Advanced virtualization management for Hyper-V and System Center environments www.citrix.com
Introduction Microsoft Hyper-V provides a dynamic, reliable and scalable virtualization platform enabling cost effective server consolidation, business continuity, disaster recovery and efficient development and test environments. Together with Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite, including Virtual Machine Manager, IT professionals can implement and manage both physical and virtual resources to deliver the most agile and dynamic datacenters. Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V complements Hyper-V and System Center Server Management Suite with advanced capabilities to enable increased levels of automation and allow IT organizations to manage their virtual infrastructure more dynamically. Citrix Essentials automation capabilities include site-to-site disaster recovery, lifecycle automation, dynamic provisioning for physical and virtual machines (VMs) and native integration with storage platforms and storage management. Situation Server virtualization enables IT to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of delivering datacenter services to users. Hyper-V server virtualization allows organizations to consolidate their physical infrastructure and achieve significant IT cost savings. However, to extend beyond the benefits of consolidation and fully tap the operational efficiencies of virtualization requires advanced tools for management and automation. Within most modern datacenters, there are four key areas where IT organizations can benefit from enhanced levels of automation and management of their virtual infrastructure. Those areas are storage management, business continuity, provisioning of virtual infrastructure and the management of server workload lifecycles. 2 Server virtualization, specifically the presence of a hypervisor, can encumber storage systems by masking advanced storage services, such as thin provisioning, cloning, de-duplication and remote mirroring. As a result, storage configuration and management of virtualization environments is far from simple. In order for IT organizations to maximize the potential of Hyper-V deployments, they need tools to help them unlock the potential of enterprise storage systems. Server virtualization presents an opportunity for organizations to provide local and site-wide protection of IT systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional high availability and disaster recovery solutions. However, as with local storage management, the relative lack of integration between advanced storage technologies for disaster recovery (e.g., remote mirroring and snapshots) and virtualized servers presents a challenge to server and storage administrators. Lack of granular storage controls leaves administrators with an all or nothing approach to site recovery and little recourse for staging and testing recovery processes for virtual infrastructure. Integration of virtual infrastructure with business continuity features found in storage systems helps ensure that IT organizations achieve cost effective, yet robust implementation of local high availability and remote disaster recovery.
Many IT organizations rely on time consuming and storage intensive processes for deploying new workloads to both physical and virtualized servers. Whether installing new operating system (OS) images and configuring applications from scratch or pulling down shared images from the network, organizations typically measure the roll-out of new servers in hours or days. Ongoing maintenance and local storage required for the workload can also be a major challenge. OS streaming technologies and shared libraries for deploying physical and virtual server images on-demand is key to maintaining an agile IT operation. Another common server virtualization challenge is managing VM images throughout lab, stage and production environments. The ease with which VMs can be created and deployed creates an opportunity for faster development cycles. However, this same flexibility inevitably leads to uncontrolled sprawl of VMs and geometric growth of related datacenter infrastructure. Lab management and virtualization automation tools are essential to managing virtualization lifecycles. Solution Citrix Essentials complements the Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite and provides a consistent management experience for administrators by leveraging the Microsoft Management Console 3.0 framework and extending System Center with tools for storage integration, site recovery, on-demand provisioning and lab and stage management. Figure 1: Essentials for Hyper-V integrates with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 3
Seamless storage integration with StorageLink Citrix Essentials delivers deep integration with all leading storage platforms through its Citrix StorageLink technology to reduce the cost and complexity of managing storage in Hyper-V environments. It works with existing Windows storage management products and offers one-click access to native storage devices, providing simplified management through storage configuration wizards. StorageLink leverages existing storage array-based services and technologies directly from a server-side interface, allowing virtualization administrators easy access storage controls required for rolling out and managing virtual environments. StorageLink helps deliver faster VM deployment and lower storage management TCO in virtual environments. It lets customers directly leverage the native power of their existing storage investments, providing the ability to fast clone and provision VMs and enabling a single backup solution that spans physical and virtual resources. StorageLink is certified to work seamlessly with almost every third party storage infrastructure, array and backup system. Simple storage controls included with StorageLink make the setup and management of the latest Microsoft Failover Clusters and Cluster Shared Volumes a snap. 4 Figure 2: Leverage native storage services like provisioning, snapshots and deduplication
Site Recovery Citrix Essentials includes Site Recovery, built on Citrix StorageLink technology, allowing organizations to implement flexible, cost effective disaster recovery solutions for their Hyper-V infrastructure. Together with Citrix Essentials workflow orchestration and Windows Server 2008 Clustering, Site Recovery enables organizations to implement fully automated disaster recovery plans for fast, reliable site recovery of critical Hyper-V infrastructure. Site Recovery leverages underlying storage array replication services, giving administrators the toolset they need to enable remote fail-over strategies for their Hyper-V environments. Organizations can use StorageLink Site Recovery to set up native storage remote mirroring services, then test the recoverability of virtual infrastructure at remote sites through the staging capabilities included with Site Recovery. Instant clones of recovery VMs are created and placed in isolated networks where they can be tested without impacting ongoing data replication or access to critical Hyper-V infrastructure. Figure 3: 5
On-demand provisioning of physical and virtual workloads Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V accelerates the roll out of server workloads by dynamically provisioning countless workloads from a single server image. With Citrix Essentials, organizations can reduce both storage costs and the burden of patching, maintaining, testing and supporting dozens or hundreds of separate server images. Citrix Essentials further improves IT efficiencies with its broad coverage for datacenter infrastructure. It can provision workloads to both physical and virtual servers and to multiple hypervisor technologies, including Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. It even allows administrators to provision complete Windows Server 2008 images, including the hypervisor, to a bare metal machine, with or without internal disks. As a result, IT organizations can spin up additional web servers in minutes to match unusually high demand, or rapidly provision new Citrix XenApp servers to match fluctuating user capacities. It even allows organizations to repurpose physical or virtual servers to accommodate monthly or quarterly business cycles, leading to more efficient use of datacenter infrastructure and faster response to user demands. Figure 4: Manage virtual machine lifecycles and resource ownership across environments and sites 6
Lab and stage management Citrix Essentials includes lab and stage management to reduce the complexity, time and cost of managing non-production environments typically used in development, support and training organizations. Lab management tools in Citrix Essentials automate the setup and tear-down of complex application workload configurations, provides self-service template libraries for rapid provisioning, and enables cross-team collaboration on common virtual environments. With lab management, organizations can accelerate the process of moving workloads through development and testing and into the live production environment, while reducing VM sprawl and minimizing setup or configuration errors and delays. The web-based lab management console provides role-based access to a rich set of tools that greatly advance the agility and efficiency of managing labs and enable collaboration across your nonproduction environment. Users can select from a self-service library of templates to quickly create server and workstation configurations for pre-deployment acceptance testing, product development and quality assurance, technical support triage, or standardized training and demonstration environments. Additional configuration tasks such as installing applications, running scripts or defining the startup order and dependencies are preconfigured and automated. When provisioning, the package is deployed at the touch of a button. Figure 5: Stream workloads to multiple virtual machines or bare-metal servers from a single, golden image 7
Summary Citrix Essentials improves the ability of Microsoft Hyper-V users to take advantage of the powerful virtualization capabilities included with Windows Server 2008 and the System Center Server Management Suite. It optimizes the delivery and management of server workloads for the highest datacenter flexibility and server utilization, while seamless storage integration allows organizations to more fully leverage Hyper-V storage resources. To learn more about how you can extend your Microsoft Hyper-V environment with Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V visit www.citrix.com/ehv. Worldwide Headquarters Citrix Systems, Inc. 851 West Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309, USA T +1 800 393 1888 T +1 954 267 3000 www.citrix.com Americas Citrix Silicon Valley 4988 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA T +1 408 790 8000 Europe Citrix Systems International GmbH Rheinweg 9 8200 Schaffhausen, Switzerland T +41 52 635 7700 Asia Pacific Citrix Systems Hong Kong Ltd. Suite 6301-10, 63rd Floor One Island East 18 Westlands Road Island East, Hong Kong, China T +852 2100 5000 Citrix Online Division 6500 Hollister Avenue Goleta, CA 93117, USA T +1 805 690 6400 Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the leading provider of virtualization, networking and software as a service technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion. 2009 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix, Citrix Essentials, XenServer, XenApp, StorageLink and Citrix Delivery Center are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. 1009/PDF