The term Cloud is used A LOT these days, and I mean a lot! it comes in different shapes and sizes and much of the term is a lot of marketing gone wrong…
Citrix marketing team is also very happy in using that term on their products, therefore they have a huge line of software including the name “Cloud” therefore I decided to write a post about what all the Citrix cloud solutions actually do and what
they consist of. Might also mention that a lot of the products may also contain Netscaler name in front. Citrix has a lot to learn regarding naming and explaining what they actually do. But that is another post entirely
All these Cloud products are a key component to what Citrix calls “Project Avalon”
NOTE: And what you also can notice there on that picture is that XenApp is gone, with Project Excalibur XenApp and XenDesktop are merged together.
Their Cloud products are as following:
CloudPortal Service Manager
CloudPortal Business Manager
CloudBridge
CloudGateway
CloudPlatform (Powered by Apache Cloudstack)
Cloudportal Service Manager is an software only available to CSP (Citrix Service Providers) it provides hosting providers with a web control panel solution where they can provision services for their customers, ad users or Lync, XenApp, XenDesktop, Exchange, SharePoint ++ for customers. For those who have worked with HMC or ExtendASP it is very much like that. You can look more at the architecture here –> http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ccp-10/cloudportal-services-manager-10-architecture.png
CloudPortal Business Manager is an platform that enables service providers to get to market with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud that has been built on the CloudStack platform. Mostly a billing and reporting solution.
CloudBridge is an extension to Netscaler, and what is does is bridge your “on-premise” cloud solution with your public cloud solution using an layer 2 VPN tunnel ( Which is using IPsec ) And you can see here that is only a part of Netscaler platinum license –> http://www.citrix.com/site/resources/dynamic/salesdocs/Netscaler_Datasheet_August_2012.pdf
CloudGateway is divided into two editions. Express and Enterprise the Enterprise edition, consists of the App Controller, Netscaler Access Gateway and Storefront Services (which is the new Web interface) so this is your ticket into your business . While the express edition does not include AppController. I will discuss in a later post what the AppController actually does.
CloudPlatform is an open source software platform that pools computing resources to build public, private and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. It is built upon the Apache Cloudstack solution and allows you to manage most of the virtualization hypervisors.
Oracle VM, KVM, vSphere™ and Citrix XenServer but not Hyper-V (It is much like Virtual Machine Manager from Microsoft)
So in short, much of the products from Citrix labeled with Cloud are actually other products “in disguise” and the term Project Merlin is actually going to be focused on CloudPlatform and will include features such as (Azure support) Merlin Tech Preview is set to Q1 2013.
Will update this post with some more info later on today….