Citrix cloud envelops VMLogix

Citrix Systems has placed a bid to acquire virtualisation management vendor VMLogix. The company said this would improve the scalability and interoperability of developing its Citrix OpenCloud platform.

The deal is expected to close in the next few weeks, subject to the usual legal considerations. Merging the technologies of the two companies should be easily achieved, owing to a long-term partnership and an 18-month long agreement for VMLogix to support the Citrix XenServer and Hyper-V products.

The acquired software will deliver key lifecycle management capabilities to OpenCloud, Citrix said. The aim is to assist cloud providers in offering infrastructure services that extend from pre-production and quality assurance, to staging, deployment and business continuity.

Citrix plans to add a self-service interface to its XenServer virtualisation platform, a key component of the OpenCloud framework. The company believed this would enable in-house private cloud environments to be set up in a similar way to setting up virtual services in large public clouds, like Amazon or Rackspace.

The company has also announced plans to expand its OpenCloud platform to include enhanced networking and interoperability between public and private clouds. Workloads for both environments can be managed from a single console, even if they span across different providers.

The keystone will be OpenStack, an open-source interoperability technology Citrix is co-developing with Rackspace, NASA, Dell, and over 20 other technology and cloud service providers.

Similarly, Open vSwitch will provide virtual network switching. This supports the OpenFlow protocol, a nascent industry standard to pool the resources of per-host virtual switches and create a multi-tenanted, policy-controlled cloud fabric.

The financial terms of the VMLogix purchase were not disclosed.