Citrix Essentials™ provides a set of virtualization management and automation capabilities to help customers transform datacenters into proactive and automated delivery centers. The Citrix Essentials platform builds on, and extends, the capabilities of either the free Citrix XenServer™ or Microsoft Hyper-V™ base virtualization platform.

The Citrix Essentials platform:   Citrix Essentials for XenServer Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V

Citrix Essentials product line consists of Six broad categories of capabilities:

• Seamless Storage Integration Citrix StorageLink™ technology exposes the advanced data and storage management features in today’s storage systems directly to a virtualized environment.
• Dynamic Workload Management provides granular visibility to real-time system performance and intelligently places and rebalances virtual workloads across XenServer resource pools to ensure optimal utilization and performance.
• Automated Lifecycle Management reduces the complexity, time and cost of developing, maintaining and delivering applications to both lab, and production system environments.
• Dynamic provisioning services provides on-demand deployment of workloads to any combination of virtual machines or physical servers from a single golden image.
• High availability for the automatic restart and intelligent placement of virtual machines in case of failure of guest systems or physical servers.
• Workflow orchestration for the simplified scripting to automation of key management processes.

Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of Citrix and Microsoft virtualization environments in corporate datacenters, while enabling easy interaction with existing servers that have already been virtualized with other third-party products.

“With three quarters of servers still not virtualized, the server virtualization market is still wide open. We believe XenServer and Hyper-V will be the two fastest growing virtualization platforms in this space going forward, each appealing broadly to different segments. Citrix is aligning its server virtualization strategy around adding significant value to these two high growth platforms, helping customers achieve more manageable, scalable and agile datacenters in a way that leverages their existing investments in the most efficient way possible.”

- Peter Levine, SVP and general manager, Virtualization Management Division, Citrix Systems

The future...here today

Most virtualization vendors focus on providing virtual machine management capabilities for a single virtualization platform… theirs. Citrix Essentials has been designed from the start to provide advanced virtualization management capabilities on both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, the choice is yours.

“As enterprise datacenters become increasingly virtualized, customers need hypervisor-agnostic management solutions that go beyond general virtual machine administration—automating and streamlining virtualization throughout the application lifecycle, delivering workloads across a mix of physical and virtual machines and simplifying integration with third-party enterprise storage systems.”

- Chris Wolf, senior analyst, Burton Group.