With 2025 officially underway, there is an important date to be aware of: Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) will reach End of Life on June 25, 2025. This is a great opportunity to upgrade your hypervisor to XenServer 8. XenServer 8 not only brings a heap of new features but also transforms the way hypervisors are kept up to date.
XenServer 8 introduces new functionality, including:
- Support for Windows 11 and vTPM
- Integrated PVS Accelerator
- Added support for Nagios and SNMP
- An updated Xen Conversion Manager
One of the biggest changes with this release is the way the hypervisor is kept current. The old way of downloading individual fixes and hoping you got the right mix is gone. This has been replaced with a stream of fixes delivered through a content delivery network (CDN) that help you keep your XenServer pools updated and fresh with minimum effort. You can read more about Automated Updates here.
As a result of the stream model and a new engineering process, we added a number of new features throughout the year including a simplified way of getting PVS images from VMware to XenServer, Terraform support, anti-affinity support, Windows Server 2025 support, and a Citrix-aware XenCenter.
What if your XenServer pool has no way of connecting to the internet or the hosts are not permitted to fetch the updates from a CDN? Don’t worry—there is a way to get the update stream to your pool even without using a CDN.
What about hardware? Will XenServer 8 run on the same servers? Yes: the hardware compatibility list is the same for both Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1 and XenServer 8.
For more detailed information, check out the Prepare for Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 End of Life knowledge base article.
Get your upgrade project started today, and enjoy all the great new features of an updated hypervisor!