Well, the big launch of XenServer 5 has gone smoothly, and with it have arrived a flood of questions about how exactly the new High Availability functionality works.  I’ll use this post to explain the overall architecture of HA in XenServer 5, and also how some of the fault detection and failure planning works. Fundamentally, HA is about making sure important VMs are always running on a resource pool.

You won’t be surprised to hear that we spend a lot of time improving XenApp performance when running on XenServer. Although there are some good benchmark comparisons available (such as the Tolly Group report), I still get a lot of customers asking about what the “secret sauce” is. I sat down with George Dunlap, the lead XenServer performance engineer to chat about the very first optimisation we did back in XenServer 4.0 last year.

I thought I’d kick off my Citrix blog with a question I get pretty often from Linux enthusiasts: how to install unsupported Linux distributions on XenServer 4.1. The most common solution people find is to use the "Other Install Media" template, insert the distribution installation CD, and find that the mouse cursor doesn’t work when they boot into X11.