Glance through on Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Express Edition

I have come across to Citrix website while browsing. Citrix has recently offered a free Express Editon-Citrix Essential for Hyper V The product helps Hyper-V administrators take full advantage of powerful storage-based features like deduplication, thin provisioning, cloning, snapshots and replication.

Citrix StorageLink is part of the Citrix Essentials product offering. Citrix StorageLink is an enterprise‐class virtualization storage resource management service for Microsoft Hyper‐V and Citrix XenServer deployments. StorageLink accelerates application delivery by automating complex virtual machine storage resource management operations, allowing you to leverage advanced storage services to rapidly bring new virtual machines online, simplify storage management, improve storage utilization and lower TCO. You create virtual machines from pre‐defined virtual machine templates that identify the hardware and storage resources required by the virtual machines.

For more information about Citrix Essential for Hyper V, Express Edition, please go to
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1855667

To download, please go to:- http://www.citrix.com/ehvexpress . Once download, you can install Citrix StorageLink Gateway and StorageLink Manager on a Windows Server 2003/2008 with Powershell and MMC 3.0 installed.

Citrix Essentials for Hyper‐V Express Edition entitles the customers to use StorageLink for up to two Hyper‐V servers and a single storage array, without the requirement of a license or installation of the Citrix License server. You can only use Citrix Essential when you have the following supported storage:-

Here is some quick guide on what to do after finish the installation

a) Connect to your Hypervisor hosts by clicking on Add Hypervisor host.
b) Add Storage Array Adaptor
c) Create a Storage Repository

Since i did not have the supported storage, let glance through on the Citrix StorageLink Manager. The interface almost similar as SCVMM, so you would not have any problem when using Citrix StorageLink manager .

1. To add hypervisor host, click Add hypervisor host.

The Express edition, did not allow you to manage Cluster Hyper V host. In order to manage, cluster Hyper V host, you need to purchase full edition. Below is the snapshot of error message that i get when trying to add Cluster Hyper V host.

2. After adding a hypervisor host, you can see the Host and Virtual machine.

a) Hypervisor host pane

b) Virtual machine pane

c) Storage Infrastructure pane

d) Virtual Machine template pane.

Function is identical as Library feature in SCVMM product,

e) Jobs pane.

Function is identical as SCVMM product.

f) Administration pane.

If you have the supported storage, you can give a try for this product.

Enjoy !