Citrix aims high with XenServer 5, cloud center

As VMWorld moves into full swing, rival Citrix launched a major upgrade of its core XenServer and based upon it a cloud computing infrastructure for service providers. Both are available now.

Citrix's XenServer 5, based upon the open source Xen hypervisor, adds more than 100 new features to the core product including advanced high availability, auto restart, and failover features along with a distributed management architecture to prevent a single point of failure from downing an entire server cluster, the company announced.

Some of the high availability features come with XenServer 5 while others -- such as full fault tolerance -- are delivered in conjunction with Citrix partner Marathon Technologies.

XenServer 5 also expands support for replication and remote mirroring and offers built-in replication of virtual machine metadata, thus allowing for easy recovery of applications in the event of a disaster or failure.

Citrix clearly wants to convey to enterprises and service providers that it has robust virtualization platform that can compete against VMware's virtual infrastructure. The existing platform has live migration, resource pooling and workload provisioning, the company pointed out in a press release Monday.

The company also emphasizes that it supports open storage APIs so that customers can perform snapshots, cloning, replication and provisioning from third party storage systems  from the XenServer management console. Storage systems supported include those from EqualLogic and NetApp.

The company also unveiled the Citrix Cloud Center, a cloud computing infrastructure for service providers based on XenServer 5 Cloud Edition along with Citrix's Netscaler, Citrix WANScaler and Citrix Workflow Studio Tech Preview. 3Tera, Skytap and Softlayer announced support for the infrastructure in the company's statement.