In July this year Citrix acquired Cloud.com a company providing an orchestration tool for managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) called CloudStack. Now Citrix has announced a new upcoming release of CloudStack introducing support for now the vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors which is expected in October. Microsoft Hyper-V support is expected in Q4 this year.
CloudStack will now be completely open sourced under the GPL v3 license, which is inline with the open source commitment of Citrix. CloudStack can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted cloud service and a preview release (dubbed version 2.1.11) is available today as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution from Citrix.
CloudStack provides virtual machines self-service provisioning, dynamic workload management, virtual network fencing and routing, usage metering and billing, support for snapshots and rollbacks, ISOs and VM templates library, delegate administration, multi-tenancy and web access. Cloudstack leverages components from – and contributes to the OpenStack community, which further develops the technology from RackSpace and NASA which was released as open source in July last year and for which Citrix is second largest contributor at this moment.