The blog..

A lot of stuff is going on with the announcement that XenServer is now free… or the free version delivers a lot more functionality anyway than the free hypervisors have been doing so far. I hope we will see VMware joining in and giving us more of their management tools for free as well. To me it would be a great solution is Virtualization in general with the most needed central management is free, like Citrix have done now, allowing customers to buy the add-on features they need.

Citrix Essentials which is the name for the “XenApp of the Server Virtualization world” has been announced and the major news for me is the strong integration with Microsoft Hyper-V. To me Microsoft Hyper-V has always been a player in the market which i had high expectations of, i think Microsoft has succeeded well in building a very customer base often with a dedicated “microsoft strategy”.. Loving Microsoft or not, i think that is an impressive achievement.

Citrix Essentials include a lot of cool features which will be the same value-add for both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, i will try to show explanations, demos and reviews of the components as i think it is way more important than the cool names someone in Marketing came up with

For this post i came across this video-demo of the Advanced StorageLink technology and i would like to share it with you guys. The demo is shown on a Hyper-V environment.

I think the fact of having a product like this, which can easily be updated with new features, greater support in storage vendors and whatever comes next puts Citrix in a unique position to offer value-add like they have done for so many years with Metaframe, Presentation Server, XenApp(wonder whats next). Who knows.. maybe Citrix Essentials will be available in a VMware edition at some point?

As i was looking around for more references and buzz on the Citrix Essentials stuff i came across Alexander Ervik Johnsen homepage. He also mentions the Citrix Essentials features and i added his site to my list of blogs i read. Good to find another scandinavian on the big bad internet. Ervik is also recognized as a CTP by Citrix for his contributions.

Rene Vester