Citrix CloudStack eases the financial impact associated with the “vTax,” the term used by many in the cloud and virtualization communities to refer to the latest update to the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that added costs to customers’ existing cloud and virtualization implementations.  Since CloudStack can support multiple hypervisors in the same cloud, VMware customers can mix and match their virtualization technologies under the same cloud environment and optimize their costs, as well as the business value.

By providing a cost effective and scalable cloud platform that works with all major enterprise virtualization technologies, Citrix CloudStack allows users to preserve their existing virtualization investments – whether they are based on KVM, Oracle VM, vSphere, XenServer®, or a mix of these technologies – while enabling them to continue to grow their virtual infrastructure.

VMware users particularly benefit when they choose to deploy Citrix CloudStack over vCloud Director as their preferred cloud platform.  By using Citrix CloudStack, VMware customers not only break free from the proprietary costs that VMware imposes with its platform, but they also gain the added flexibility and control associated with leveraging the most popular open source cloud platform in the market. This latest release of CloudStack is a continuation of the company’s efforts to provide VMware customers with an open source choice when building clouds on vSphere.  In March, Citrix delivered VMware support into OpenStack and has now extended that work into CloudStack.  In addition to adding enhanced support for vSphere and Oracle VM, the upcoming version of Citrix CloudStack will also enable bare metal provisioning, allowing users to increase the agility of their cloud deployment by provisioning and managing workloads on physical servers without a hypervisor.