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Archive for the ‘citrix’ Category

Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Richard Jones have recently both blogged about certification of Citrix XenServer 5.5 combined with Citrix Essentials Platinum Edition as an enterprise ready solution. Citrix XenServer 5.5 is available as a free download, but managing XenServer via Citrix Essentials requires the purchase ($5000 per host list price) of the Essentials Platinum Edition product.

It’s Official – Citrix XenServer 5.5 with Citrix Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition is Enterprise-Production Ready is a post by Chris Wolf from his personal blog announcing the certification of Citrix XenServer 5.5 managed by Citrix Essentials Platinum Edition as “worthy of the demands of large scale enterprise environments.”

Citrix has an enterprise-grade virtualization platform says the Burton Group is a post by Richard Jones also from his personal blog that declares “This is a great milestone for the industry as it marks the first time that the x86 market has more than one vendor (VMware) offering an enterprise production worthy virtualization solution.”

Read both posts for more details.

The Burton Group report requires a subscription to access, but Wolf promises to detail the findings at the upcoming Catalyst Conference where he will speaking.

Jones’ blog provides an interesting caveat to the enterprise ready comparison of VMware vSphere and XenServer Platinum:

“However, this is not to say that Citrix XenServer 5.5 exceeds VMware vSphere 4 in features and function.  Burton Group’s production class hypervisor requirements specify technical and product features that fall into three buckets:  Required, Preferred, and Optional.  While Citrix now meets 100% of the Required features, it still falls behind the x86 virtualization leader in the Preferred and Optional criteria.”

Citrix has opened the Citrix Synergy 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, NV this week with a flurry of press releases announcing new products that provide innovative methods for delivering corporate published applications. Adopting a model similar to satellite TV providers, Citrix Receiver, Dazzle, and Merchandising Server provide end users the ability to choose their own applications, and then those applications are available not only on the desktop but from any device, anywhere.

This model offers the potential to lift a huge burden from the IT department when provisioning both physical and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). At the same time, on demand self service applications also introduce software as a service provided by a company store delivery concept. For example, the IT department can build a standard desktop image or template virtual machine (VM) that consists of just the operating system and basic enterprise applications like anti virus and asset monitoring software. Then, based on familiar and easy to use TV programing -like subscription options, the end user has the control to choose which applications are delivered to their desktop via the combination of Citrix Reciever and Dazzle. These same applications or virtual desktops are also made available from the home PC or the iPhone without compromising administrative centralized security and control. New application choices and version updates are continuously provided via the “company store.”

Apparently, all of these new Citrix products are free. Reciever and Merchandising Server are available today. According to the Citrix press releases “both Receiver and Merchandising Server require infrastructure products from the Citrix Delivery Center product family to complete their operations.”

The following is a summary of links to the official Citrix announcements with some key quotes from each.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hypervisor Test Explained is a Virtualization Review post by Rick Vanover written in response to the fallout over “The Benchmark”. Real quick for those few that do not know, Rick, along with Editor in Chief Keith Ward, recently published (in Rick’s words) “a comparative performance test” for VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. The results of that test have been hotly debated since. Mostly between VMware and Citrix, but other skirmishes in the form of comments, tweets, and blog posts have also popped up scattered around the virtualization blogisphere. Until recently I’ve sat on the fence about the test results and the reactions. Partly because I found the test’s outcome startling, but also because I found myself disagreeing with the position and opinions of both sides as I watched the battle.

Now, before I continue let me establish that I immediately questioned why this was even being debated as a hypervisor “benchmark” at all. In my mind it was always what Rick describes now: a comparitive test. The goal wasn’t to say hypervisor A, B, and C can do X amount of Y and Z. Rick’s comment on Jason Boche’s early post on this topic makes it crystal clear what his objective really was:

“… everyone is assuming I’m offering this as information for the enterprise. Not so. I really am targeting this to the customer who is going to select the free hypervisors for small, unmanaged installations.”

To satisfy me for “small unmanaged installations” Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

Rumored last week to be one of the early major non VMware announcements of VMworld Europe 2009, today Citrix has officially announced it’s next version of XenServer will be free. Obviously a strategic move to bolster production deployment of the XenServer hypervisor, Citrix is also confident that today’s move will ultimately provide a low cost enterprise class virtual infrastructure alternative, improve hosted cloud services already using Xen Server (such as Amazon EC2), and enable cost effective private cloud infrastructure. XenServer will also apparently be included with XenApp solutions in the future as well.

Citrix plans to make the new release available for download around the end of March 2009. You can download a free trial version today at http://www.citrix.com/freexenserver.

New management and automation products, such as Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V which were also announced today, are expected to generate revenue for the Citrix virtualization products.

Citrix is not holding back on the features available in the free release either, thus immediately making VMware’s free ESXi Read the rest of this entry »

PCQuest has published a performance comparison of popular virtualization platforms from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware. In the report titled Virtualization Platforms Compared, the testing measures various CPU and graphics card benchmarks of the VMs running on the different platforms. Check the report out for yourself, but the testing details explained in the report left me confused. Since there is no option for comments at PCQuest I am posting about it here at VM /ETC.

Here’s the test setup info from the report: Read the rest of this entry »