Citrix offers advanced management
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Citrix Systems' new product line brings advanced management and automation capabilities to the Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms.
Citrix Systems has unveiled a new product line that brings advanced management and automation capabilities to the Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms, the company said.
Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V offers capabilities such as lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration and seamless integration with leading storage systems, which let organizations turn their datacenters into automated delivery centers, Citrix officials said.
Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of datacenters running Citrix and Microsoft virtualization environments. Because virtualization is now built into Windows Server 2008, more Windows users are expected to move to Hyper-V. Citrix will offer XenServer for those shops running mixed Linux and Windows environments.
Also, Citrix Essential will allow easy interaction with existing servers that have already been virtualized with other third-party products, officials said.
Citrix Essentials will extend the capabilities of Citrix XenCenter and Microsoft System Center, the primary management systems of XenServer and Hyper-V, respectively.
SystemCenter is Microsoft’s core life cycle management tool for both physical and virtual environments offering provisioning, patching, monitoring and backup capabilities, said David Greschler, director of virtualization strategy with Microsoft. However, Citrix Essentials will bring more intelligence and advanced automation, provisioning and storage management capabilities, he said.
As enterprise datacenters become increasingly virtualized, organizations need hypervisor-agnostic management solutions that go beyond general virtual machine administration, said Chris Wolf, senior analyst with the Burton Group.
Users need products that can automate and streamline virtualization throughout the application life cycle, deliver workloads across a mix of physical and virtual machines and simplify integration with third-party enterprise storage systems, he said.
Citrix also unveiled a new version of XenServer that will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment. With this new release, XenServer offers features like centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion.
Free hypervisors with limited functionality have been around for a long time, but the new version of XenSever is different because it provides an enterprise-ready virtual infrastructure platform with centralized management, live motion and support for unlimited virtual machines and servers, said Mark Bowker, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.
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