News
VMLogix Enhances 'Essential' Functionality
Virtualization vendor VMLogix has partnered with
Citrix to shore up its brand-new offering, adding lab management and automation
capabilities to
Citrix
Essentials.
Palo Alto, CA-based VMLogix announced today that it has signed an OEM agreement to provide
LabManager and StageManager with Essentials. Both products will be re-branded by
Citrix and bundled with the Platinum version of Essentials. The Enterprise
version of Essentials won't include the products.
Sameer Dholakia, VMLogix's CEO, said the deal is important from various
points of view. For Citrix, it helps the company "Close important gaps at the
management level." Market leader VMware offers its own lab management software,
also called Lab Manager, and Citrix needed an offering to compete with VMware.
Customers benefit, Dholakia said, from new options. "It
provides choice. In today's [VMware] ESX-dominated world, customers choose the
platform and get whatever management tools come along with it."
The benefit for VMLogix is obviously its increased profile and usage in
the types of enterprise computing environments Citrix hopes to infiltrate with
Essentials.
LabManager, explained Dholakia, "Is typically for pure test-dev lab
[environments]. The use case is much more around setting up and tearing down
virtualization environments" for software development teams. StageManager is
more concerned with workflow, and bridging the gap between how an application
gets out of the lab and onto a live production network.
Essentials works hand-in-hand
with Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, a virtualization platform introduced by
Microsoft last June. The addition of VMLogix products helps narrow the gap
between VMware’s offerings and the competition.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.