Citrix took its virtualization widgetry, repackaged it, and went into the cloud business Monday, announcing a new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family targeted at the would-be hosted cloud services that are chasing both consumers and enterprise data centers.

C3 is supposed to be a complete set of infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering large-scale, on-demand, cloud-based services, whether infrastructure or applications, on both Windows and Linux.

It includes a supposedly newfangled reference architecture made up of a new XenServer Cloud Edition based on Citrix’ Xen hypervisor and the company’s existing NetScaler policy-based delivery technology, which is already supposed to deliver web applications to an estimated 75% of all Internet users every day.

Citrix is using its WANScaler widgetry for federating hosted cloud services and premise-based enterprise clouds and promising that C3 will eventually incorporate a set of open interfaces that lets customers move virtual machines and application resources into a cloud-based datacenter and back again as needed.

It says WANScaler technology will play a critical role in this “enterprise bridge” by accelerating and optimizing application traffic between the cloud and the enterprise datacenter, even over long distances.

Tying it all together is Citrix’ Workflow Studio, which is supposed to provide the orchestration and workflow capabilities that dynamically control and automate the products in the C3 portfolio, integrating them with the customer’s business and IT policy.

Workflow Studio, which is still in preview mode, is supposed to make Citrix clouds “burstable” so they automatically scale resources up and down on-demand, shifting hardware resources to where they are needed and powering them down to save power when they’re not.

XenServer Cloud Edition employs a new consumption-based pricing model so service providers can charge their customers based on metered resource use.

Citrix said the Cloud Edition will include an in-place upgrade package for standalone Xen implementations that includes XenServer’s support for Windows guests, including full VM compatibility with Microsoft Hyper-V.