Right on the heels of the Provisioning Server 5.1 release Citrix announces and releases the latest version of their hypervisor… XenServer 5.5.  This release brings about some MUCH needed new enterprise class features.

Some of my biggest complaints about XenServer when compared to VMware ESX was that XenServer was lacking some of the features that have become critical to the successful adoption and implementation of a hypervisor.  Specifically, XenServer has been missing dynamic load balancing  and snapshot capabilities.  Also included in XenServer 5.5 is support for Active Directory authentication through XenCenter.  You can read the full list of new features in the release notes found here:  http://support.citrix.com/product/xens/v5.5/

Now it would be easy to argue that all of these features have been available from VMware since the inception of VI3 through ESX 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 which was originally released in June of 2006!

So is this just Citrix playing catch up?  Are they really three years behind VMware?