Now more than ever, enterprises are moving to cloud computing to lower capital costs and deliver more responsive and timely IT services to the business. The growth of both public and private clouds is causing the IT industry to rapidly expand beyond the traditional boundaries of the datacenter and expose new concepts such as platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to users via an enterprise network. Inherent in the promise of cloud computing is an extremely flexible IT infrastructure that can be quickly customized to the meet needs of the business, rather than having the business bend to the needs of IT.

To deliver on these requirements, IT administrators are relying on core virtualization as the foundation to their computing environment  and advanced virtualization services to help automate service delivery across the entire computing infrastructure. Using Citrix XenServer to build a cloud infrastructure, organizations have reduced the costs associated with maintaining their datacenters while creating a flexible infrastructure to meet the demands of their expanding environments.

Extending self-service with cloud computing

Cloud computing is about fast, reliable services and quick response times to new computing requests. XenServer includes a web-based self-service console which allows IT administrators to create and delegate individual VM rights to application owners, and allows application owners to request new VMs and manage day-to-day operations.

A flexible enterprise cloud network

A properly built cloud network includes the ability to host a VM on any server and to move a VM freely around an organization's IT infrastructure. Using the distributed virtual switching capabilities of XenServer, IT administrators can create a multi-tenant, highly secure and extremely flexible network fabric that allows them to move VMs freely within the network while maintaining security and control.

Pooling hardware for simplified IT infrastructure management

As cloud environments grow, it is commonplace to have hardware from several different manufacturers and IT generations. With XenServer, IT administrators can manage multiple resource pools that contain servers with different processor types while still supporting full VM motion, high availability, workload balancing and shared storage functionality.

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