VM /ETC

Some of the new automation and life cycle management technology for both XenServer and Hyper-V announced today by Citrix will be provided by an integration of VMLogix LabManager and StageManager products with Citrix Essentials. This partner feature integration follows a similar strategy used by Citrix in the past with Marathon Technologies to provide High Availability for guests on XenServer hosts. VMLogix LabManager and StageManager are very similar in name to VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products that provide basically the same automation and management features.

In the official announcement today, VMLogix explains:

“With most enterprises and data centers deploying more than one virtualization platform, hypervisor-agnostic application lifecycle management tools will become essential to managing the virtual infrastructure. VMLogix products are hypervisor-agnostic and offer a number of benefits including:

• VMLogix LabManager: allows customers to consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across virtualization platforms. Companies can dramatically reduce the manual effort, time and IT resources required to develop and maintain higher quality software applications by using comprehensive automation capabilities, advanced team management and seamless integrations with leading solutions from HP and IBM.
• VMLogix StageManager: enabling customers to manage the pre-production and staging infrastructure for IT operations. StageManager helps IT operations engineers create a customizable staging workflow and stage applications for comprehensive testing and production readying – helping reduce the risk of downtime, improving and enforcing the staging process and reducing the IT costs related to service staging.”

The VMLogix announcement sheds some light on how some of the new features promised by Citrix Essentials will be provided, as well as offer Citrix customers competitive alternatives to the VMware automation and VM lifecycle management products currently available today. Coupled with the news of XenServer Enterprise becoming available for free at the end of March 2009, Citrix hopes to gain some significant market share with cost effective production deployments of their newest virtualization product editions.

For more information on VMLogix LabManager and StageManager check out the VMLogix web site.

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