Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Citrix Product Documentation | docs.citrix.com June 9, 2020 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Contents Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Current Release 3 What’s new 4 Fixed issues 11 Known issues 13 Deprecation 18 System requirements 24 Configuration limits 28 Guest operating system support 33 Quick start 37 Technical overview 59 Technical FAQs 66 Licensing 83 Install 91 Installation and deployment scenarios 100 Upgrade from an existing version 106 Update your hosts 115 Troubleshoot the installation 127 Boot from SAN environments 128 Network boot installations 131 Host partition layout 137 Install on small devices 138 Hosts and resource pools 139 Clustered pools 152 © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Manage users 157 Role-based access control 165 RBAC roles and permissions 166 Use RBAC with the CLI 177 Networking 182 Manage networking 198 Troubleshoot networking 221 Storage 226 Storage repository formats 231 Thin provisioned shared GFS2 block storage 248 Manage storage repositories 255 Storage multipathing 267 IntelliCache 269 Storage read caching 274 PVS-Accelerator 277 Graphics overview 284 Prepare host for graphics 289 Create vGPU enabled VMs 299 Memory usage 305 Monitor and manage your deployment 307 Manage virtual machines 330 Windows VMs 335 Linux VMs 355 VM memory 364 © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 3 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Migrate VMs 370 Import and export VMs 374 Bromium Secure Platform 391 Container management 392 vApps 400 Demo Linux virtual appliance 404 Advanced notes for virtual machines 406 Enable VNC for Linux VMs 415 Troubleshoot VM problems 427 High availability 434 Disaster recovery and backup 441 Enable Disaster Recovery 444 vApps 449 Back up and restore hosts and VMs 450 VM snapshots 455 Cope with machine failures 461 Troubleshooting 465 Measured Boot Supplemental Pack 469 Workload Balancing 472 Get started with Workload Balancing 475 Administer the Workload Balancing virtual appliance 484 Certificates for Workload Balancing 553 Convert VMware workloads 561 vSwitch and Controller 577 © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Manage vSwitch 582 Virtual network visibility and control 588 Administer and maintain the vSwitch Controller 606 Commands 610 Troubleshoot vSwitch Controller issues 615 Command-line interface 618 SDKs and APIs 747 Data Governance 748 © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Current Release May 27, 2020 The technology you trust from XenServer, the high-performance hypervisor optimized for virtual app and desktop workloads and based on the Xen Project hypervisor, is now Citrix Hypervisor. Latest release Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 is the latest Current Release version of Citrix Hypervisor and this documentation reflects features and configurations in this latest release. To learn about the new features in Citrix Hypervisor 8.1, see What’s New. Earlier releases For documentation on supported previous releases, see: • Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 CR • XenServer 7.1 LTSR • XenServer 7.0 Documentation for Citrix Hypervisor and XenServer releases that are no longer supported is archived in the Legacy Documentation area. The Citrix Hypervisor product lifecycle strategy for Current Releases and Long Term Service Releases is described in Lifecycle Milestones for Citrix Hypervisor. About Citrix Hypervisor Citrix Hypervisor is the complete server virtualization platform from Citrix. The Citrix Hypervisor pack- age contains all you need to create and manage a deployment of virtual x86 computers running on Xen, the open-source paravirtualizing hypervisor with near-native performance. Citrix Hypervisor is optimized for both Windows and Linux virtual servers. Citrix Hypervisor runs directly on server hardware without requiring an underlying operating system, which results in an efficient and scalable system. Citrix Hypervisor works by abstracting elements from the physical machine (such as hard drives, resources, and ports) and allocating them to the virtual machines running on it. A virtual machine (VM) is a computer composed entirely of software that can run its own operating sys- tem and applications as if it were a physical computer. A VM behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains its own virtual (software-based) CPU, RAM, hard disk, and NIC. © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 6 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Citrix Hypervisor lets you create VMs, take VM disk snapshots, and manage VM workloads. For a comprehensive list of major Citrix Hypervisor features, visit https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix- hypervisor. XenCenter XenCenter is a Windows GUI client that provides a rich user experience when managing multiple Citrix Hypervisor servers and resource pools, and the virtual infrastructure associated with them. For more information, see the XenCenter documentation. What’s new April 29, 2020 About this release The technology you trust from XenServer, the high-performance hypervisor optimized for virtual app and desktop workloads and based on the Xen Project hypervisor, is now Citrix Hypervisor. Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 is a Current Release (CR). The Current Release model allows customers to con- sume new features at the earliest possible juncture. A Current Release contrasts with the Long Term Service Release (XenServer 7.1 LTSR), which guarantees stability in terms of the feature set. Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 is available in the following editions: • Premium Edition (previously Enterprise Edition) • Standard Edition • Express Edition (previously Free Edition) For information about the features available in each edition, see the Citrix Hypervisor Feature Matrix. New features and improvements in Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 introduces enhanced features and functionality for application, desktop, and server virtualization use cases. All Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 features are available to all licensed Citrix Vir- tual Apps and Desktops (formerly XenApp and XenDesktop) customers. © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Guest UEFI boot and Secure Boot Citrix Hypervisor enables VMs running Windows 10 (64-bit), Windows Server 2016 (64-bit), or Windows Server 2019 (64-bit) to boot in UEFI mode. UEFI boot provides a richer interface for the guest operating systems to interact with the hardware, which can significantly reduce Windows VM boot times. For these Windows operating systems, Citrix Hypervisor also supports Windows Secure Boot. Secure Boot prevents unsigned, incorrectly signed or modified binaries from being executed during boot. Secure Boot also reduces the risk that malware in the guest can manipulate the boot files or run during the boot process. For more information, see Windows VMs Note: Guest UEFI boot was provided in Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 as an experimental feature. If you created UEFI boot VMs with Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 you cannot migrate them to Citrix Hypervisor 8.1. You must shutdown these UEFI boot VMs before updating to Citrix Hypervisor 8.1. Multiple vGPU For NVIDIA GPUs and drivers that support multiple vGPU, you can configure a single VM to use multiple virtual GPUs concurrently. These additional vGPUs can be used to perform computational processing. Only certain vGPU profiles can be used and all vGPUs attached to a single VM must be of the same type. For more information, see Graphics Overview. Performance improvements Improved performance for VM imports and exports that use the XVA format Changes to the checksum used in XVA files in Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 provide significant performance improvements when importing or exporting VMs using this new checksum algorithm. The reduction in the time it takes to import or export a VM depends on the specific hardware of the machine. The larger the VM the larger the performance improvement seen. Use XenCenter 8.1 to manage exported VMs that use XVA files with the new checksum algorithm. If you have a custom application that relies on the format of the checksum included in the XVA file, up- date your application to use the new format. The checksum has changed to use the xxHash algorithm. The checksum file name now ends with the extension .xxhash. © 1999-2020 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Storage performance improvements Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 includes the following performance enhancements to storage: • Storage performance is significantly improved when I/O is performed in block sizes larger than 64 KiB on an NFS SR. • Multipage support is now available in non-GFS2 SRs for better storage performance. If your Windows VM has the Citrix VM Tools installed, the VM uses multipage support automatically. To enable multipage support on a Linux VM complete the following steps: 1. First, verify that your kernel supports the max_ring_page_order parameter. Run the following command: 1 modinfo xen_blkfront | grep max_ring_page_order If this command returns an empty response, your kernel does not support this feature. Do not proceed with these steps. 2. Take a snapshot of your VM. 3. On the VM, run the following command: 1 echo ’options xen_blkfront max_ring_page_order=3’ >/etc/ modprobe.d/xen_blkfront.conf 4. Depending on your Linux distribution, run one of the following commands: – For RHEL, CentOS, or Oracle Enterprise Linux: dracut -f -v – For Debian-based distributions: update-initramfs -u -k all 5. Reboot your VM. New Windows I/O drivers with improved performance Updated Windows I/O drivers with the major version 9 (9.x.x.x) are provided with this release of Cit- rix Hypervisor for the following operating systems: Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server Core 2016, Windows Server 2019, Win- dows Server Core 2019. These Windows I/O drivers include a number of performance improvements. These drivers are also available through Windows Update for Premium Edition customers. Windows I/O drivers with the major version 8 (8.x.x.x) are still provided for the older supported Win- dows operating systems. These drivers do not contain the performance improvements.