HERMES SoftLab, a ComTrade company, today announced the extension of their Management Pack for Citrix Xen to include comprehensive support for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.

Following the successful launch of the Management Pack for Citrix XenServer at the 2009 Microsoft Management Summit, this new and extended version of the Citrix Xen Management Pack will be unveiled in November at Microsoft TechEd in Berlin.

Working closely with both Microsoft and Citrix, HERMES SoftLab is delivering enterprise class service-management solutions and best practices for Citrix XenApp, XenServer, and XenDesktop. HERMES SoftLab’s Management Pack for Citrix Xen extends the capabilities of Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager by providing comprehensive Citrix health, performance, and topology information that is fully integrated into the OpsMgr environment.

“HERMES SoftLab’s extensive experience in key Citrix product segments has put us in a unique position to offer an extensive, power-user grade management solution for the Citrix Delivery Center,” said Gregor Smrekar, HERMES SoftLab CEO. “The new Citrix Xen Management Pack incorporates extensive monitoring of the XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer environments which provides essential insight into the link between the physical and virtual, and ultimately any impact on the end-user experience.”

Organizations that standardized their operations management around Microsoft System Center Operations Manager are now able to equip their staff with out-of-box monitoring knowledge, tasks, and reports to handle the day-to-day supervision of their Citrix Xen estate. The Citrix Xen Management Pack is designed to deliver immediate and long-term value across IT organizations: from operations staff and Citrix specialists to IT managers and CIO’s.

Citrix Xen Management Pack benefits:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Availability, performance, and capacity of XenApp, XenServer, and XenDesktop infrastructure is continuously monitored and tracked.
• End-user probing: Synthetic application and desktop launch probing ensures availability issues are quickly identified.
• End-user latency monitoring: From logon to log-off, latency issues can be confirmed and isolated to specific components.
• Web access resilience: The Citrix Web Interface configuration is auto-discovered and continuously probed to ensure web-based access availability.
• Integrated management: The Citrix Xen Management Pack automatically integrates performance and availability information from the Citrix infrastructure with that of the back-end application layers, acting as an operations bridge for different subject matter experts.
• Unified management: Further leverage your investment in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, operations personnel, processes, and procedures to extend ITIL and Enterprise Systems Management to the Citrix Xen environment.
• Native: The Citrix Xen Management Pack natively integrates with the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. No connectors / secondary consoles are required.
• Complete: No more blind-spots in your Citrix infrastructure – the Citrix Xen Management Pack provides complete coverage of your Citrix Xen infrastructure. XenApp servers, XenServer hosts and VMs, Web Interface servers, License servers, Provisioning servers, and Desktop Delivery Controllers – all kept under control by the Citrix Xen Management Pack.