VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 23 – The Citrix Virtualization Safari. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com with guests and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com and Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen). This week’s special guest is Citrix CTO Simon Crosby (@simoncrosby / Citrix Blogs). This episode’s conversation covers almost everything going on at Citrix for virtualization. From Citrix Receiver on the iPad, HDX with VDI, development of the Citrix XenClient, XenServer strategy, partnership with Microsoft, to Citrix in the Cloud, Crosby offers inside thoughts and experiences.  VIRTUMANIA is a Infosmack Production.

Before, between, and after the important stuff we also have some fun with Rick’s picture of the wrong end of a giraffe and Dell’s rumored acquisition of 3PAR

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Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

Citrix describes the XenClient hypervisor as “a high-performance, bare-metal hypervisor that enables users to run multiple instances of an operating system simultaneously, side by side, and in complete isolation.” A key feature necessary for running virtual corporate desktops provided by a centralized IT department is the Citrix Synchronizer. According to Citrix, Synchronizer will “add centralized control, deployment, and backup of local virtual machines to your XenClient environment.”

Since I was not in attendance at the Keynote, it is unclear to me whether the version of XenClient available for download today is in fact a production ready release. It is available as open source and free to download for those that want to try it out.

There is only a short list of hardware supported, however.

Citrix lists the following general hardware requirements for XenClient:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core i5, Intel Core i7
• Graphics: Intel integrated graphics GMA 4500, Intel® HD Graphics
• Memory: 4GB RAM recommended
• Disk: 160GB recommended
• Wireless Lan: Intel WiFi Link 5100/5300, Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6200, Intel® Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300
• Intel vPro: Highly Recommended

Systems currently on the XenClient hardware compatibility list are:

• HP EliteBook 6930p, 2530p, 8440p*
• Dell Latitude E4300, E6400, E6410*, E6500, E6510*
• Dell Optiplex 780
• Lenovo ThinkPad X200, T400, T500

From what I can tell, the promise of 3D graphics, video, and overall rich user experience for both personal and corporate desktop virtual machines running simultaneously on the local hardware does seem to have been successfully delivered.

Citrix has provided some screen shots of XenClient in action.

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.”

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.

Citrix Receiver Makes Accessing Virtual Desktops and Apps Easy as Turning on Your Tv

“In the world of broadcast media, satellite and cable TV receivers are largely transparent to subscribers, silently receiving broadcast signals from head-end controllers, and responding to user requests for content. Their role is simple, yet profound, allowing subscribers to use the TV of their choice, and view standard, high-definition or pay-per-view content from any room in their home, while also giving the provider full control over service delivery. Citrix Receiver functions in much the same way for corporate employees. Following an initial download and installation, Receiver sits quietly in the background and “listens” for signals from the corporate “delivery center”. This allows IT to deliver any app or desktop from Citrix Delivery Center™Citrix® XenApp™ and Citrix® XenDesktop™, to any device with a Receiver installed. Should employees want to access their work environment from a home PC or Mac laptop, they simply go to a URL given to them by IT and download a Receiver for that device as well. As long as Citrix Receiver is installed on a device, IT has complete control over security, performance, and user experience, allowing them to deliver IT services on-demand with no need to manage, own or care about the physical device or its location.”

[omitted]

“Administration is provided by Citrix Merchandising Server, a new server component that manages the initial setup of Receiver for employees, provides centralized management of plug-ins, keeps plug-ins updated on each end point, manages web-based user support services, and offers robust reporting features. Because Merchandising Server is a virtual appliance, it’s easy to provision in any customer environment. Merchandising Server also includes tools for migrating existing Citrix customers from legacy implementations of Citrix software clients and user interfaces such as Citrix Program Neighborhood, PN Agent, and Web Interface.”

Citrix Dazzle Puts the Personal Back in Computing

“Dazzle gives corporate employees 24×7 self-service access to a broad array of applications, desktops and content, allowing them to choose exactly what they need, when they need it. For the more than 200,000 enterprise customers already using Citrix Delivery Center™ products like Citrix® XenApp™ and Citrix® XenDesktop™, Dazzle effectively acts as a storefront to their existing delivery infrastructure. Best of all, Dazzle offers a rich, intuitive user experience that requires no training. If you’ve used DirecTV or Apple iTunes, you already know how to use Dazzle. In short, Dazzle makes self-service IT a reality for the first time ever, giving users simple access to apps and IT services, and bringing the economics of the web to enterprise IT.”

[omitted]

“Dazzle is a user-facing application that runs on any Windows or Mac computer. It essentially acts as a lightweight storefront for all the applications IT has centrally staged in head-end infrastructure products like XenApp. To select an application in Dazzle, users simply browse and search based on application name, description, or type. They can also choose applications based on IT-defined categories such as functional department or group name. Selecting an application is as simple as clicking an icon in Windows, or dragging it into the Applications folder or Dock on a Mac. Organizing selected applications into user-defined “playlists” is equally simple and intuitive, giving Windows users full control over how apps will appear in their Start menu. Apps available for offline use are clearly designated in the Dazzle console, making selection easy for laptop users who need to work while disconnected from the network.”

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.

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.

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

a distant second in my opinion as a virtualization solution when considering free hypervisor choices. From the official announcement:

“The new Citrix XenServer release provides customers with a robust, scalable, feature-rich virtualization platform that is exceptionally powerful, yet incredibly easy to learn and use. Core features of XenServer include the following:

• Powerful Centralized Management enables full multi-node management for an unlimited number of servers and virtual machines; includes easy physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual conversion tools, centralized configuration management and a resilient distributed management architecture
  
• Live Motion and Multi-Server Resource Sharing incorporates powerful XenMotion™ technology that allows virtual machines to be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero downtime; also includes optimal initial virtual machine placement and intelligent maintenance mode
  
• Proven Hypervisor Engine powered by the 64-bit industry standard Xen open source hypervisor developed jointly by more than 50 leading technology vendors, enabling users take full advantage of the latest performance, security and scalability enhancements in next-generation servers, operating systems and microprocessors
  
• Fast Bare Metal Performance supports an unlimited number of servers and virtual machines with industry-leading consolidation ratios, near native performance on the most challenging application workloads, and virtually zero overhead in both Microsoft Windows® and Linux environments
  
• Easy Setup and Administration features familiar interface with easy wizard-driven configuration, intuitive Web 2.0 style search, and built-in auto-help that makes the learning curve for new administrators a snap
  
• Integrated Storage Management that supports any existing storage system; includes built-in storage management features such as host-based logical volume management, and dynamic multi-pathing capabilities”
  

The following XenServer versus ESXi comparison chart is available on Citrix’s XenServer web page and shows how Citrix now clearly offers an advantage in features as a free virtualization platform.

Another interesting twist to this announcement is that XenApp, Citrix’s flagship server based computing solution used by most enterprise companies today, will also include the XenServer hypervisor.

“As a result of this move, XenServer will also now be included as a core feature of Citrix® XenApp™, the company’s flagship application virtualization product line.  Adding XenServer as the base platform under XenApp increases flexibility and helps customers consolidate the number of physical servers in production with virtually no overhead.  More than one million servers in enterprise datacenters today are running XenApp.”

Finally, Citrix, along with the upcoming 9.10 version of Ubuntu Server, has become the second free Xen based cloud computing option for companies interested in taking advantage of both hosted and private Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) solutions.

“The new free XenServer release is also great news for cloud providers, the vast majority of whom use the open source Xen hypervisor today as a core component of their platforms.  By upgrading to the full XenServer product, these cloud vendors not only gain a far richer virtual infrastructure platform at no cost, they also get instant native support for Windows guests in addition to the Linux guests they offer today.  This will also make it easier for Linux OS vendors who currently include Xen in their products to move to the full XenServer, giving their customers far more value and focusing their development efforts on adding differentiated services on top of the virtualization platform.”

As a consultant and Citrix partner providing virtual infrastructure design and architecture primarily to small to medium businesses (SMB), this news creates some interesting alternative design possibilities for many of my current and potential customers.

“There’s only one company that doesn’t use Linux for its server virtualization platform. Can you guess which one it is? If you guessed Microsoft, you’re correct. Microsoft is a newbie in the virtualization space but wants in and may make significant dents in the already well-established market that is significantly owned by VMware. For Windows-only virtualization, there may be some validity to the switch to Hyper-V.

For the rest of us, who are either too stubborn or too smart to make the shift to Hyper-V, what are our choices? The following is a list of 5 of the main players in Linux-based virtualization.”

Use the link above to read all of Ken’s original post for some brief info about each platform, but I am listing the 6 products and the links to their free versions for quick reference here. Ken does not discuss nor am I including free hosted platforms such as Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Server.

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
• VMware ESXi
• Citrix XenServer 5.0 Express Edition
  
• Virtual Iron Single Server Edition
• OpenVZ or OpenVZ LiveCD
• KVM

Be aware that most of these platforms require 64 bit hardware with AMD-V or Intel-VT virtualization assist technologies. if you need to check if your current hardware is virtualization ready then check out my previous post How to check if your CPU supports hardware virtualization.

Personally I have not used OpenVZ, KVM, or Virtual Iron. It will be interesting to see how these alternatives find their place with customers in today’s competitive market.