Citrix XenServer 5.6 Beta aka “Project Midnight Ride” now available for download.

What’s new in XenServer and Essentials for XenServer 5.6?
Quite a lot, really. XenServer 5.6 Beta includes a number of new features and ongoing improvements, including:

• Granular Role-based Access Controls. Administrative users can be assigned one of several roles, which govern the actions they are able to complete from XenCenter and the command-line interface (CLI).
• Administrative Logging and Audit. Administrative changes made from XenCenter or the CLI are logged and available in the Workload Reports in XenCenter.
• Dynamic Memory Control. This feature can increase the number of VMs per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing VMs to be compressed so that additional VMs can boot on the host.
• Enhanced VM Snapshots. It is now possible to create full VM snapshots including the disk and memory state.  Virtual machines can be easily rolled back to prior snapshot states with a “revert to snapshot” option.
• Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management. Workload balancing (WLB) recommendations can be applied automatically without administrative intervention.  Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others.
• StorageLink Site Recovery. Enhanced integration with storage-level replication enables recovery of an entire virtual infrastructure at a secondary disaster recovery site.
• Citrix License Server integration. Essentials for XenServer features are now activated using a license applied to a Citrix Licensing Server. 
  

 

Check out the XenServer 5.6 Beta program page here

Click here to download via mycitrix.com ( requires a valid mycitrix.com account )