Today, HotLink, a Citrix Ready Technology Partner, announced a new product called HotLink Hybrid Express for Citrix.

HotLink is known for their cool technology that allows customers to administer and manage multiple hypervisor platforms and cloud workloads from within the commonly used VMware vCenter. This hybrid style of virtual host and VM management is great for customers who are accustomed to working with vCenter, but want to smoothly and easily add XenServer in order to take advantage of its advanced features, better performance, and lower overall costs that come from reducing the vTax.

HotLink Hybrid Express for Citrix is a laser-focused solution for Citrix customers who want to move XenApp and XenDesktop workloads over to XenServer but find it difficult to do so when their IT operations, tools, scripts and training revolve around vCenter. With HotLink, Citrix customers who want to evaluate or move to XenServer don’t have to deploy redundant management stacks, re-write scripts, or immediately learn a new hypervisor management paradigm.

HotLink plugs into vCenter and enables XenServer hosts and VMs to show up right next to the vSphere ones. It uses the familiar vCenter console and management techniques, so there is no re-training involved. Underneath the covers, HotLink does all the work to translate XenServer metadata into the native format that vCenter and its ecosystem understands with no code changes to either vCenter or XenServer. Workloads are automatically converted from vSphere to XenServer, and there’s no need to rebuild virtual machine templates. It’s a completely seamless hybrid management environment, yet deployment takes less than 15 minutes.

Some key features of the new HotLink Hybrid Express for Citrix offering include:

  • Natively administer and manage XenServer resources within vCenter (no additional consoles required)
  • Full vCenter functionality is extended to XenServer
    • Fine-grained host and VM management, monitoring, networking and security
    • Seamless cross-platform cloning, snapshots and migration
    • Provisioning to XenServer from existing VMware templates
    • Live migration within homogenous clusters
  • Any-to-any workload conversions between hybrid formats
  • Ability to utilize VMware-compatible tools and automation scripts, including existing workflows and PowerCLI scripts.

What’s more, HotLink is offering a special promotion that will run throughout Q4 of 2017 that drastically reduces the already low price of HotLink Hybrid Express for Citrix.  Along with the great promotional price, HotLink is offering the following during Q4:

  • A no-charge, 2-month/3-host license to quickly evaluate the solution.
  • The ability to extend the low promotional price for up to 3 years.

We are excited about this fantastic opportunity for customers to take advantage of a great deal that allows them to move Citrix-related workloads over to or to expand their Citrix deployments on Citrix XenServer. It has never been easier or smoother for customers to transition Citrix workloads over to XenServer and we are proud to have HotLink as the technology partner who is helping to make it happen.

Citrix customers or partners who want more details on HotLink Hybrid Express for Citrix, need pricing or are interested in working with HotLink to help with the transition of XenDesktop and XenApp deployments to XenServer should contact Citrix@HotLink.com.

To learn more about the solution, check out these resources: