Citrix announced Citrix XenServer 4.1 and Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition, the first new releases to its server virtualization product line since completing the acquisition of XenSource last quarter. With the new releases, XenServer becomes the first solution in the industry to address both virtual and physical servers. With fewer than 15 percent of all corporate servers expected to be virtualized by 2012 according to industry estimates, the ability to dynamically provision virtual application workloads across 100 percent of servers in the typical datacenter provides a significant advantage for XenServer customers. The new XenServer release also adds more than 50 new enhancements, improving the product’s ease-of-use, performance and increased support for enterprise storage systems. In addition, XenServer adds specific new optimization for Citrix XenApp (the new name for Citrix Presentation Server), ensuring customers the most scalable, high performance solution for Windows application delivery running in a virtualized environment.  

“IT organizations are under constant pressure to manage increasingly complex datacenter environments while improving service levels and operational efficiency...all while reducing expenses,” said John Humphreys, program vice president, Enterprise Platform Group, IDC. “IDC believes that server virtualization in fact can result in significant benefits including reduced hardware costs, facilities and operational expenses, all while providing a degree of business continuity to a greater percentage of the server assets in a customers’ data center.”

Delivering the Dynamic Datacenter
Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition includes new capabilities that provision both virtual and physical servers, extending the product’s value to servers running native workload images and assuring server consistency within silos by provisioning simultaneously from a single standard workload image.  The result is increased IT responsiveness and agility by enabling capacity on-demand, and the ability to dynamically manage provisioning for disaster recovery and business continuity.

“We expect the virtualization market to continue to grow, but understand that our customers want solutions that address 100 percent of the servers in their datacenter today – both physical and virtual,” said Phil Montgomery, senior director, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems.  “Our customers want the ability to create a datacenter that can dynamically adapt to changing business needs, regardless of whether servers are virtualized and physical.  Citrix XenServer Platinum edition is the first step in bringing these previously separate worlds together.”

Extending Benefits of Virtualization to Storage
While most virtualization products consume valuable server resources to run proprietary management tools to manage storage services, the new storage delivery services in XenServer 4.1 enable each hardware component to do what it does best by offering tight integration with native storage hardware. The initial implementation in XenServer 4.1 is the Storage Delivery Services for the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, a fully virtualized data management environment.  Data ONTAP provides a unified storage platform for virtualized environments and a foundation for application-empowered data management to free physical and virtual servers to run business-critical application workloads, not storage management–related tasks. With this new release, Citrix customers can immediately take full advantage of the rich data management and data protection capabilities in their existing NetApp storage systems including thin provisioning, cloning, replication, and backup and recovery directly from the XenCenter management console.

“Enterprises are undergoing significant IT transformations that are being driven by server virtualization,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp.  “Networked storage is a major requirement for enterprises’ virtualized environments, so we are teaming with Citrix to provide our customers a fully integrated virtualization solution that leverages NetApp’s core set of standard data management features and capabilities found in Data ONTAP with the new XenServer 4.1 release. All this comes at no extra cost to our customers and can be used directly from the XenCenter management console, simplifying customers’ virtual and physical Citrix server environments. Customers can leverage this joint, certified solution today to start their path to creating their transparent data center infrastructures.”

Advancing the Virtualization Infrastructure
The latest version of Citrix XenServer also includes new optimizations for XenApp, including enhanced scalability, faster performance, and the ability to conduct virtual infrastructure platform upgrades and automated patching with zero downtime.  The 4.1 release also includes many other new capabilities, including support for NIC bonding, 10Gb/s networking, and 64-bit enterprise Linux guests.

“We initially chose to implement Citrix XenServer to cut down on the hardware costs associated with multiple physical servers, and were quickly impressed with the other benefits that Citrix XenServer provides, including disaster recovery and scalability,” said Matt Alisch, controller, Martin Selig Real Estate.  “Should one of our virtual servers fail, a new server can be built within the same Xen environment and within a couple of hours an image of the failed server can be restored and we move on.  What took a day or two to recover in a traditional server environment can now be done in a few hours, helping maintain productivity and keep consultant costs at a minimum.  Furthermore, should our IT requirements expand and require more servers, there is no need to purchase additional hardware. New virtual servers can be built within the existing Citrix XenServer and be brought online very efficiently saving both money and time.  We have found that the investment in XenServer pays for itself many times over.”

Pricing and Availability
Citrix XenServer 4.1 is currently available as a public beta from the Citrix web site and will be generally available in March 2008. Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition will be generally available shortly after in Q2. Pricing starts at $5,000 for Platinum Edition; $3,000 for Enterprise Edition, and $900 for standard edition (all prices are for 2 CPU socket systems).  Lower priced annual licenses are also available and the popular Express Edition continues as a freely available download from the Citrix web site.