Citrix has announced the first upgrades to the Xen server virtualisation products since completing the acquisition of XenSource last October.
Citrix emphasised that XenServer 4.1 and XenServer Platinum Edition, the new products, are designed to provision application workloads across both virtual and physical servers.
While analysts predict a majority of enterprises will use some virtualisation within the next year or so, Citrix officials referred to industry estimates that claim only 15 per cent of corporate servers will be virtualised by 2012.
"We expect the virtualisation market to continue to grow, but understand that our customers want solutions that address 100 per cent of the servers in their datacentre today - both physical and virtual," Citrix's senior director of virtualisation and management, Phil Montgomery, said in a press release.
Citrix said there were more than 50 enhancements in the new product releases designed to improve ease-of-use, performance and support for storage systems.
"While most virtualisation products consume valuable server resources to run proprietary management tools to manage storage services, the new storage delivery services in XenServer 4.1 enable each hardware component to do what it does best by offering tight integration with native storage hardware," Citrix said.
Citrix, an application delivery specialist, spent $US500 million on XenSource, host of the open source Xen hypervisor project. Citrix hopes the acquisition will help it cut into VMware's dominant share in the growing virtualisation market.
