Posted on May 26, 2011

ComTrade at Citrix Synergy 2011 with new Management Pack

Application management provider ComTrade (formerly HERMES SoftLab) is proud to announce the release of new Management Pack supporting Citrix XenDesktop® 5. In addition, existing ComTrade’s Management Pack for Citrix XenApp™ now supports XenApp 6; both products are integrated in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to provide simple installation, minimal training and easy maintenance.

Citrix XenDesktop enables organizations to deliver virtual desktops with confidence to any user, anywhere and ultimately provides quantifiable business cost savings. ComTrade’s Management Pack for Citrix XenDesktop includes a fully-featured availability and performance management solution and extends the end-to-end service monitoring capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to include Citrix XenDesktop 5 infrastructure.

“We believe Citrix XenDesktop 5 represents an important milestone in desktop virtualization and delivers efficiencies that drive down the cost of infrastructure and management overhead. We are thrilled to be able to further support Citrix vision of desktop virtualization and application delivery by offering our new management pack for Citrix XenDesktop.” said Gregor Smrekar, General Manager for ComTrade International Business.

The release of ComTrade’s management pack for Citrix Xen Desktop 5 follows market acceptance of ComTrade’s power-user management products of both Citrix XenServer® and Citrix XenApp.

“Citrix XenDesktop 5 continues to make desktop transformation easier by adding innovative capabilities that dramatically simplify desktop management and support,” said Natalie Lambert, director of product marketing, Enterprise Desktops and Apps at Citrix. “ComTrade’s Management Pack for Citrix XenDesktop delivers immediate integration of these new capabilities with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, enabling IT to leverage existing management systems and skill sets for an end-to-end view of virtual desktop management.”

“System Center Operations Manager benefits from ComTrade Management Packs for Citrix as it adds greater levels of sophistication and in-depth monitoring for end users,” said Sergio Klarriech, Director Strategic Alliances, Management & Security Division, Microsoft Corp.

ComTrade Management Pack for Citrix XenDesktop presents extensive system data to operations personnel in a standard and familiar way. Organizations with operations management standardized around Microsoft System Center Operations Manager are now able to equip their staff with out-of-box monitoring knowledge, tasks, and reports created specifically to enable day-to-day supervision of Citrix XenDesktop for Windows desktop and application delivery. ComTrade’s Management Packs were developed to provide comprehensive health, performance, and topology information, all natively integrated into the Operations Manager platform.

On display at Citrix Synergy, May 25-27, 2011, Citrix Synergy™, San Francisco, California. The ComTrade -Management Packs and Smart Plug-ins for Citrix, now also with integrated support for Citrix XenDesktop on top of support for Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenServer, will be on display in the ComTrade booth #610 at the Citrix Synergy, May 25-27. In addition, ComTrade Management Pack for Citrix XenServer was selected as one of the three finalists for the Best of Synergy award in the category The Best Partner Solution for Virtual Data Centers. ComTrade management products are also available for testing and review from the ComTrade web site at managementproducts.comtrade.com.

ComTrade Management Pack for Citrix XenDesktop – Key Benefits and Highlights:

• Rich topology views expose XenDesktop component dependencies and allow their direct correlation with the rest of the IT infrastructure.
• Configurable monitors watch for end-user, desktop, application, and virtual infrastructure-level events that could impact the overall health and performance. The resulting alerts carry specific event information and relevant troubleshooting knowledge.
• Predefined performance views and reports track the historical performance and help predict future trends.
• A configurable list of actions can be taken against target XenDesktop infrastructure, truly enabling autonomous day-to-day operational management of the XenDesktop estate.

The Citrix XenDesktop Management Pack brings immediate value to any Operations Staff, Citrix Specialist, or IT Manager:

• Desktop and application availability: synthetic launch checks across the user entry points reveal issues that directly impact end-users and form the basis of service-level reports.
• Agent-less hosting infrastructure oversight: key resources of hosted user desktops can be monitored without any agent software installed on them, ensuring ease of deployment, stability, and no impact when extending or upgrading the Citrix desktop virtualization infrastructure.
• Improved infrastructure health: XenDesktop virtualization infrastructure availability is confirmed through rigorous connectivity probing and active service checks. Whether issues reside in the underlying virtualization layer or within a specific application, misbehaving components are quickly detected, easily isolated and rapidly solved.
• Complete end-to-end monitoring: Performance and availability information from XenDesktop infrastructure is integrated with that of the back-end application layers. OpsMgr becomes the operations bridge for different subject matter experts. This end-to-end approach ensures coherent IT responses and efficient management of desktop delivery.