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Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V Delivers Advanced Automation and Management for the Virtual Datacenter
Monday 23. February 2009 - New Product Line Offers Automated Lifecycle Management, Storage Integration and Dynamic Provisioning Services for Citrix and Microsoft Virtualization Customers
Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced Citrix Essentialsfor XenServer and Hyper-V, a new product line that adds a rich set of advanced management and automation capabilities to the Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms. The new solution helps customers transform virtualized datacenters into more dynamic “delivery centers” with capabilities like lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration and seamless integration with leading storage systems.
Citrix Essentials provides an ideal complement for customers using the enterprise-class, cloud-proven Citrix XenServer virtualization platform, which is now being offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment (please see todays separate announcement). The Citrix Essentials product line also extends the enterprise management capabilities of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, helping customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures within a Microsoft environment (please also see todays separate announcement of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V). This combination enables broad interoperability that makes it easier for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous virtualization environments throughout the full application lifecycle, from lab and testing to production.
“As enterprise datacenters become increasingly virtualized, customers need hypervisor-agnostic management solutions that go beyond general virtual machine administration – automating and streamlining virtualization throughout the application lifecycle, delivering workloads across a mix of physical and virtual machines and simplifying integration with third-party enterprise storage systems,” said Chris Wolf, senior analyst, Burton Group. “Vendors that provide practical, heterogeneous virtualization management solutions that address not just the virtual infrastructure, but also provide a framework for third party innovation within and beyond the virtual infrastructure, are best positioned for long-term success.”
Advanced Automation and Management for the Virtual Datacenter
With more than 75 percent of corporate servers still not virtualized1, and product options increasing rapidly, datacenters in the near future will likely include a far different mix of virtualization platforms supporting a greater diversity of use cases. Now that virtualization is included as a standard component of the Windows Server platform, many Microsoft customers will begin moving to Hyper-V as their preferred virtualization environment for new Windows-oriented deployments. And with the enterprise-class, cloud-proven XenServer platform now available for free unlimited use in production, customers with mixed Windows and Linux environments, significant investments in Citrix application delivery solutions, or plans to build “private clouds” will increasingly turn to Citrix XenServer.
Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of Citrix and Microsoft virtualization environments in corporate datacenters, while enabling easy interaction with existing servers that have already been virtualized with other third-party products. It provides customers with a robust set of advanced management and automation solutions that enhance and extend the capabilities of Citrix XenCenter and Microsoft System Center, the primary management systems of XenServer and Hyper-V, respectively. While some features vary based on the underlying virtualization environment, the Citrix Essentials product line consists of five broad categories of capabilities:
Automated Lab Management streamlines the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering applications on-demand throughout the full application lifecycle, from development labs to production servers. Because this functionality supports all of the leading virtualization platforms, customers can even run development and testing environments on one virtualization platform, and seamlessly move those applications into production on another platform.
Advanced Storage Integration featuring Citrix StorageLink technology fully leverages all the native power of third-party array-based storage systems making it easy for customers to manage advanced storage features directly from their virtualization management environments.
Dynamic Provisioning Services reduce costs and optimize datacenter infrastructure by letting customers manage common sets of master workload images centrally and stream them on-demand to both virtual machines or physical servers.
Workflow Orchestration enables users to automate key management processes across their virtual infrastructure using common task libraries and a graphical workflow canvas.
High Availability delivers a broad range of powerful high availability options from automatic restart as the result of host or virtual machine failure to intelligent placement of virtual machines across resource pools based on resource availability.
“With three quarters of servers still not virtualized and customer choices increasing, the server virtualization market is still wide open,” said Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization Management Division, Citrix Systems. “We believe XenServer and Hyper-V will be the two fastest growing virtualization platforms in this space going forward, each appealing broadly to different segments. Citrix is aligning its server virtualization strategy around adding significant value to these two high-growth platforms, helping customers achieve more manageable, scalable and agile datacenters in a way that leverages their existing investments in the most efficient way possible.”
Leveraging the Full Value of Storage in the Virtual Datacenter
One of the most significant challenges customers face as they virtualize datacenter servers is the increasing complexity of interfacing with enterprise storage systems. Because server virtualization can often hinder the linkage between servers and storage, some virtualization vendors have attempted to replicate storage-related functions in their own proprietary management systems. Unfortunately, this approach is complicated and can effectively turn expensive array-based storage systems into little more than “dumb disks,” making many of their most powerful capabilities far less accessible to datacenter administrators.
One of the most powerful and innovative new features in the Citrix Essentials product line is the Citrix StorageLink technology, which dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of storage management by making it easy to leverage all the power of existing storage systems from within both XenServer and Hyper-V virtualization environments. The StorageLink capabilities in Citrix Essentials include the following four feature sets:
StorageLink Gateway enables automated discovery and one-click access to native storage services using any of the leading storage architectures and protocols, including DAS, NAS, SAN, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
StorageLink Resource Manager makes common actions in native storage arrays visible from within the virtualization management environment, including partitioning, snapshots, backups and data replication.
StorageLink Image Manager provides a centralized library of virtual machine images that can be instantly converted between XenServer and Hyper-V and rapidly cloned and delivered to any number of target hosts.
StorageLink Connect provides a set of clearly-defined open APIs that make it easy to link XenServer and Hyper-V environments to third-party backup solutions and enterprise management frameworks.
“Through its advanced StorageLink technology, Citrix Essentials provides our joint customers with one-click access to powerful storage efficiency and data management features inherent in all NetApp systems,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing at NetApp. “This tight integration allows customers to keep storage management processes consistent and gain better virtual machine performance by offloading storage services to the storage network. Now, customers with virtualized datacenters can take full advantage of NetApp capabilities such as instant virtual machine cloning, backup, thin provisioning, and deduplication to maximize the value of their overall virtualization solution.”
Pricing and Availability
Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V will be available through channel partners on April 7, 2009. Suggested retail pricing for the Citrix Essentials product line ranges from $1,500 to $5,000 per physical server.