Citrix has come out with a way for IT shops to model and test the delivery of virtual applications and desktops from the cloud.
The Citrix C3 Lab service has been built using Amazon web services to provide a preconfigured environment for IT professionals to prototype solutions using their existing applications and includes technical components required to create a robust application delivery centre in the cloud, the company said.
Available immediately, Citrix has said that there is no additional charge for running Citrix C3 Lab instances in Amazon EC2.
The company has said it will be unveiling a series of Citrix C3 Cloud blueprints, which offer guidelines for testing virtualisation, security and application services in the cloud.
In a separate announcement coming out of a company conference in Las Vegas, the vendor said it has also produced a software-based virtual appliance version of its NetScaler application delivery and optimisation product.
It said that the use of ‘soft’ application delivery controllers makes it easier for IT to apply established application deployment processes for tasks such as provisioning, charge-back and automation to their application delivery infrastructure.
The new NetScaler VPX application accelerator can be downloaded from the web and run on any standard server platform.
Citrix has also announced an upgrade to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, the recently launched virtualisation management suite.
The new 5.5 release adds virtual machine fast clone and provisioning features, something that is intended to make it easier to establish unified backup and snapshot processes for both Hyper-V and XenServer environments.
