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My first experiences with Citrix XenClient Hypervisor
June 4, 2010
Since Citrix first client hypervisor is public available I decided to directly install it to my machine. Whoops…XenClient needs formatting your complete harddisk! Allright, I’ll go for it, show me what you can and I agree to start the installation process. After the installation completed there is an excellent graphical and easy to use interface where you can create and manage your Virtual Machines. Also network connectivity, including wireless configuration, can be set at the hypervisor level for all of your VM’s.
So I created one Windows XP 32bits VM and a Windows 7 64bits VM. I know that 64bits is not supported but I wanted to see what is happening. Both Operating Systems can be installed well and both are functioning. For better integration with the XenClient Hypervisor from the VM’s it is neccessary to install XenClient Tools. On Windows XP there are some troubles with driver installation and after a few restarts it is working. On Windows 7 64bits it is not possible to install XenClient Tools and that is probably the reason why 64bits Operating Systems are not supported. They simple don’t have XenClient Tools for 64bits yet.
Installing Windows 7 32bits with XenClient Tools works fine. Performance is great and even 3D graphic movies can be played like if it’s locally running without any hypervisor. After one week working with it I must say that this is really cool stuff. I can switch between multiple virtual Operating Systems by simple using the CTRL-keys and the menubar. But the most important thing is that all of my installed Operating Systems are only files, for example .vhd files. This gives me the opportunity to easily switch my laptop hardware with another that simplifies the requirements and keep using my current laptop installation without reinstalling or losing anything, isn’t that nice?
But the first Citrix XenClient Hypervisor is still a Release Candidate and that brings some disadvantages too. Except that you can only assing 3GB of memory to a Virtual Machine the two most restrictions for me is that the beamer is not functioning as usual and that VMware Workstation cannot be installed. I know that it is all virtual and that we could expect this before. For now, with two VMware ThinApp courses next week, it is time to spend my weekend reinstalling my laptop back to where it came from. Don’t forget…Citrix XenClient is promising technology for the near future!
Topics: Citrix | 2 Comments »
June 4th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Very well summarized: “promising, but not quite there yet”. For me, what stops me from using it right now:
1) No 64 bit support (I guess it will be a matter of (short) time to fix this one);
2) No non-Intel graphics card support: I know this one will require a lot of time, but until they do it, it will be a useless product for many of us;
3) Lack of import/export: short than swapping your HDD out and into a new machine, you can’t export and import your VMs…
But, it *IS* indeed a very promising product…
June 6th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
There needs to be much more documentation on the Citrix website regarding each and every option. While this is an “exploratory” technology, I shouldn’t have to guess how things are handled. As Fernando mentioned “you can swap your HDD” Actually you can’t (easily), the XenClient installation is locked to the hardware GUID and requires a password to boot (only visible during a console boot). Also, the requirement for DHCP on the LAN is a show stopper for me, but the fact they are using NetworkManager for that may be a bigger hurdle.
Citrix tends to rename everything (product name AND option variables) so often that searches are ineffective.