Today, Citrix announced the release of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 Beta “Project Cowley”.

What’s new in the XenServer Beta Release?
Quite a lot, really – the Beta Program showcases a number of new features and ongoing improvements, including:

• Distributed Virtual Switching Integrated, Open vSwitch technology provides distributed fine-grained networking configuration and control policies – increasing visibility into XenServer virtual networks and providing a centralized Controller for administration of multiple vSwitches and cross-host internal networks. The open vSwitch also includes support for jumbo frames configuration on storage networks.
• VM Protection and Recovery Policy based snapshotting and archiving of selected VMs across a XenServer resource pool enables administrators to schedule and recover when needed from the XenCenter management console.
• Web Self-Service Portal Allows XenServer administrators to delegate VM rights to select individuals and enables users to request and access VMs via a simple to use web-based portal.
• XenDesktop performance improvements Further enhances the best-in-class performance for XenDesktop on XenServer including local storage caching for better TCO and increased scalability via performance tuning in the control domain (requires a future version of XenDesktop to use).
• Enhanced XenCenter Including StorageLink configuration entirely within XenCenter, workload reporting for VM utilization and chargeback.
• Boot from SAN with multi-pathing support Boot XenServer hosts with Fibre Channel and iSCSI HBAs from a SAN, with multi-pathing support.
• HA Restart Priority Configure HA policies to restart specific VM(s) first, such as StorageLink Gateway VMs or the Distributed vSwitch Controller VM.
• Enhanced guest OS support for Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, RHEL 6.0 (RTM), CentOS 6.0 (RTM), Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RTM), Debian Squeeze (32 and 64-bit), and SLES 11 SP1. Generic RHEL 5.x support..RHEL / CentOS / Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0- 5.5 support with a generic “RHEL 5” template.

To learn more and participate in the beta program click here