTROYED! Best practice when inserting a machine into a pool is to remove all local virtual machine storage

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