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Criggie
Asked: 2016-05-19 14:42:57 +0800 CST

What are the implications of running an older version of xenserver tools on VMs?

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As part of my day-job I manage a couple of xenserver pools. I've been working through the old ones, bringing them up to xenserver 6.5 from a range of older versions 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2

Many of the VMs now have an older version of xenserver tools installed. On the VM's General tab it says something like

 Virtualisation state:  Tools out of date (version 5.5 installed)
 Virtualisation state:  Tools out of date (version 6.0 installed)

Or confusingly 

 Virtualisation state:  Optimised (version 6.2 installed)

What are the potential downsides for leaving the VMs as-is? Are there possible performance or reliability issues? This question is not about whether xentools should be installed, its aimed at whether updates to tools are important.

xenserver update upgrade

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Your drivers will be in legacy mode, simply as that.

    An actual example from the competitor is like the e1000 (legacy) or vmxnet3 (optimised) in esx.

    I manage some pool and with xendesktop its hard to stay uptodate with the xentool. (you have to reimage a virtual machine from the pvs to a machine on the xen and reapply the update and reimage back...) Thus for some customer I never did the update for large pool of VM due to time restriction. (desktop for my side)

    I never seen stability issue, but I cant tell if it could run better.

    The best place to answer your question is the 'whats fixed' of each release. (like there; http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX142583)

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