XenCenter

Permanent URL http://community.citrix.com/xencenter

Citrix XenCenter is the Windows-native graphical user interface for managing Citrix XenServer.

Features include:

• Full virtual machine installation, configuration and lifecycle management.
• Access to VM consoles: VNC for installation-time, Xvnc for graphical displays on Linux, and Remote Desktop for Windows.
• vApps.

• Remote storage configuration, including NetApp and DellEqualLogic StorageLink, and HBA (Fibre Channel and hardware iSCSI) support.
• Host networking management, including VLANs and internal networks, bonded and dedicated NICs.

• XenSearch: searching, sorting, filtering, and grouping, using tags, folders and custom fields.

• Dynamic memory management.

• Complete resource pool management.
• High availability configuration.
• Active Directory integration, for user authentication and revocation.
• Role-based access control

• VM snapshot management.
• Full memory snapshots and VM rollback.

• Disaster Recovery.

• Workload Balancing, for pool-wide load balancing recommendations.
• Workload Reports, giving performance views over time and across the datacenter.
• Automated power management, to turn off idle servers.

• Performance metrics display.
• Long term metrics gathering and analysis.

The current version is XenCenter 6.1. It is capable of managing all server versions between XenServer 5.0 and 6.1.

XenCenter is available as a Windows Installer package (.msi) from any of these places:

  the XenServer product CDs, in the client_install directory;
  if you have an installed XenServer, navigate to the address of your server in your web browser;
  from http://www.citrix.com/xenserver/download (follow the link to "Get helpful resources").

If you want to try out XenCenter even before you have any XenServers to manage, you can load sample data into XenCenter as follows.

1. Click the Add New Server button on the toolbar
2. Press Tab until the focus is on the Cancel button
3. Press Alt plus a number from 1 to 6

XenCenter has plugin capabilities which allow you to add custom menu items or even whole tabs to the XenCenter window. You might do this as an ISV to integrate your own product with XenCenter, or as an end-user to integrate with your company's existing inventory management, for example.

The plugin specification and some tutorials can be found on the XenCenter Plugins page.

XenServer Support Forums
XenServer 6.0 Knowledge Center

Looking for a web-based alternative to XenCenter? Take a look at xvp, an open-source web interface for XenServer, developed at Durham University in the UK.