Deprecation
Important:
Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 becomes End of Life on June 25, 2025. Plan your upgrade to XenServer 8 now to ensure a smooth transition and continued support. For more information, see Upgrade.
If you are using your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops license files to license your Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 hosts, these license files are not compatible with XenServer 8. Before upgrading you must acquire XenServer Premium Edition socket license files to use with XenServer 8. These socket license files are available as an entitlement of the Citrix for Private Cloud, Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud, Citrix Universal MSP, and Citrix Platform License subscriptions for running your Citrix workloads. Citrix customers who have not yet transitioned to these new subscriptions can request to participate in a no-cost promotion for 10,000 XenServer Premium Edition socket licenses. For more information, see XenServer.
If you do not get a compatible license for XenServer 8 before upgrading, when you upgrade your hosts they revert to the 90-day Trial Edition. Trial Edition provides the same features as Premium Edition with some limitations. For more information, see XenServer 8 Licensing Overview.
The announcements in this article give you advanced notice of platforms, Citrix products, and features that are being phased out so that you can make timely business decisions. Citrix monitors customer use and feedback to determine when they are withdrawn. Announcements can change in subsequent releases and might not include every deprecated feature or functionality.
For details about product lifecycle support, see the Product Lifecycle Support Policy article.
Deprecations and removals
The following table shows the platforms, Citrix products, and features that are deprecated or removed.
Deprecated items are not removed immediately. Citrix continues to support them in the current release, but they will be removed in a future release.
Removed items are either removed, or are no longer supported, in Citrix Hypervisor.
Dates in bold face indicate changes at this release.
| Item | Deprecation announced in | Removed in | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|
| VM Recovery Mode | XenCenter 2024.2.1 | XenCenter 2024.2.1 | |
| PuTTY installed with XenCenter | XenCenter 8.2.6 | XenCenter 2024.2.0 (for Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1) | With future versions of XenCenter, you must install your own instance of PuTTY or OpenSSH on the system where XenCenter is installed. |
| Standard Edition license | June 3, 2024 | Standard Edition licenses issued before this date are supported until their expiry. | For ways to get a license, see the XenServer website. |
| Support for Bromium Secure Platform in Windows VMs | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 | |
| Health Check | XenCenter 8.2.6 | XenCenter 8.2.7 | |
| Upload of server status reports to Citrix Insight Services (CIS) from XenCenter | XenCenter 8.2.6 | XenCenter 8.2.7 | Upload your status reports manually through the CIS website. |
| PuTTY installed with XenCenter | XenCenter 8.2.6 | XenCenter 2023.3.1 | With future versions of XenCenter, you must install your own instance of PuTTY or OpenSSH on the system where XenCenter is installed. |
| Localization of XenCenter into Japanese and Simplified Chinese | XenCenter 8.2.6 | XenCenter 2023.3.1 | |
| Software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) | 8.2 CU1 | ||
| Support for Debian Bullseye 11 32-bit | 8.2 CU1 | XenServer 8 | |
| Intel GVT-g | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 | |
| AMD MxGPU | 8.2 CU1 | XenServer 8 | |
| Separate PVS-Accelerator Supplemental Pack | 8.2 CU1 | XenServer 8 | In future versions of XenServer, these capabilities will be included in the core product. |
| Support for the following Linux operating systems: CoreOS, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Debian Jessie 8, Debian Stretch 9, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 SP3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 SP4, CentOS 8 | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system where available. |
| Support for the following Linux operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Scientific Linux 7, Oracle Linux 7, CentOS 7, Debian Buster 10, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP4 | XenServer 8 | XenServer 8 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system where available. |
| Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 | 8.2 CU1 | XenServer 8 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system. |
| Support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.1 | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system. |
| Transfer VM | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 (XenCenter 8.2.3) | Use the latest release of XenCenter. Since XenCenter 8.2.3, the mechanism used for OVF/OVA import/export and single disk image import has been simplified and these operations are now performed without using the Transfer VM. |
| Measured Boot Supplemental Pack | 8.2 CU1 | 8.2 CU1 | |
| Container Management Supplemental Pack | 8.2 | 8.2 | |
| Support for Hewlett-Packard Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) | 8.2 | 8.2 | |
Support for the following legacy processors: Xeon E3/5/7 family - Sandy Bridge, Xeon E3/5/7 v2 family - Ivy Bridge
|
8.2 | 8.2 | |
The guest-tools.iso file included in the Citrix Hypervisor installation ISO |
8.2 | 8.2 | Download the Citrix VM Tools for Windows or for Linux from the Citrix Hypervisor downloads page. |
| Support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 SP2, and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 | 8.2 | 8.2 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system. |
| Legacy SSL mode and support for the TLS 1.0/1.1 protocol | 8.2 | 8.2 | |
| Cross-server private networks | 8.2 | 8.2 | |
The following xe CLI log commands: diagnostic-db-log, log-set-output, log-get-keys, log-get, log-reopen
|
8.2 | ||
| The vSwitch Controller (see Notes) | 8.1 | 8.2 | |
| Legacy partition layouts: DOS partition layout, Old GPT partition layout. Note, this change also removes support for servers with less than 46 GB of primary disk space. | 8.1 | XenServer 8 | |
| VSS and quiesced snapshots | 8.1 | 8.1 | |
| Support for Ubuntu 14.04 | 8.1 | 8.1 | |
| Support for all paravirtualized (PV) VMs. | 8.1 | 8.1 | Upgrade your VMs to a later version of their operating system before moving to the latest version of Citrix Hypervisor. For more information, see Upgrade from PV to HVM guests. |
Legacy drivers: qla4xxx, qla3xxx, netxen_nic, qlge, qlcnic
|
8.0 | ||
| XenCenter installer bundled with the Citrix Hypervisor installation media. | 8.0 | 8.0 | Download the XenCenter installer from the Downloads page instead. |
| XenCenter connections to XenServer hosts that are version 6.x and earlier. | 8.0 | 8.0 | Upgrade your out-of-support XenServer hosts. |
| Support for Nutanix integration. | 8.0 | 8.0 | |
Support for the following legacy processors: Opteron 13xx Budapest, Opteron 23xx/83xx Barcelona, Opteron 23xx/83xx Shanghai, Opteron 24xx/84xx Istanbul, Opteron 41xx Lisbon, Opteron 61xx Magny Cours, Xeon 53xx Clovertown, Xeon 54xx Harpertown, Xeon 55xx Nehalem, Xeon 56xx Westmere-EP, Xeon 65xx/75xx Nehalem-EX, Xeon 73xx Tigerton, Xeon 74xx Dunnington
|
8.0 | 8.0 | For information about supported processors, see the Hardware Compatibility List. |
Support for qemu-trad. It is no longer possible to use qemu-trad by setting platform-devicemodel=qemu-trad. All VMs created with qemu-trad device profile get automatically upgraded to qemu-upstream-compat profile. |
8.0 | 8.0 | |
| Support for the following guest templates: Debian 6 Squeeze, Ubuntu 12.04, Legacy Windows, Asianux Server 4.2, 4.4, and 4.5, NeoKylin Linux Security OS 5, Linx Linux 6, Linx Linux 8, GreatTurbo Enterprise Server 12, Yinhe Kylin 4 | 8.0 | 8.0 | |
| Legacy Windows drivers from the Citrix VM Tools ISO | 8.0 | 8.0 |
Notes
Health Check
Logs for the Health Check service are retained by Windows for troubleshooting purposes. To remove these logs, delete them manually from %SystemRoot%\System32\Winevt\Logs on the Windows machine running XenCenter.
Dynamic Memory Control (DMC)
This feature was previously listed as deprecated. The deprecation notice was removed on Jan 30, 2023. DMC is supported in future releases of XenServer.
Disconnecting the vSwitch controller
The vSwitch Controller is no longer supported. Disconnect the vSwitch Controller from your pool before attempting to update or upgrade to the latest version of Citrix Hypervisor.
- In the vSwitch controller user interface, go to the Visibility & Control tab.
- Locate the pool to disconnect in the All Resource Pools table. The pools in the table are listed using the IP address of the pool master.
- Click the cog icon and select Remove Pool.
- Click Remove to confirm.
After the update or upgrade, the following configuration changes take place:
- Cross-server private networks revert to single-server private networks.
- Any Quality of Service settings made through the DVSC console are no longer applied. Network rate limits are no longer enforced.
- ACL rules are removed. All traffic from VMs is allowed.
- Port mirroring (RSPAN) is disabled.
After update or upgrade, if you find any leftover state about the vSwitch Controller in your pool, clear the state with the following CLI command: xe pool-set-vswitch-controller address=