 Zen server 7.3 is out, but before we get too excited I'm gonna start right with the bad and I mean bad like I This is a bad decision by Citrix. I don't understand why they did this. Well, wait, wait I understand completely why they did this. I can't say I don't understand But it doesn't make a sense if you look at the big picture so I'm a Apparently among the few people who really like Zen server and it's part of because of the easy import export I did an entire video and setting this up with Freenias. I now have a Zen server at my house I should be doing a video on soon for home virtualization I've been running it here in our office And I don't feel locked into the product because they make it really easy to import all my stuff from virtual box or Export it back out to virtual box or any other thing that supports standard OVA for Virtualization to the standard formats which they do here at Zen which been a confusing to some people think they don't and That's why I made the videos because no they absolutely do Now they still support all the other great features I like like the live migrations and things like that and I've done some videos on that But this specifically is where I think they're making a bad decision here They have decided in the free version for the seven point three So current version seven point two as of the other day They just released yesterday today seven point three Today is do a Tuesday December 12th And they decided that a few features should be paid for and not just include it and includes dynamic memory control Now that was a feature that allows you to say okay I can allocate, you know four gigs of RAM to this virtual machine But if you're only using to give it back to the pool. I didn't use X I don't like to accidentally over precision on memory. I don't know if it would cause problems So I have all my machines provision so it doesn't directly affect me The active directory integration though I don't use it, but I think there's probably some people who may have it in a small business and Removing that along with the role-based access control now being able to set up roles and have different people access it Okay, those may be an aren't home user features if you're setting up and doing some testing in a lab But still if you're some of the smaller offices That's still kind of a feature to use or at least people would like to play with because they're thinking about expanding to the Larger scale version of this like an enterprise version for with the paid support They might want to test those features out and having a free version is a good way to do that It's already there in 7.2 GPU pass through I mixed emotions in this because I don't use it either But I think there's some people who are looking more into it And I believe there's still a way to go from the command line and bypass it But they're taking it out of the Zen server official Now the ones that are really annoying is the maximum pool size restricted to three hosts now if you Already have a large pool it will continue to work But if you remove from it if it's larger than three it won't let you add back to it So that's kind of a yeah, we'll let you play with it because you've already set it up going forward You know it's created some problems now These are really annoying things that they're doing because the idea with a lot of these products and red hat is really the Master of this we're going to give you open source products You can play with it and it really helps people set up their home labs learn about technology and really dive into it Which is why I produced these videos to help get people rolling on technology and and make this You know make some sense to them so they can you know, maybe start a career and this is what I did I just was got books and got into this and Restricting and taking away things from people doesn't make a lot of business sense because this is the general community thing and red hat Like I said, they they give you these products and you go man. I want to reuse this in my business I got to learn it at my at my home lab environment and trained on it and figured out how these things work They get a job in it and the enterprise companies frequently by support We'll we have no problems ourselves being a business buying support for things But I use the free version as then because we just need the basic use and I'm doing it to share With people who want to start home labs I'm not recommending the free version to a company who wants to run a data center with 3,000 nodes in it. This is for people who want to get started So eventually you get a job at a place that you can help manage 3,000 nodes at a data center So it's my little rant on the bad about it. The good about it is They have a few more features they added so they have some of the release notes here and nothing too exciting the most Damning thing of course is what I just said, but they're added more Linux templates and they added a tablet mode Which I thought was kind of interesting for Windows I don't know much about that out the play with it. They already offer VLAN tagging now for your storage networks now VLAN tagging is already supported. So it's not adding VLAN tagging to the whole system It's already supported and I've done this in my lab demo to how you have VLANs inside of there to control your virtual machines But it wasn't available on the storage interface So now you can add it to the storage and management interfaces. Normally those are just raw and not VLAN So there's a feature you're gonna get in 10.3 support for SMM SMB version 3 That was something I didn't have a lot of support for but it still doesn't look like we're getting any block if you have it Provisioned over a block device. You're not getting any Thin provisioning that didn't see that in the release notes here. So I guess they're still not adding that Which is at least one thing it would be nice to have but that's why I run it on free NAS I let free NASs handle so to speak the deduplication and compression in that now The one last thing they have in here But it's only available in the enterprise editions is a change block tracking set features of API's enable third-party software Vendors felt fast space efficient incremental backup tools I've had a few people say like beam isn't well supported on here and because I have backups of mine And I have a whole demo of how I run the backups because I would back up my entire virtual machines You can even back them up live. This is a Concerned some people have but this is gonna if you are using the enterprise version This probably means they're they're making it easier for the commercial vendors to support there So that's kind of neat if you move into the commercial version is then so Nothing overly exciting It almost feels because there are more things removed than there were added So I'm kind of highlighting those I spent more time on that because I'm like really you guys took away this and only added some minor Incremental features I understand maybe just adding more features to the enterprise but to take away from the free version doesn't make a lot of sense You know, that's the pull the rug out from under us. So I'm gonna rant a little about that I'm hoping then you know listen to their audience and says we're gonna change that because well This isn't a nice thing, you know, give people a lot of features and if anyone's proved it It's probably a red hat That they people play with these things they learn Linux and they move into the commercial environment and people don't mind paying for support And a commercial farmers is this is a common business model and it works. It's profitable. It's reasonable and rational I think you know, it's not that we don't think people who develop they get the time shouldn't make money But we want to make this really easy because you do not have zen I'm look to you if anyone from Zen Server Citrix is listening you don't have the install base that ESXi does that some of these others have so I It seems like you be prudent to you know, be more inclusive with your open-source audience and show us a little love and not taking things away All right, that's my little rant on Zen server 7.3 in a new release. Hopefully they fix these things I will cross my fingers and I'll probably uptake to it because these aren't features I use so it's not going to directly impact me But I'm still going to complain about it. And if they alter the deal further I will be talking about what the next hypervisor I move all my platform to because like I said, I don't feel locked in this end The thing I like about them is the easy import export of the OVA files. 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