Citrix announced it has inked a new deal Amazon that will see the companies working more closely to make their virtualization and cloud platforms play nicer with one another. What makes this partnership a bit easier to manage is the fact that both companies offer solutions built on top of their own variant of the open source Xen hypervisor technology. In other words, from a hypervisor standpoint there isn't a huge chasm to leap here.

The partnership calls for Citrix to provide engineering support to Amazon in order to help provide better optimization efforts for Citrix products and Windows applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It will also enhance interoperability between on-premise Citrix XenServer deployments and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

"Today's news expands our relationship with Amazon Web Services to enhance features in Xen, helping to further the rapid adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers," said Simon Crosby, Citrix chief technology for its datacenter and cloud division. "This effort will also focus on furthering compatibility with AWS to give customers an enhanced experience when connecting their XenServer virtualized datacenters."

The goal is to make it a much easier and more seamless process to migrate workloads between the locally owned and controlled, private virtualized datacenter and the Amazon EC2 public cloud, and ultimately work toward making the hybrid cloud a reality.

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Read the rest of this InfoWorld Virtualization Report article, here.