Today at work  it was brought to my attention that XenServer 5.6 dropped support for Windows XP 64 bit. I had only just recently started work with XenServer on a new project. This is a big deal for us because one of our VDI XenDesktop pilots is for a statistical application running on Windows XP 64 bit on XenServer 5.5.

Today at the end of the day the project manager was mentioning that that was a bad decision and even mentioned utilizing VMware as our backend for that environment.  So this evening I started doing some research and came to realize something interesting. XenServer 5.5 didn’t support 64 bit either.  So XenServer 5.6 doesn’t support 64 bit XP, but neither does 5.5.

Interestingly enough we have been having some problems with these images so now we have to wonder if it is because there is a reason Citrix doesn’t support it. If you are running Windows XP 64 bit images on your XenServers I would love to hear from you.