Citrix Opens Up the Cloud for VMware Customers

Latest Release of CloudStack Brings the Leading Open Source Cloud Platform to VMware vSphere and OracleVM Users

Last week at VMworld 2001 in Las Vegas Citrix Systems announced a new edition of CloudStack™, which will feature enhanced support for both the VMware vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors, enabling VMware and Oracle customers to manage their virtualized servers as a highly available, scalable cloud computing environment.  Citrix CloudStack is not just a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top, it is a production-ready, free and open source cloud infrastructure platform that helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.  The new release is based on the same CloudStack solution that has been used by some of the world’s largest and most successful public clouds to roll out new cloud services up to 50 times faster and at one-fifth the cost of alternative solutions(1).  This is the first release of the product since Citrix acquired Cloud.com in July.

Recognizing that organizations currently face a daunting task when trying to build their own IaaS cloud environment, Citrix CloudStack provides customers with the fastest path to the cloud by providing the most advanced software technologies for building highly scalable, highly reliable cloud computing environments.  More than 60 large-scale production clouds have been deployed using the open source CloudStack, including GoDaddy, GreenQloud, KT, Nokia, Tata Communications and Zynga.

As the industry ventures into the Cloud Era, a vast array of new cloud services will emerge, requiring platforms that are purpose-built for cloud computing – radically different from the traditional enterprise datacenters of today.  These platforms need to be designed from the ground up to deliver multi-tier, multi-tenant services in the simplest and most cost-effective way.  CloudStack addresses these challenges with a powerful, hypervisor-agnostic solution designed to help organizations build clouds the way the world’s largest and most successful public clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient.  With advanced networking capabilities, high-availability and a robust web interface, CloudStack gives users complete control of their cloud infrastructure through a single pane of glass.

100% Open Source

Last week Citrix merged the final bits of commercial CloudStack code into the open source repositories. In the past we maintained two codebases one for paying customers and one for our open source users. Going forward there will be one open source code base.  This allows Citrix to remove redundancies and focus on making one excellent product. With this code merge Citrix will also add a couple of new features and we will be advertising a number of lesser-known capabilities of CloudStack.

Cross Hypervisor Support

With CloudStack you can use multiple hypervisors, proprietary or open source (VMware, XenServer, Xen Cloud Platform, KVM or OracleVM). Not only can you use whatever hypervisor you want but also you can use multiple hypervisors in a highly available cloud computing instance.

VMware vSphere

As the most popular virtualization technology many if not most IT organizations already use VMware.  VMware’s cloud migration path is vCloud, which is well respected, but it’s also expensive and proprietary. By using CloudStack, VMware customers not only break free from the proprietary costs that VMware imposes with its platform, but they also gain the added flexibility and control associated with leveraging what we believe to be the best open source cloud platform available.

Additionally, CloudStack eases the financial impact associated with the “vTax,” the term used by many in the cloud and virtualization communities to refer to the latest update to the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that added costs to customers’ existing cloud and virtualization implementations.  Since CloudStack can support multiple hypervisors in the same cloud, VMware customers can mix and match their virtualization technologies under the same cloud environment and optimize their costs, as well as the business value.

OracleVM

This release also provides support for Oracle VM a commercial virtualization technology from Oracle that is based on the Xen hypervisor.  Once again CloudStack gives you the choice to use this hypervisor or some combination of OracleVM and other hypervisors.

Bare Metal Provisioning

Another feature recently available in CloudStack is bare metal provisioning. This capability allows users to set up bare metal hosts in a CloudStack cloud and manage them with the CloudStack Management Server. Bare metal hosts can be set up and managed in the same cloud as virtual instances. Bare metal hosts do not run hypervisor software. It is not required to have an operating system installed on the machine in advance. The operating system is provisioned to the physical host using PXE Boot when a host is provisioned from the bare metal template. In the current version of CloudStack, bare metal provisioning is supported only with the direct untagged network model.

Commitment to OpenStack

Another area that often causes confusion is the CloudStack commitment to OpenStack, Citrix is working to converge features from CloudStack and OpenStack with minimal disruption to our existing user base. We continue to work diligently on OpenStack with 21 Citrix employees contributing to the progress of the project. In the near term we will work on things like integrating OpenStack Storage (Swift) with CloudStack and working to allow the CloudStack Management server and slick web interface to manage OpenStack instances. Eventually we hope to get to a consistent use of OpenStack in the “CloudStack Stack” with additional value-added features provided by the CloudStack project.

“vTax” Break
By providing a cost effective and scalable cloud platform that works with all major enterprise virtualization technologies, Citrix CloudStack allows users to preserve their existing virtualization investments – whether they are based on KVM, Oracle VM, vSphere, XenServer®, or a mix of these technologies – while enabling them to continue to grow their virtual infrastructure.  VMware users particularly benefit when they choose to deploy Citrix CloudStack over vCloud Director as their preferred cloud platform.  By using Citrix CloudStack, VMware customers not only break free from the proprietary costs that VMware imposes with its platform, but they also gain the added flexibility and control associated with leveraging the most popular open source cloud platform in the market.  Additionally, Citrix CloudStack eases the financial impact associated with the “vTax,” the term used by many in the cloud and virtualization communities to refer to the latest update to the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that added costs to customers’ existing cloud and virtualization implementations.  Since CloudStack can support multiple hypervisors in the same cloud, VMware customers can mix and match their virtualization technologies under the same cloud environment and optimize their costs, as well as the business value.

This latest release of CloudStack is a continuation of the company’s efforts to provide VMware customers with an open source choice when building clouds on vSphere.  In March, Citrix delivered VMware support into OpenStack and has now extended that work into CloudStack.  In addition to adding enhanced support for vSphere and Oracle VM, the upcoming version of Citrix CloudStack will also enable bare metal provisioning, allowing users to increase the agility of their cloud deployment by provisioning and managing workloads on physical servers without a hypervisor.

Product Availability
Citrix CloudStack with support for VMware vSphere and bare metal provisioning is available today as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution from Citrix.  Oracle VM support will be available in October, followed by Microsoft Hyper-V later in Q4.  CloudStack can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted cloud service.

Quotes
Peder Ulander, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix
“By enhancing availability and support for VMware vSphere and Oracle VM, the latest release of Citrix CloudStack enables customers to build clouds on their existing virtualization and datacenter technologies while taking advantage of the most widely deployed open source cloud platform today.  A powerful, hypervisor-agnostic solution, CloudStack helps customers build clouds the way the world’s largest and most successful public clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and massively efficient.  And by providing advanced enterprise features that support vSphere and OVM in a free, production-ready offering, users are given a choice, not a surcharge, when building out their cloud platform.”

Ichiro Nakayama, Division Director of Business Development, IDC Frontier (IDCF), a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan
“IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, is the market leading provider of cloud services in Japan with its innovative NOAH Cloud Services product, a fully-automated cloud management service with an open API that is optimized specifically for the Japanese market.  We chose Citrix CloudStack based on the comprehensiveness of the solution and its ability to help us to quickly come to market with a highly differentiated and customized cloud platform running on top of our VMware installation.”

More information here

Nutanix aims to ban the san from virtualized datacenters

Introduces Nutanix Complete Cluster, Bringing Google-like Infrastructure to Enterprises

Nutanix today launched its flagship product, Nutanix Complete Cluster(TM), the industry's first truly converged server + storage infrastructure for enterprise-class virtualization that removes the need for network storage. Nutanix Complete Cluster is a high-performance hardware plus software solution that enables companies to virtualize their datacenters at a fraction of the cost of traditional server and SAN infrastructure. Only Nutanix Complete Cluster has a scale-out converged architecture that combines compute (servers) and storage in a single tier.

"Our customers will experience a radical improvement in TCO for their Nutanix-based virtualization projects, with savings of 40 to 60 percent in equipment alone," said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. "The Nutanix difference is that no network storage is required to implement enterprise virtualization, resulting in dramatically simpler and faster datacenters in which data sits right next to virtual machines, not across the network."

Nutanix's key innovation is the company's patent-pending distributed system software layer that converges compute and storage into a single tier, is designed specifically for virtualization, and is optimized from the ground up to make use of flash SSDs in its core architecture. This converged architecture approach, pioneered by Google and innovated by Nutanix, makes big leaps in datacenter performance and efficiency possible. Nutanix envisions datacenters that are much smaller and faster than those with SAN-based architectures, yet simpler and more cost-effective to set up, implement, scale, and sustain.

"In increasingly virtualized datacenters, we believe that storage will gradually cease to be implemented as we know it today and will itself also become completely virtualized, leveraging commodity hardware, being self-optimizing and scaling-out to new levels," explains Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The industry, which makes a lot of money by continuing to propagate existing monolithic technology, will be forced to adapt to these new realities or, like the old monolithic server vendors, perish. The Nutanix approach of converging compute and storage into a simple building block for virtualization, enhanced by a Google-like distributed system architecture, is an example that shows us that the technologies to enable this are not futuristic pipe dreams--they exist right now."

Customers can start a Nutanix-based virtualization deployment with a single Nutanix Complete Block(TM), a 2U unit containing four x86 nodes. Each Complete Block contains 8 Intel Xeon processors and 192 GB RAM (upgradable to 768 GB) for running virtual machines along with 1.28 TB of ioMemory technology from Fusion-io, 1.2 TB of SATA SSD and 20TB of SATA drives for storing virtual machine data.

Each node in a Nutanix Complete Block runs an industry-standard hypervisor (VMware ESXi), and the whole system can be deployed in about 30 minutes. It can be easily managed using an intuitive user interface that provides new levels of virtual machine visibility across compute and storage resources. Expanding a Nutanix-based virtualization environment is as easy as adding another Complete Block to scale out a single Nutanix Complete Cluster in a grow-as-you-go manner.

"The long term impact of the Nutanix solution is that we'll be able to lower all our costs in the datacenter given the simplicity, form factor and scale-out architecture. We've done vBlock, but it's more than twice the footprint of Nutanix and doesn't enable plug and play expansion as one single system," says Neil Ferguson, Technology Director for Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, a top international law firm.

Designed for enterprise class virtualization, Nutanix Complete Cluster provides seamless support for key virtualization capabilities like VMware's vMotion(TM), High Availability (HA), and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), along with industry-leading data management features that include fast VM cloning, capacity optimization, and converged backup for instant backup and recovery of virtual machine data without requiring external backup appliances.

"The Nutanix team has delivered a game-changing enterprise product in record time; the channel will love the economics behind collapsed compute and storage," says Bipul Sinha, an early backer and board member from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nutanix Complete Cluster is now generally available through the company's certified solution partners, including Lilien, LogicsOne, P1 Technologies and Mainline Information Systems. Please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for a complete list of partners. U.S. list price for Nutanix Complete Cluster starts at $75,000. Nutanix will also be demonstrating its solution to prospective customers and partners at vmworld, August 29 - September 1, 2011 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For more about Nutanix and its products, please visit www.nutanix.com and follow them on Twitter @nutanix.

About Nutanix

Founded in 2009, Nutanix is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive network storage (SAN or NAS). Founded by a team that has built scalable systems like Google File System and enterprise-class systems like Oracle Database/Exadata in the past, Nutanix is based in San Jose and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital.

Nutanix and Nutanix Complete Cluster are trademarks of Nutanix Inc. Other marks mentioned herein are trademarks that are proprietary to other companies.