Citrix Essentials for XenServer

Citrix Essentials for XenServer

Citrix® Essentials™ for XenServer™ extends advanced virtualization management capabilities to Citrix XenServer environments to help customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures. The solution extends the enterprise management capabilities of XenServer in the areas of lab automation, storage management, provisioning services, workflow automation and high availability.

With the enterprise-class, cloud-proven XenServer platform now available for free unlimited use, customers with mixed Windows® and Linux environments, significant investments in Citrix application delivery solutions, or plans to build private clouds can turn to Citrix XenServer.

Citrix Essentials for XenServer includes:

• 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.
• 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 reduces costs and optimizes datacenter infrastructure by letting customers manage a common set of master workload images centrally, then stream them on-demand to any combination of 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 to workload balancing of virtual machines across resource pools based on preset thresholds.

One of the most powerful and innovative new features in the Citrix Essentials product line is the Citrix StorageLink™ technology, which dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of storage management by making it easy to leverage all the power of existing storage systems from within both XenServer and Hyper-V virtualization environments.

Features and benefits

Integrated storage management

Citrix® Essentials™ for XenServer featuring StorageLink™ technology delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms to reduce the cost and complexity of managing storage in XenServer environments. StorageLink provides one-click access to native storage devices for simplified management through storage configuration wizards that leverage existing storage array-based services. Essentials for XenServer with StorageLink supports all storage architectures, including SMI-S based, to deliver faster virtual machine deployment and lower storage management TCO in virtual environments

Automated lab management

Essentials for XenServer automates the management of lab infrastructures to reduce the complexity, time and cost of managing non-production environments typically used in development, test, support and training organizations. Lab management capabilities included in Essentials for XenServer automate the setup and tear-down of complex application workload configurations, provide self-service template libraries for rapid provisioning, reduce virtual machine sprawl and enable cross-team collaboration on common virtual environments. With Essentials for XenServer, organizations can accelerate and improve the process of moving applications workloads through testing and into the production environment while reducing virtual machine sprawl and minimizing configuration errors and delays.

Dynamic provisioning services

Essentials for XenServer accelerates the delivery of server workloads, dramatically improves IT agility and simplifies ongoing IT administration by dynamically provisioning application workloads from a single server image. With Essentials for XenServer, organizations can reduce both the storage costs and the burden of patching, maintaining, testing and supporting hundreds of separate server images. Essentials for XenServer further improves IT efficiencies with its broad coverage for datacenter infrastructure by provisioning workloads to both physical and virtual servers.

High availability

XenServer resource pools can be configured with automated high-availability protection allowing virtual machines on a failed host to automatically restart on another physical server according to priority and resource availability. Essentials for Xenserver provides a range high availability offerings, from automatic restart of hosts and virtual machines after a hardware failure through full fault tolerance of hardware and applications.

Workflow orchestration

Citrix Workflow Studio™ 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.

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