SearchServerVirtualization.com is breaking the news today revealing that Citrix will release a management suite for Microsoft Hyper-V in Q1 2009.
The product, dubbed Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V (codename Encore), will bring in some most wanted features like the virtual machines live migration that Microsoft will be unable to deliver until Windows Server 2008 R2, somewhere in 2010.
Citrix continues to advertise the same strategy since the XenSource acquisition: deliver value on top of the Microsoft hypervisor as it did for Terminal Services in the last decade.
But with virtualization the situation is different: Citrix doesn’t have a solution that depends on a Microsoft product. Citrix has a complete virtualization stack that could totally replace Microsoft in a customer environment. So what’s the strategy for the overlapping components and features?
Lou Shipley, General manager and Group Vice President of XenServer division at Citrix clarifies it: the company plans to stay on top of competition developing software that is 18 months ahead of Microsoft technologies.
The article also reveals that Citrix will introduce a memory overcommit technique, the so called ballooning, in XenServer 6.0, along with virtual lab management and workload balancing capabilities.
The new release is expected somewhere in 2009.