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DataCore’s SANsymphony and SANmelody Certified On Citrix XenServer 5

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DataCore Software, provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that its SANsymphony and SANmelody products have been certified on Citrix‘s newest XenServer 5 release as virtual SAN appliances, as well as on both standard servers and blades. With XenServer 5, Citrix has optimized Citrix XenApp performance on XenServer virtual machines. According to Citrix, this enables XenApp workloads to be virtualized with as little as 7% overhead and as many as 73% more users than XenApp workloads virtualized with competing products. Citrix XenApp (formerly Citrix Presentation Server) is used by more than 100 million users and 99% of the Fortune Global 500.

DataCore Virtual SAN appliance and storage virtualization software are certified for XenServer 5
Through its own rigorous testing, Citrix has certified that both SANsymphony and SANmelody software support XenServer 5 virtual machines as shared storage pools with advanced storage virtualization functions critical to demanding virtual server environments. The manufacturer-independent features include fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, remote replication to disaster recovery sites, non-disruptive virtual data migration, thin provisioning and high speed caching for performance acceleration.
DataCore Software

eG Innovations Adds XenServer and Sun LDoms Support to Its VM Monitor

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eG Innovations today announced that its eG VM Monitor now supports Citrix XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Domains (LDoms).

The enhancements are part of v4.2 of the company’s eG Enterprise Suite, which already supports VMware ESX and ESX 3i servers as well as Solaris Containers. The new software release also strengthens management of VMware environments. eG Enterprise agents can now be integrated directly within VMware’s Virtual Center. This greatly simplifies configuration of the monitoring for VMware server farms.

Also, the eG VM Monitor software now monitors the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager to provide an end-to-end view of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment. A new VM Search capability makes it easier to track the status and performance of virtual machines (VMs) as they move from one physical server to another.

The eG Enterprise Suite monitors Citrix XenServers and Sun LDoms in much the same way it monitors VMware ESX servers. eG Enterprise v4.2 offers agent-based and agentless monitoring of CitrixXen server v4.0 and 4.1. For agent-based monitoring, an eG agent on the control domain of a XenServer monitors the hypervisor and all its virtual machines (VMs).
Administrators can also choose to monitor their XenServers without agents, with either a Linux or a Windows system being used to host the remote data collector. Citrix XenMotion activity is tracked to determine when, how often, why and where VMs migrate to.

eG Enterprise v4.2 provides many other improvements and new features. These include: tracking and reporting uptime of individual VMs, ability to share customized views and reports among all or specific administrators, allowing administrators to select a console display “skin” (color) of their choice, providing selectable alert modes (e.g., email and SMS) to accommodate preferences of administrators who work in shifts; and custom monitoring of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The eG Enterprise v4.2 will be available at the end of September. Pricing for any virtualization platform supported is per server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (e.g., CPU, memory, socket) of the server, or the number of virtual machines or virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25-node environment starts at $50,000.

Citrix Releases XenApp 5, Will It Prove To Become The Application Virtualization Standard?

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Remember when Brian Madden pointed out that Citrix XenApp 5.0 would be delayed for several months? Well, he was right, technically. Anyhow, Citrix today announced the release of Citrix XenApp 5, and claims it “breaks through performance and operating-cost barriers, making application start times up to 10 times faster, dramatically improving end-user experience and lowering application management costs by more than 25 percent over previous versions”.

“XenApp 5 broadens the horizon of the end-user experience and accessibility by delivering an end-to-end virtualization solution that addresses the needs of both local and hosted applications,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In addition, XenApp 5 is giving new and existing customers a welcome boost in performance at an attractive price-point, two highly sought-after requirements for companies investing in strategic technologies in today’s economy.”

XenApp, in combination with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer, creates an end-to-end virtualization solution that spans servers, applications and desktops. The new XenApp 5 release is being featured on September 9, 2008 as part of a global, online launch event, called Citrix Delivery Center Live!

With the release of XenApp 5, Citrix claims it is raising the bar with significant new improvements to performance, user experience and cost savings. In total, XenApp 5 includes more than 50 new major enhancements, according to the official press release.

XenApp 5, which runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform, leverages all the enhancements in Windows Server 2008 and fully supports Windows Server 2003. This enables existing Windows Server 2003 customers to immediately deploy Windows Server 2008 into their existing XenApp environments in any mix.

XenApp 5 will be available September 10, 2008. For North America, suggested retail pricing is per concurrent user (CCU) and includes one year of Subscription Advantage:

  • Advanced Edition – US $350
  • Enterprise Edition – US $450
  • Platinum Edition – US $600

Standalone pricing for client-side application streaming and virtualization begins as low as $60 per CCU.

Citrix Systems

StoneFly IP SAN Configurations Now Fit For Citrix XenServer

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StoneFly, a supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, today announced that all of its IP SAN configurations have completed Citrix Ready compatibility verification testing for use with server virtualization solutions from Citrix Systems.

StoneFly’s High-Availability Storage Concentrator (HSC), Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) and OptiSAN Storage Concentrator product lines have been optimized for Citrix XenServer server solutions, which are designed for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter.

The compatibility bolsters StoneFly’s existing support for fast integration of networked storage with virtual servers – available via StoneFusion, the company’s IP-based, block-level provisioning platform. StoneFly pioneered storage virtualization over five years ago with StoneFusion, which centralizes storage management, control and monitoring of logical storage volumes.
XenServer compatibility allows StoneFly to further simplify IP SAN deployment for its customers: StoneFly’s support for network boot technologies (both software and hardware initiator based) in diskless virtual server environments saves IT administration time, and streamlines operations. Customers can also reduce datacenter costs and consolidate resources by using IP SANs to facilitate the use of diskless servers and virtual servers.
StoneFly is planning further enhancements over the coming months to its integration with Xen environments to build upon the seamless storage/server experience that it is providing to customers.

Monitor Your Citrix XenServer Environment With Hyperic HQ

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Open source Web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer management and monitoring software for Citrix XenServer. The new software allows XenServer administrators to quickly and correctly assess IT decisions within their XenServer environment.

“Our customers manage some of the world’s biggest Web environments where every second of downtime can mean losing revenue, users or both. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer delivers these organizations the necessary tools to be ultra-responsive to changes in user patterns and application performance,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO for Hyperic HQ. “By adding support for XenServer, we are once again taking the guesswork out of the management side of the equation. In providing management support for all virtualized and non-virtualized systems from one central location, we continue in our mission to make Web-based applications more manageable.”

Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer combines performance metrics, log data, configuration and security events in a single view correlated by time. These events can be used to link errors reported in the XenServer logs with other performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment, generate alerts or trigger automated control actions to remediate the current problem. Additionally, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer allows users to suspend, shutdown, start and reboot directly from the HQ interface and record the action in the event history for future reference.

Currently, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer is available on Hyperic’s community Hyperforge. Hyperic will incorporate this new plugin directly into the core distribution in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 4.0 release, due out later this summer.

Hyperic

Citrix Announces Public Beta of XenServer 4.2

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Yesterday, Citrix released the public beta of the next version of XenServer, which may or may not be called XenServer 4.2 but is still being referred to as ‘Project Orlando’. Judging by the comments on the Citrix forum, the release was indeed scheduled for end of July, with a final version coming in September.

Citrix XenServer 4.2 comes with Xen 3.2, with Xen 3.3 remaining in final testing stage. On to the Xen.org blog, you can already post feature requests for Xen 3.4.

Virtualization.info broke the news about the release and lists the following additional new features:

  • Automated high availability
  • VM grouping, searching and tagging
  • Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
  • Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
  • Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
  • Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
  • Support for alerts as email

You can enroll for the public beta program here.

Citrix Systems