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Citrix Systems Newest Member Of The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Board

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced that it has elected Citrix Systems to its board of directors. In addition, CA, which was appointed to the Board last year, was elected to a full term and joins Advanced Micro Devices, CA, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM, and Microsoft Corporation who were re-elected to the board. These seven companies join Broadcom, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Intel Corporation, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and VMware to drive the development of DMTF standards and initiatives in 2009.

The DMTF board of directors works together to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships and lead the organization’s committee work. DMTF technologies are designed to address the industry’s requirements for interoperable distributed management, providing valuable tools for managing multiple platforms.

“Citrix looks forward to sharing our considerable expertise in the enterprise to alleviate the challenges of managing complex IT environments,” said Abolfazl Sirjani, CTO Office and senior director of advanced products at Citrix. “Over the past 20 years, we have had the privilege of being part of the fabric of many blue-chip companies, in 100 million corporate desktops and 1 million datacenter servers. Our solutions, best practices and ongoing research and development should be of great benefit both to DMTF and to the industry as a whole.”

Sirjani will represent Citrix on the board. Other individuals representing the board member companies include:

  • Valerie Kane, AMD
  • Uri Elzur, Broadcom
  • Paul Lipton, CA
  • Jon Hass, Dell
  • Wayne Adams, EMC
  • Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu
  • Jishnu Mukerji, HP
  • Nobutoshi Sagawa, Hitachi, Ltd.
  • Mike Baskey, IBM
  • Kevin Cline, Intel Corporation
  • Josh Cohen, Microsoft Corporation
  • Robert Wipfell, Novell
  • Tony DiCenzo, Oracle
  • Mark Carlson, Sun Microsystems
  • Winston Bumpus, VMware

Citrix Receiver Technology Preview for iPhone Released

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Today, Citrix released the Technical Preview of the upcoming ICA client for the Apple iPhone called “Citrix Receiver” (iTunes link).

Anyone with a properly configured Citrix XenApp environment can download the Citrix Receiver and access authorized company apps from their iPhone today ! Now is the time to start testing the iPhone in your environment, look for ways to increase productivity, and have some fun.

Note: Works with Wi-Fi or 3G connection, Citrix XenApp and XenApp Web Services, Windows applications hosted on Citrix XenApp.  And the Citrix XenApp secure application feature is not supported with this Technology Preview Release.

Also watch this Citrix Receiver video from Chris Fleck.

Citrix Project Satori Sees Light Of Day

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From the Xen blog:

Citrix Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.

The complete source code and license information (GPL version 2) on this project is now available here.

HEI Systems & Solutions Debuts Integrated Storage and Virtualization Solutions

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HEI Systems & Solutions announced the release of two new products last week targeted at small to mid-sized businesses looking to leverage advanced virtualization solutions at an affordable price. HEI’s Z2 Systems line includes the R3000 Storage Server and the R3000x Integrated Storage and Virtualization Server.The R3000 is a one rack unit (1U) storage server with 3 terabytes of redundant enterprise class storage.Included with the Storage Server is HEI developed software integrated with Citrix XenServer™ to provide configurable snap-shotting, on-disk cloning and roll-back of individual virtual machines, in addition to other virtual machine management and automation capabilities. By providing an orchestration layer between the storage and the virtualization components, the Z2 solution enables organizations of all sizes to implement enterprise level system management and disaster recovery solutions without significant capital investment and ongoing operational costs. The R3000 is capable of expanding up to 96 terabytes using a mixture of Enterprise SATA or SAS hard drives, and is available with redundant, energy efficient power supplies.

The R3000x system is built upon the Supermicro 1U Twin “twin server” architecture that includes a similar storage platform as in the R3000 and an additional dedicated server in the same 1U chassis, providing a platform for virtualization with dual quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs and 16GB of RAM (up to 48GB available). The unique architecture includes a dedicated 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet storage network between the two nodes, providing high-speed and secure data access. 

In general, the Z2 Systems are priced at about 10-25 percent of the cost compared to larger enterprise class storage platforms, but provide the same advanced features required to effectively host a reliable and supportable virtualization infrastructure. The R3000 has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $5,650 for the basic storage server, and the R3000x is priced at $6,449 with the integrated virtualization platform.

XenServer for Free !

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With VMWorld Europe coming up,it seems Citrix is trying to get VMWare out of its warm cozy mansion, it seems they plan to announce next week that they won’t charge anymore for XenServer.

Altough the underlying Xen technology is fully Open source , Citrix doesn’t plan on fully opensourcing XenServer itselve yet. So how will they make their money then you’d ask ? By shipping a new managment framwork that will support both XenServer and the Microschoft Hyper-V platform.

It looks like Citrix is also planning to announce a similar agreement with Micro
soft as RedHat already did earlier this week.

So what will VMWare do as a reaction next week ?

Here Comes Citrix XenDesktop 3

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Citrix Systems today announced Citrix XenDesktop 3, the newest release of its desktop virtualization solution. XenDesktop 3, a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, incorporates several of the company’s new Citrix HDX technologies, giving virtual desktop users a richer “high-definition” experience with enhanced support for multimedia, audio and video.

XenDesktop 3 also dramatically improves scalability, hosting twice as many virtual desktops per server as previous versions. And with version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first product on the market to deliver Microsoft Windows desktops from a common set of centrally managed images that can be run either in the datacenter (hosted), or directly on a PC or thin client device (local). This new capability gives IT organizations far more flexibility, reducing desktop management costs by making efficient use of distributed processing power across both servers and end point devices.

XenDesktop 3 includes several enhancements that dramatically improve virtual machine density and efficiency in the datacenter, allowing customers to host up to twice as many hosted virtual desktops per server as previous versions.  These new optimizations cut server acquisition costs in half and dramatically reduce ongoing management and power consumption costs, allowing significantly larger deployments than before at no additional cost.

With version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first solution on the market to deliver both hosted virtual desktops and local streamed desktops from a single image store, leveraging the same delivery infrastructure. Most virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions on the market offer only hosted virtual desktops, in which each desktop runs inside a virtual machine in the datacenter.

Adding support for local streamed desktops lets XenDesktop administrators stream desktops from the same golden master images, and execute them locally on any network-connected endpoint capable of running a desktop operating system. This powerful combination adds significant flexibility and cost savings, allowing IT to centrally manage desktops for office workers and run them wherever it makes the most sense, leveraging the distributed processing power of both servers and endpoint devices.

XenDesktop 3 also includes a variety of new features to support simpler management, easier user personalization and enhanced security. Most significant among these new features is fully integrated user profile management, making it far easier for IT to provide a consistent, personalized experience for each unique user every time they log in. Version 3 also includes broad support for smart card security authentication systems which are widely adopted throughout government, financial services and healthcare organizations.  XenDesktop not only enables this added level of security for gaining general access to the desktop environment, it also ensures that this information is seamlessly and transparently passed through to individual applications within each virtual desktop.

Citrix XenDesktop 3 will be generally available from authorized Citrix partners in February 2009, and from the Citrix website at http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop. Suggested retail pricing begins at $75 per concurrent user.