Introduction
I am writing this on a desktop running Windows 7 computer as a virtual machine on a XenServer pool running a pre-release version of XenServer. XenServer in engineering this system is known as Xenia. It is an example of a so-called system "dog-fooding", whereby members of teams of engineers who create a product are also using this product in their daily work.
Citrix has a long history the use of its own products, usually in one of two ways: as an iT company led the deployment shipping versions of products such as Citrix XenApp, NetScaler, CloudBridge or CloudPlatform, or more local deployments within the engineering teams, often pre-releases. Xènia is an example of the latter. It is managed by the QA team XenServer for use by members of the XenServer engineering group.
empathy
the main objective of Xenia is to provide staff with an overview XenServer in XenServer experience of our customers. in other words, to obtain a measure of empathy with our customers. to do this we need the firsthand experience deploying and administering production XenServer running in the pool live workloads that matter to people. We also want to understand the impacts of our product quality, performance, stability, etc. on the experience of the end user.
We run two pools of XenServer, one containing the latest version of XenServer GA updated with all patches, and a current version of pre-release of XenServer. Various workloads that are essential for the XenServer product group are run on these pools, including virtual desktops. Although Xenia not use a full XenDesktop deployment (RDS or VDI), he re-use the office "brokerage" virtual functionality of XenDesktop to provide easy access to the persistent virtual machines. The members of the XenServer product group are encouraged to use these virtual machines as the main office for the day-to-day, whether in the office or outside.
QA tool
As mentioned earlier, a Xenia key objective is to provide the XenServer product group with an overview of what it takes to administer the pools production XenServer. Our QA team possess Xenia and as such gain experience of installing, upgrading, hotfixing and generally maintain a system of production and supply of a service based on it. Their findings are injected into the maps decisions XenServer, bug tracking and product improvement proposals.When new version of XenServer is imminent, we improve one of the pools to use the new version, validating the upgrade path the previous version of XenServer, and expose the newly installed candidate built for live use and therefore, essentially in real time soak test. When a new patch for the latest version of XenServer GA is imminent, the final validation step is to apply it to the appropriate pool to ensure it runs successfully the first.
Basically, although the system is managed by QA XenServer, members of our development teams and product management are often involved in administrative tasks such as upgrades. We want as many members of the group of products as possible to get a better degree of empathy with our customers, not only end users, but system administrators as well.
Of course, an additional advantage of Xenia is that, by its very nature, it is a living system that must operate 24 × 7. This gives us a degree of soak test that complements our existing tests but more static automated soak. Xenia has various capacities for surveillance and control built into it, including the detection of memory leaks, with more planned (including the use of 3rd party integrated tools for XenServer). This makes Xenia A powerful element of our integration (CI) Suite continues. Examples of defects found by Xenia, before liberation is a nasty bug upgrade from XenServer 6.1 and 6.2 caused by the addition of a new piece of VM metadata, permissions various faults and problems of use.
Citrix Interop
Xenia is run by and for the group of XenServer products and focuses on XenServer largely isolated from other Citrix products.
One of the inspirations for Xenia is another "inner dog-fooding" system known RTST ( "Real Time stress test"). This was managed by our colleagues in the XenDesktop product group for a number of years, providing XenDesktop virtual desktops and XenApp running on a variety of different hypervisors.
The engineering team also manages a XenServer deployment Citrix CloudPlatform on XenServer.
Summary
XenServer personal gain empathy with the experience of the administration and use of XenServer through our use of an internal deployment XenServer with live workloads and strategic to our customers.
results are returned as defects and requests for product improvement, or more generally as context to maps decisions.
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