VMLogix Enhances 'Essential' Functionality -- Redmondmag.com

VMLogix Enhances 'Essential' Functionality

By Keith Ward
02/23/2009

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.

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