CITRIX announces XenServer 5.6 editions in 4 flavours.

During Citrix Synergy a lot of new products and features have been announced amongst others the new XenServer 5.6 version. Over the last days more details have become available:

Citrix Essentials for XenServer will no longer be available as of version 5.6, the new XenServer edition will be available in four flavours: free, advanced, enterprise and platinum. Which aligns the XenServer product branding with the others like XenApp and XenDesktop.

Important changes include:

Dynamic Memory: a technology that offers overcommitting functionality while the functionality remains within a range of predefined limits
Automated Workload Balancing: offers the possibility to reduce power consumption by consolidating workloads and powering off unused hosts
Host Power Management: providing support for WOL and vendor-specific implementations (like HP & Dell)
Role-Based Administration: granual access control and execution rights within XenCenter
StorageLink Site Recovery: storage replication enabling recovery of a virtual infrastructure on a secondary site
Additional OS support: RHEL, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4
Support for OVF import/export in XenCenter

XenServer 5.6 will probably be available for download as of May 28th, 2010 in the following versions.

Feature		Free	Advanced	Enterprise	Platinum
Free virtual infrastructure	XenServer hypervisor
	XenMotion® live migration
	VM Disk Snapshot and Revert
	XenCenter Management
	Resilient distributed management architecture
	XenConvert
Advanced management and automation	High availability
	Memory optimization
	Performance alterting and reporting
	Automated workload balancing
	Host power management
	Provisioning services (virtual)
	Role-based administration
	Live memory snapshots and reverts
	Citrix® StorageLink™
	Lifecycle management
	Provisioning services (physical)
	Site recovery
	Indication - Cost per server (to be confirmed in the following days). All prices excluding taxes	Free	$1,000	$2,500	$5,000