Intel S3420GP Installation Guide

Citrix* XenServer* 5.5.0 Installation Guide -
Intel® Server Board S3420GP
7
Linux* guests have been refreshed to their latest upstream versions, including the bundled XenServer*
kernels which fixes stability issues not addressed in the upstream releases.
Business Continuity
XenServer* supports several features to maximize service uptime in the event of infrastructure failure.
These include:
 Redundant storage (via multipath) and network (via NIC bonding) heartbeats eliminate single
points of network failure and permit reliable detection of genuine host failure.
 Generate e-mail and XenCenter* alerts on host failures.
 Integrated disaster recovery to enable regular backups of virtual machine metadata. Peer-to-peer
"self-healing" architecture ensures there is no single point of management failure.
 When combined with SAN storage replication, this provides an efficient way to migrate entire
resource pools to another physical site and continue running services with little interruption. It also
permits the use of storage repositories, including the metadata for VMs installed on them, which
permits a "transportable VM" model across resource pools.
 iSCSI multipath support, configurable from the XenCenter* GUI. This ensures redundant storage
links to an iSCSI SR and permits link failures without loss of service.
 Improved network reliability by support active/active NIC aggregation. Existing active/passive NIC
bonds on older installations are upgraded to aggregation mode for active/active usage, permitting
full use of all available bandwidth while still maintaining redundant links.
 Multiple management network interfaces can be defined in the control domain, and individual
networks can be dedicated for use by network storage, e.g., iSCSI or NFS. This improves isolation
between VMs and storage infrastructure traffic.
With the addition of Citrix* Essentials* for XenServer*, resource pools can be configured for
automated high-availability. This addresses individual host failures by restarting VMs running on a host
onto the next available machine in the resource pool. Additional reliability features in Citrix Essentials
include:
 The ability to set VM restart priorities individually to control the order services are restarted in a
host failure.
 Dynamic failure planning algorithms allow administrators to see how many hosts failures can be
tolerated without compromising services.
One of the most common reasons for system failure is misconfiguration by an operator. Citrix
Essentials for XenServer now provides e-mail and XenCenter alerting for potentially dangerous
configurations, for example, when VM performance will be degraded or a resource pool is
overcommitted with respect to high availability.
Storage and Provisioning
Diskless virtual machines running on Citrix* Provisioning Server* now support more advanced PXE
configurations, such as DHCP Proxy ARP responses or wide-area DHCP relays. Support for PXE servers
such as Altiris* and Windows Deployment Services* (WDS) is improved. There is support in XenServer*
5.5.0 for VM storage snapshots for backup enablement, and CLI-only support for quiesced, fully
consistent VM storage snapshots for Windows* VMs.

Intel S3420GP Specifications

General

Brand	Intel
Model	S3420GP
Category	Server Board
Language	English