XenServer Administration Handbook

Chapter 13. Hardware Maintenance

Once deployed, it’s not uncommon for XenServer installations to run without incident for years. Often, it’s a hardware issue or growth in requirements that prompts administrators to look at their XenServer infrastructure. In this chapter, we’ll be covering practices for everything related to hardware maintenance, be it storage, network, or computer.

Upgrades, Support, and Hardware

A chapter on hardware wouldn’t be complete without some discussion of how the XenServer hardware compatibility list (HCL) works. As mentioned in Chapter 4, the XenServer HCL is located at http://hcl.xenserver.org. A component gets added to the HCL when the hardware vendor and Citrix agree that they will jointly accept user support calls for a given version of XenServer on that hardware.

While in a perfect world, all hardware would be tested and certified for new versions, the reality is that often, hardware vendors wish to no longer certify XenServer for legacy or end-of-life hardware. This doesn’t mean XenServer won’t function on older hardware, but if you want to maintain a “supported platform” in the eyes of Citrix and your hardware vendor, you may find that upgrading XenServer past a certain version will place you into “unsupported” territory.

As a XenServer administrator, it’s important to pay attention to the HCL as you plan out your upgrades. Newer hardware may not have been certified for older versions of XenServer, and older hardware may no longer be ...