Another look at Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V

Submitted by vcadmin on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 05:55

Citrix Essentials was release last month the same time Citrix announced that its XenServer is available as a free download. Building on their long term relationship with Microsoft, Citrix said it new virtualization management software – Citrix Essentials will manage both its XenServer and Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V. The Citrix Essentials suite of products/features is aimed at businesses that have a heterogeneous architecture of both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Already a trusted name in application delivery, with the announcement of Citrix Essentials Citrix has position it self in the virtualization management market for both those using Xen, XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The Citrix Essential product line promises enhance management capability on top of Microsoft System Center and XenServer.
According to Citrix, Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of Citrix and Microsoft virtualization environments in corporate datacenters and that Citrix Essentials suite will extends the enterprise management capabilities of Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, helping customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures within a XenServer and Microsoft virtualization environment. Customers with the free version of XenServer will see certain option grayed out on the system. If needed these functions/features are available for purchase. The features you get in Citrix Essentials will depend on if you are using XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V.

These are the features that are common across environment:

  • 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.

Included in Citrix Essentials is Citrix’s Storage Link technology for those who want to use Citrix Essentials to manage their storage. Using Storage Link customers will be able to manage their storage systems from within XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

StorageLink features:

  • StorageLink Gateway enables automated discovery and one-click access to native storage services using any of the leading storage architectures and protocols, including DAS, NAS, SAN, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
  • StorageLink Resource Manager makes common actions in native storage arrays visible from within the virtualization management environment, including partitioning, snapshots, backups and data replication.
  • StorageLink Image Manager provides a centralized library of virtual machine images that can be instantly converted between XenServer and Hyper-V and rapidly cloned and delivered to any number of target hosts.
  • StorageLink Connect provides a set of clearly-defined open APIs that make it easy to link XenServer and Hyper-V environments to third-party backup solutions and enterprise management frameworks.

I think the announcement of Citrix Essentials has highlighted some very fruitful and strategic partnerships done by Citrix. I will wait to see what come out of the Citrix, Intel partnership.

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