VM /ETC

Along with the news of a free XenServer, Citrix has officially announced Citrix Essentials – a new product line that will provide lifecycle management, storage integration, and automated provisioning features for both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. In the press release Citrix states, “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 appears to help close the current feature gap between Citrix and the virtualization market leader VMware by providing much of the automation already available for the VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products.

The announcement provides the following outline of Citrix Essentials features:

“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.”

Citrix has released a separate announcement for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V that explains the extended partnership between Citrix and Microsoft now known as “Project Encore”. This press release also describes

“Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V provides customers with a powerful set of advanced virtualization management capabilities that extend the enterprise management capabilities of Hyper-V and System Center to help make virtualized environments more scalable, more manageable and more agile.  Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V includes:

• Advanced Storage Integration using Citrix® StorageLink™ technology makes it easy for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center customers to fully leverage all the native power of their existing array-based storage systems.
• Dynamic Provisioning Services lets customers centrally manage a common set of master images, which can be streamed on-demand into Hyper-V virtual machines or physical servers.
• Hypervisor Interoperability makes it easy for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous Hyper-V and XenServer™ environments.
• Automated Lab Management enables Hyper-V customers to develop, test, and deliver applications faster by automating and simplifying the entire virtual machine lifecycle, including movement across virtualization platforms.”

An interesting common denominator for both the XenServer and Hyper-V features mentioned above is the Citrix Storage Link technology. In summary, this technology allows virtualization admins to manage advanced storage features directly from the Citrix Essentials tools. This management is normally only available to the storage admin from the storage vendor’s management interface. The details of the integration of these features is unclear in the press releases, but the possibility of leveraging filer features such as de-duplication, thin provisioning, and volume snapshots while provisioning and managing virtual machines and virtual infrastructure is exciting.

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