Citrix Xenserver Installation Guide

This illustrated article will guide you through how to plan and execute a citrix xenserver installation. This guide is based on installing Citrix Xenserver 5.5 Advanced edition.

What is Citrix xenserver?

Around a year ago citrix bought out xensource and rebranded it as citrix xenserver and also improved the software with there own improvements. Citrix xenserver is a free virtualization solution for creating

a network of virtual machines on one server.

Why should I use Citrix Xenserver?

I think the answer is simple, to save money on buying hardware and also running costs such as electricity and hardware maintenance. For example, at my work we have 2 environments test and live.  All of our applications / websites are developed in our test environment before being put live.  Our test servers generally tend to run on older hardware which are highly likely to fail soon.  So we bought 2 top of the range HP servers and moved all of our test environment servers (30 Servers) to run on these 2 servers. Full system backups / clones of the servers are now much more reliable since installing citrix xenserver,  Take a look at our "Tips and Tricks For Citrix Xenserver" guide on this site.  To learn about more advance features of xenserver take a look below after the installation guide.

Citrix Xenserver Requirements / Guide lines

Your system must meet certain minimum requirements before you are able to install citrix xenserver.  Your processor must be 64bit 1.5Ghz (we recommend multiprocessors if possible) with virtualization support or Intel VT, With some computers virtualization or Intel VT is disabled in the system bios as default.  Go in to the bios and check this setting.  Minimum of 1 gb of RAM.  The install of citrix xenserver takes up roughly 200mb, but the minimum disk space you can have is 16gig, you will also need to think about how much disk space each of your virtual machines will take up. You may also check the system requirements on the official citrix website here

Installing Citrix Xenserver

Before installing Citrix xenserver you might want to check out our “Advanced Deployment Tips For Citrix Xenserver instalations” section below the install guide before you get started. Don’t panic the installation of citrix xenserver is very easy.  First you need to download the ISO so you can create a bootable CD Download the files here

  There are 2 CDs, if you are going to run only windows virtual machines only download the 1st disk ISO.  If you plan to run linux machines you will need to download the 2nd disk ISO as well. Burn the ISO to a CD-ROM.  Now put the CD-ROM in to your server and boot to it.  With some computers you might need to change the boot priority within the BIOS. When you boot to the CD you will get the citrix xenserver install screen shown below.  (Pic1) Simply hit enter to start the installation.

(Pic1)

(Pic2) On the next screen select what keyboard layout you have and hit enter. 

(Pic2)

On the next screen select "Install or upgrade xenserver Host"  (Pic3) Now you will be prompted that the xenserver installation will wipe your disks, make sure theres no data on there that you will need, select ok and hit enter.

(Pic3)

Accept the license agreement and hit enter. (Pic4) If you get the below error this is because virtualization or Intel VT has not been enabled in your bios.  You can either continue with the citrix xenserver installation by selecting ok and then enable virtualization or Intel VT when the installation has finished. Or you can click on back, exit the installation to enable virtualization / Intel VT and start the install again, either way doesn’t matter.

(Pic4)

(Pic5) The next screen will ask you where you are installing citrix xenserver from,  Select local media then hit enter. 

(Pic5)

(Pic6) Here you get prompted to install the linux pack.  If you are running only windows virtual machines and dont plan to run linux virtual machines select no.  If you plan to use linux virtual machines select yes.

(Pic6)

(Pic7) Verify media, I always skip this and have never had a problem, if you want to run this it might take a long time (So I have been told) Select skip or verify

(Pic7)

(Pic8) Set the citrix xenserver password. Its very important that you remember this password, if you forget it you wont be able to administer your server / virtual machines. After you have entered a password click on ok.

(Pic8)

(Pic9) Enter the servers IP address.  As this is a server I guess you want to give it a static IP Address?? Enter the ip address and select ok.

(Pic9)

(Pic10) Enter the servers host name and enter up to 3 dns servers. Then select ok

(Pic10)

The citrix xenserver installation will now run and complete.  The server will reboot and load citrix xenserver, For a guide on how to connect to and configure your citrix xenserver take a look at our "Configuring Citrix Xen Server Guide"

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What Do I Need To Do After Installing Citrix Xenserver ?

This is detailed in another guide on this site, But here is a rough idea what you need to do

-Install Citrix Xencentre to connect to the citrix xenserver

-Setup the networking on your citrix xenserver

-Add the license to your citrix xenserver

-Create virtual machines on your citrix xenserver, you can either create new virtual machines or you can import your existing physical machines

-Finally monitor and backup your citrix xenserver virtual machines

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Advanced Installation Deployment Tips For Citrix Xenserver

I have personally build and configured lots of citrix xenservers and I have picked up a few deployment tips for you.

-Make sure you add enough disk space to your citrix xenserver, plan ahead, there is no easy way to add extra disk space to your xenserver after the initial install.

-Personally I use raid 5 with my xenservers, this reason for this is redundancy, if a disk was to fail the server would still run as the online spare will kick in and replace the faulty drive.  The speed of the disks will also be faster in raid 5 than in any other configuration.

-Networking, In my environment we use 2 x network connections for each part of the network we want our virtual machines to run on. For example 2 x connections for LAN, 2 x connections for management, 2 x connections for DMZ.  Again plan ahead, after the initial install if you add more network cards to the server the OS wont pick them up.  I believe there is a way to make the xenserver pick them up but I haven’t managed to get it working yet.

-Always bond 2 nics together, this way if one of the nics fail the other connected nic will take over.  If possible create a bond with 2 nics which are from different nic cards.  This way you are protected from nic hardware failure.

-Memory isnt really an issue, you can install 4gig to start with, then add more memory as and when needed, the OS will pick up the extra memory no problem.

-Upgrade the system firmware on the machines you wish to run citrix xenserver, Make sure you upgrade the BIOS, Storage controller, network.  This could help performance and help avoid system crashes.

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Advanced Features Of Citrix Xenserver - Listed below are the features of citrix xenserver

-Quick and easy installation of citrix xenserver means you could be up and running within 20 minutes

-Support for 32 virtual processors (Note a quad core CPU counts as 4 processors) and 128gig of RAM

-Support for multiple storage repository’s, Local, ISCSI, SCSI over TCP/IP, NFS.

-Take snapshots (Images) of your servers on the fly.

-Run your citrix xenserver in a clustered environment using citrix xenmotion (Citrix xenserver enterprise needed, and you need to pay for this version ) Move a live server from one server to another in under a second and no outage.

-Advanced network features such as, Load balancing, fault tolerance, assign VLANS, create local network adaptors that are only available to local virtual machines.  Additional QOS control.

-Easy backup and restore your citrix xenserver virtual machines.

-Supports all versions of windows that are version windows 2000 or newer.  Supports all versions of Linux