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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 »

There were 2 messages from the Citrix Summit 2008 conference in Orlando this week that really stuck with me. I’ve already posted about the first, “XenServer 5 is ready for the enterprise“. The other message was “Use XenServer to host XenApp”.

Virtualizing XenApp is a concept to get on board with in general, but it’s also logical to assume Citrix can best support and optimize their products when they are used together.

The message is that virtualizing existing and future implementations of XenApp (or Presentation Server) on XenServer can

• Reduce physical server count
• Increase availability
• Increase flexibility
• Improve performance

Let me explain how it was explained to me during a hands on lab. Read the rest of this entry »

For more coverage and commentary on the Citrix Summit 2008 Keynotes and vendor floor check out Tim Mangan’s blog on BrianMadden.com.

Read his posts in their entirety, but here are some quotes of interest.

• Citrix Summit 2008 – Day 2

  “This morning, Mark T.  opened the second day keynote by announcing that next year Summit will be held as part of Synergy 2009 in Las Vegas. Citrix plans to expand Synergy into a much larger event. It will include the old iForum, Geek Speak Live, a Virtualization Congress, Network World Live, and Summit. Summit will be 2 pre-days (May 3-4) of the main conferences (May 5-8), giving the partners a chance to hear and understand the message before their customers arrive. Mark said that the Virtualization Congress would include all the players in the virtualization space. Details on Network World Live were not given, other than this is being driven by Network World to bring networking people into the conference. Mark indicated that they are planning for about 9000 people.”

• Citrix Summit 2008: Day 1

  “At the opening keynote, CEO Mark Templeton had the difficult task of telling the VAR/Reseller community to sell more product in a likely down economy. In a time of shrinking budgets and cancelled plans there will be far fewer opportunities, but no doubt they will exist. CTOs (often) understand that now is the right time to examine their operations and look for opportunities to simplify the back end of their operations in order to set themselves up for the growth that will follow the following year(s). Tapping into those inclinations will be important for the VAR community to succeed, and Citrix does have a reasonable message to play into all of this. Of course, so will others… We had some nice demos, some of existing released products and some previewing future capabilities, but there was no earth-shattering wow shown today.”

• Citrix Summit: Day 0

“Citrix publicly announced today the availability of the tech preview version of a new capability called the Citrix “User Profile Manager”. This is technology that Citrix picked up from the acquisition of Sepago last May. [EDIT NOTE:  It seems that Citrix did not buy the company, but only the product.  I hope I did not cause confusion by this wording, however Citrix used the same phrase in their announcement.  Sepago is alive and well and here at the Summit]. User Profile manager intends to provide profile management for users in a centralized, easy and simple to maintain, fashion. It will be a future add-on to support XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer users.”

XenServer 5 is ready for the Enterprise. That’s been one of the flavors of the partner “kool aid” flowing here at Citrix Summit 2008 this week. Customer adoption will gauge this statement over the next year, but from a feature stand point Citrix’s latest version of XenServer now has the “bells and whistles” necessary to compete for market share in the number one strategic technology for 2009 (according to Gartner), virtualization. Citrix is not just promising future releases and roadmaps either (although there is some of that happening here too), but partners are seeing demos and participating in hands on labs for product capabilities already available.

I was told over 100 new features and enhancements have been added to XenServer 5.0. I can’t say that I have experienced all 100+ of them this week personally, but I’ve seen enough to know the changes are obvious and impressive.

Click through this SlideShare.net presentation for new feature technical details and images provided by Barry Flanagan on his Citrix Community blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Like almost all of the virtualization vendors these days, Citrix has their own set of technologies in development that will enable a highly scalable and dynamic cloud server infrastructure. I attended a Citrix Summit 2008 breakout session yesterday about one of the new Citrix products at the heart of the Citrix Cloud Center (C3) portfolio; Citrix Workflow Studio.

Citrix describes Workflow Studio as an orchestrator of products and processes that allows all the technologies in Citrix’s version of the cloud to be automated and controlled. Combined with the virtualization and consolidation made possible by Citrix XenServer, Workflow Studio will enable administrators to turn virtual infrastructure into a dynamic delivery platform by: Read the rest of this entry »