At some point the XenServer environments I deployed for cost reasons hit a wall — either the organization’s needs grew beyond what XenServer’s ecosystem could support cleanly, or a strategic decision to standardize on VMware made the migration necessary. Moving workloads between hypervisors isn’t trivial, but with the right approach it’s manageable. The Core Challenge: … Read more
Snapshots are the most misunderstood feature in virtualization. On XenServer, the confusion is compounded by the fact that snapshots look useful for backup purposes and are easy to take. Let me save you from the mistake. What a XenServer Snapshot Actually Is A snapshot in XenServer freezes the state of a VM’s virtual disk at … Read more
Connecting XenServer to iSCSI shared storage is more nuanced than the documentation implies. Most guides walk you through the happy path — discover the target, create the SR, done. They skip the operational details that determine whether your shared storage actually behaves reliably over time. Use a Dedicated Storage Network This one is non-negotiable. iSCSI … Read more
XenMotion — XenServer’s live migration capability — requires shared storage. If all your VMs live on local storage (the default after a fresh install), you can’t migrate them between hosts. Setting up a resource pool with shared storage correctly is the step that unlocks the platform’s high availability and flexibility features. Resource Pool Basics A … Read more
The pool master is XenServer’s single management control plane for a resource pool. All XenCenter connections, all xe CLI commands that operate across the pool, all pool-level configuration changes — they all route through the pool master. Understanding what happens when it fails, and how to recover, is essential knowledge before you put XenServer into … Read more
I’ve deployed both XenServer and VMware ESXi for small-to-medium businesses, sometimes switching between them for the same client as their needs evolved. The right choice depends on several factors that vendor marketing rarely addresses honestly. Where XenServer Wins Cost: XenServer’s free edition covers the core features needed by most SMB deployments — live migration (XenMotion), … Read more
In 2015, I was working with a mid-size client who needed to virtualize roughly 20 servers on a budget that made VMware’s licensing difficult to justify. They’d looked at Hyper-V but didn’t have strong Windows Server Datacenter licensing already in place. XenServer 6.5 was free (for the base edition), mature enough for production use, and … Read more