Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V

Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V

Citrix introduces a new solution called Citrix® Essentials™ for Microsoft® Hyper-V™, offering advanced virtualization management capabilities for Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V to help customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures. The new solution will extend the enterprise management capabilities of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center in the areas of storage management, provisioning services and lab automation.

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:

• 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.
• 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.

Features and benefits

Integrated storage management

Essentials for Hyper-V™ featuring StorageLink™ technology delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms to reduce the cost and complexity of managing storage in Hyper-V environments. StorageLink provides one-click access to native storage devices for simplified management through storage configuration wizards that leverage existing storage array-based services and technologies directly from within its Microsoft® Management Console.

Automated lab management

Essentials for Hyper-V automates the management of lab infrastructure to reduce the complexity, time and cost of developing and maintaining applications in virtualized environments. Take advantage of lab management tools within Essentials for Hyper-V to automate the setup and tear-down of application test beds. Develop, test and deploy applications faster and reduce virtual machine sprawl with fine-grained controls for automating and managing lab resources.

Dynamic provisioning services

Essentials for Hyper-V accelerates the delivery of server workloads, dramatically improves IT agility and simplifies ongoing IT administration by dynamically provisioning countless workloads from a single server image. With Essentials for Hyper-V, organizations can reduce both storage costs and the burden of patching, maintaining, testing and supporting hundreds of separate server images. It even allows administrators to provision complete Windows Server® 2008 images, including the hypervisor, to bare metal machines, with or without internal disks.

Workflow orchestration

Workflow Studio™ orchestration is an infrastructure process automation platform that enables you to transform your datacenter into a dynamic delivery center. Built on top of Windows® PowerShell™ and Windows Workflow Foundation, Workflow Studio provides an easy-to-use, graphical interface for workflow composition that virtually eliminates scripting. Workflow Studio orchestration acts as the glue across the IT infrastructure allowing administrators to easily tie technology components together via workflows.

Multi-hypervisor support

Essentials for Hyper-V allows virtual machines to be run on either Hyper-V or XenServer hypervisors without modification. Easily migrate virtual machines from XenServer environments to Hyper-V for unparalleled IT flexibility. Hypervisor interoperability and migration is made possible with common virtual hard disk formats and common storage management tools across Hyper-V and XenServer environments, including the automation of storage resource configuration across hypervisor hosts.

Microsoft management support

Essentials for Hyper-V is based on the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0 and provides a consistent management experience for administrators by integrating with Virtual Machine Manager and other Microsoft tools you already own. It is based on .NET 2.0 and integrates with PowerShell-based services and applications.

For a technical consultant to call you click here and they will do so at the time you specify. If you are looking for a quotation or need help designing your solution then click here. If you require access to our SECURE online catalogue then click here.