Citrix continues its relationship with Microsoft by extending Hyper-V
Microsoft and Citrix have had a “unique” relationship, I guess you could say, over the years. Citrix and Microsoft have walked a fine line of partnership/competition in regards to Terminal Services and Presentation Server (XenApp). It looks like this dance is continuing in to the hardware virtualization sector as well. Citrix has a set of tools (called XenServer) to manage the Xen bare metal hypervisor (Citrix doesn’t actually own the Xen hypervisor itself). As you know, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is a bare metal hypervisor (like Xen or ESX) and Microsoft has a set of tools to manager Hyper-V called Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Now, Citrix has a set of tools called “Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V” that will add more functionality on top of Hyper-V. Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V adds:
- Advanced Storage Integration
- Dynamic Provisioning Services
- Hypervisor Interoperability
- Automated Lab Management
