Wasn't too sure where to post this and I'm sure the team are already aware of XS8.0 and whats on the horizon but for everyone else here's the announcement from Citrix:

https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2018/10/03/major-platform-changes-to-xenserver-what-you-need-to-know/

"The new 8.0 release includes new platform components, most notably changes to the linux kernel. The changes to the linux kernel will require hardware vendors to re-certify their servers, NICs and HBAs against this new platform; therefore, changes to the HCL should be expected."

Updated one host without issue and currently testing.

@Marc-pezin

Wow.. fab news .. well done all!

Folks... was at Citrix event today and the morning was a talk by LoginVSI looking at the impact of the latest security patches for Intel CPU's and the performance impact server on EUC work loads and server scalebility on the Hypervisors. According to the presenter all the Hypervisors (Hyper-V, VMware ESX and XenServer) that they were testing were seeing approx 20-25% decrease in performance when using Intel based systems. What I found interesting was VMware has developed a new scheduler, SCAv2 to help reduce the impact although no numbers where mentioned. There was no mention of anything of th sort for XenServer or HyperV.

https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/05/new-scheduler-option-for-vsphere-6-7-u2.html

According to that blog post .. the impact using the SCAv2 was reduced to 11%.

@olivierlambert
(1) Missing the ZFS packages from the base install.
(2) Needed a "yum clean all" to be able to install zfs packages.
(3) Needed to manually import the ZFS zpool

I'm a noob with zfs so had to work out how to import an existing zpool and once thats done it can be repaired/mounted.

@olivierlambert .. Thanks for the headsup that XS8.0 has landed .. and now we must wait for XCP-NG 8 ... patiently.. hopefully not too long

So the core changes:
Kernel version: Linux 4.19
Xen hypervisor version: 4.11
Control domain operating system version: CentOS 7.5
Guest UEFI boot
Virtual disk images larger than 2 TiB on GFS2 SR
Disk and memory snapshots for vGPU-enabled VM

I'm concerned that the Citrix XS8.0 docs state support for "legacy" cpu's has been dropped but those same legacy CPUs are listed as supported on the HCL.

The following processors are now supported in Citrix Hypervisor 8.0:

Xeon 82xx/62xx/52xx/42xx/32xx CascadeLake-SP

The following legacy processors are no longer supported in Citrix Hypervisor 8.0:

Opteron 13xx Budapest
Opteron 23xx/83xx Barcelona
Opteron 23xx/83xx Shanghai
Opteron 24xx/84xx Istanbul
Opteron 41xx Lisbon
Opteron 61xx Magny Cours
Xeon 53xx Clovertown
Xeon 54xx Harpertown
Xeon 55xx Nehalem
Xeon 56xx Westmere-EP
Xeon 65xx/75xx Nehalem-EX
Xeon 73xx Tigerton
Xeon 74xx Dunnington

The XS HCL which is showing it supports the following intel cpus

The following legacy drivers will be deprecated:
qla4xxx
qla3xxx
netxen_nic
qlge
qlcnic

Citrix continues to support them in this release but they will be removed in a future Current Release.

Can some one clarify or am I just misreading the docs ? If they've dropped support for cpu's such as the Xeon 56XX Westmere in XS8.0 can XCP-NG add those back in ? Both my XCP-NG hosts are running Intel Xeon 56XX CPU's and I know a lot of others are as well.

The

A Citrix Consultant/Engineer and been playing with XenServer since 2012. Work a lot with XenApp/XD on Vmware in production environments but my home lab has always been XS.

@stormi

Update both hosts from 7.5 to 7.6 Beta via yum

PVS accelerator looks to have survived the update.

Only bug so far .. XCP-Centre from the 7.6 servers is v7.5.0.

@Arvee

Well done.. the S7150x2 should be a a fair bit faster than the K2/K1 grid cards. For CAD/Architectural workloads we found it as fast as Nvidia M60 and sometimes faster .. using the same GPU profile types.

@Marc-pezin

Wow.. fab news .. well done all!

@olivierlambert said in New XCP-ng developers:

@dthenot and @maevaram

Congrats to @dthenot and @maevaram, hope you both have a blast in your roles and good luck!

@olivierlambert

Its all about XA/XD I'm afraid but it does state year end 2019 for the next LTSR.

https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2019/09/19/whats-new-with-citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops-september-2019/

"Long-Term Service Release News

For those of you on 7.15 LTSR — one of our most popular releases — we have some exciting news about our next LTSR availability. We’re planning our next LTSR for year-end."

@olivierlambert

Citrix, have recently announced via blog post that the next reported XenApp/XenDesktop LTSR release is due end Q4 2019 so its possible CH8.1 might show up at the same time.

@LonnieTC , as @nikade stated you can sign up and get a 90/180 day trail for XA/XD and all you'll need is a mycitrix account to do so and rinse and repeat for a POC or Lab.

Yep.. Its called XenApp/Xendesktop aka Citrix Apps and Desktops, MS RDSH and UDS Enterprise all are fine on XCP_NG ... although I only used XA/XD/RDSH on XCP-ng.

@Arvee

We were always deploying using Xendesktop/XenApp - performance once configured correctly - GPO's HDX policies was usually very good - apps workloads Autocad, Revit and Inventor Pro. No longer have access to all the tweaks.

Not sure how you'd tune and tweak RDP to improve the performance.

@Arvee

Well done.. the S7150x2 should be a a fair bit faster than the K2/K1 grid cards. For CAD/Architectural workloads we found it as fast as Nvidia M60 and sometimes faster .. using the same GPU profile types.

@olivierlambert

Good to know that they're already working on it for Xen. Surprised that none of the Citrix bod's at the event mentioned it. Looks like the best way to do get around the massive performance hit without switching to AMD !

Folks... was at Citrix event today and the morning was a talk by LoginVSI looking at the impact of the latest security patches for Intel CPU's and the performance impact server on EUC work loads and server scalebility on the Hypervisors. According to the presenter all the Hypervisors (Hyper-V, VMware ESX and XenServer) that they were testing were seeing approx 20-25% decrease in performance when using Intel based systems. What I found interesting was VMware has developed a new scheduler, SCAv2 to help reduce the impact although no numbers where mentioned. There was no mention of anything of th sort for XenServer or HyperV.

https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/05/new-scheduler-option-for-vsphere-6-7-u2.html

According to that blog post .. the impact using the SCAv2 was reduced to 11%.