Five reasons why you need Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V now

WHITE PAPER Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V
Five reasons why you
need Citrix Essentials for
Hyper-V now
This paper explores common challenges associated with server virtualization deployments and the ways Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V together with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager can help organizations maximize the value of server virtualization.
www.citrix.comOverview
Server virtualization has the potential to yield dramatic savings through consolidation of datacenter infrastructure, streamlined delivery of server workloads and more scalable IT administration. If not managed properly, however, it can also introduce challenges, both in infrastructure and operations. Having the right virtualization management tools is essential to maximizing the value of server virtualization and making a smooth transition from physical to virtual server infrastructure. This paper explores common challenges associated with server virtualization deployments and the ways T T ®Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V together with Windows Server 2008 THyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager can help organizations maximize the value of server virtualization.
Challenge #1 - Storage cost and complexityOne of the first challenges many organizations face when virtualizing an existing environment is a potentially complex and costly storage architecture upgrade. To take advantage of virtualization's most powerful features, such as live motion, high availability and fast virtual machine (VM) provisioning and cloning, organizations must have shared or networked storage. This upgrade requires organizations to migrate server workloads and associated data from internal or directly attached storage devices to fibre channel, iSCSI or NFS devices. Both the initial migration of server workloads and subsequent management of storage in virtual environments can be challenging for a number of reasons.
Storage management challenges are compounded by server virtualization itself. Hypervisors create an abstraction layer between storage hardware and guest VMs, making it difficult to map VM objects to appropriate storage LUNs. Inadequate mapping of storage objects can lead to performance degradation as environments grow. Additionally, server virtualization limits an organization's ability to take advantage of powerful array-based features, such as thin-provisioning, snapshots and deduplication.
Some virtualization vendors remedy the storage dilemma by performing all advanced storage management functions on the host using cluster file system controls included with the hypervisor. This approach leads to unnecessary server resource consumption and generally limits administrators' ability to use advanced storage features.
Solution #1 - Seamless storage integrationCitrix Essentials for Hyper-V with StorageLinkT offers seamless storage integration that unlocks the full potential of storage arrays in Hyper-V environments. StorageLink dramatically simplifies initial storage provisioning by condensing dozens of time consuming, manual configuration steps into just a few clicks. It intelligently coordinates complex storage provisioning operations, helping to ensure optimal I/O performance and simplify the overall storage management process. Additionally, it allows server administrators to easily tap into advanced storage features such as thin-provisioning, data deduplication, space efficient snapshots, backup and replication.
2WHITE PAPER Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V
StorageLink helps organizations make a smooth transition to networked storage by eliminating such complex tasks as SAN fabric zoning for improved security and by providing hardware level assurance that only authorized servers are allowed access to specific storage resources. StorageLink complements the wide range of storage architectures supported with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. It supports all Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) based arrays as well as many non-SMI-S arrays through easily implemented custom storage adapters.
Challenge #2 - VM sprawlOne of virtualization's greatest strengths can also be its biggest weakness-VM sprawl. Virtualization eliminates many of the costly and time consuming steps for procuring, installing and configuring new workloads. This reduces the time to deploy servers and applications from days to... [download for more]