(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — On-demand data center and hosting services provider SoftLayer Technologies (www.softlayer.com) has begun offering Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise Edition as a new service that can be added on top of Citrix XenServer virtual machines to extend server virtualization management.
According to SoftLayer’s Tuesday announcement, Citrix Essentials provides integration with native storage services, workload balancing, high availability, and performance monitoring and reporting. It gives IT administrators advantages throughout the application delivery lifecycle. Intelligent workload placement capabilities optimize computing resource usage, and rapid provisioning streamlines the creation of new virtual machine resources on demand.
“At SoftLayer, we are proud to consistently offer our customers the newest and greatest features,” SoftLayer chief technology officer Nathan Day said in a statement. “Citrix Essentials is yet another product that gives our customers increased control over management of virtual server environments. Citrix Essentials adds on features such as high availability to ensure uptime and dynamic workload balancing that helps to distribute workloads intelligently across available resources.”
Key benefits include optimized use of computing resources, accelerated provisioning, reduced sprawl and energy consumption, simplified maintenance and minimize downtime. The solution also simplifies virtual environment storage management with its backup and maintenance features that integrate with existing storage platforms.
Citrix XenServer Essentials can be provisioned with a server order and is available on order forms as an operating system add-on. As with all SoftLayer services, management is available through SoftLayer’s customer portal, where customers will also now be able to view their daily virtual machine count statistics.
