Citrix Essentials™ provides a set of management and automation capabilities to help customers transform datacenters into proactive and automated delivery centers. The Citrix Essentials platform builds on, and extends, the capabilities of either the free Citrix XenServer™ or Microsoft Hyper-V™ base virtualisation platform.

Citrix Essentials product line consists of five broad categories of capabilities:

Automated Lab Management streamlines the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering throughout the application lifecycle, from development labs into the production environment.

Advanced Storage Integration featuring Citrix StorageLink™ technology exposes the advanced data and storage management features in today’s storage systems directly to a virtualised environment.

Dynamic Provisioning Services for the on-demand deployment of workloads to any combination of virtual machines or physical servers from a single golden image.

Workflow Orchestration for the simplified scripting to automation of key management processes.

High Availability for the automatic restart and intelligent placement of virtual machines in case of failure of guest systems or physical servers.

Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V was designed specifically to address the growing share of Citrix and Microsoft virtualisation environments in corporate datacenters, while enabling easy interaction with existing servers that have already been virtualised with other third-party products.