Citrix Buys VMLogix, Bulks Up OpenCloud Infrastructure

Citrix beefed up its OpenCloud infrastructure platform for cloud computing providers on Monday with the acquisition of cloud virtualization management vendor VMLogix and adding new functionality.

The acquisition of VMLogix, which offers virtualization management for private and public clouds, will give San Francisco-based Citrix key lifecycle management capabilities in its OpenCloud platform. It will help cloud providers offer infrastructure services that extend from pre-production and quality assurance, to staging, deployment and business continuity.

Citrix said the VMLogix acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed on Monday, will also let Citrix add intuitive, self-service interface to its XenServer virtualization platform to allow users to access and manage their own virtual computing resources in an on-premise private cloud environment similar to how they set up virtual services in large public clouds like Amazon or Rackspace.

According to Citrix, the VMLogix purchase will add virtual lifecycle automation and self-service capabilities that support all leading virtualization platforms and make it easier to build, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand in both private and public clouds, and migrate virtual workloads between production stages with a mouse click. Cloud providers can now give users self-service access to a single pool of computing resources.

Along with the VMLogix buy on Monday, Citrix revealed plans to bulk up its OpenCloud platform to include enhanced networking and interoperability, including the ability for customers to manage a mix of public and private cloud workloads from a single management console, whether from a single provider or across different cloud providers.

Citrix said it will integrate the Citrix OpenCloud infrastructure platform with the OpenStack open-source cloud orchestration and management technology from Rackspace, NASA and a host of other partners. Interoperability with OpenStack will enable cloud management functions and let cloud providers give their clients open integration and a consistent view of both private and public cloud workloads.

On the networking side, Citrix said it will add virtual switching capabilities leveraging the Open vSwitch project to its OpenCloud platform and also support the emerging OpenFlow protocol, which pools the resources of per-host virtual switches to create a cloud fabric. Those capabilities will give cloud providers the ability to create isolated, multi-tenant cloud environments with dynamic, per-flow control and per virtual-interface policies. They will also enable rich packet processing capabilities at the network edge, including the ability to leverage advanced application networking capabilities in Citrix NetScaler, another key component of the OpenCloud platform.