Virsto Software, an innovative provider of VM-centric storage hypervisor software, today announced the general availability of Virsto for vSphere 2.0. The new version offers fully-integrated support for both Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View, enhanced high availability (HA) capabilities and significant workflow optimizations. With Virsto for vSphere 2.0, XenDesktop customers can achieve an over 50 percent reduction in storage cost per desktop, while improving VDI performance up to 10x.

Just as the hypervisor did for servers, Virsto’s storage hypervisor achieves new levels of efficiency, affordability and agility for storage in virtualized environments. Traditionally, provisioning storage in virtualized environments required a compromise: production-level performance or efficient storage capacity consumption. With its hypervisor-agnostic, 100 percent software approach, Virsto combines performance and efficiency to fundamentally transform the economics of storage for virtual machines (VMs).

Virsto for vSphere 2.0 delivers efficient, affordable and agile storage for VMs

As the industry’s first VM-centric storage hypervisor, Virsto delivers differentiated software-defined storage functionality to each virtual machine, regardless of the underlying storage. With Virsto, all storage presented to virtual machines is high performance, thin-provisioned and instantly available. Virsto removes the storage inefficiencies of virtualized workloads and enables IT to achieve the full performance potential of the block-based storage deployed to support virtualized environments. IT administrators no longer need to trade off performance against space efficiency based on workload, with Virsto software, all workloads can now be virtualized cost effectively, with predictable high performance.

New features and benefits in Virsto for vSphere 2.0 include:

• Data center ready: Virsto for vSphere 2.0 offers a series of enhancements providing improved support for tier 1 applications with faster, more comprehensive automated recovery options, monitoring of the Virsto infrastructure now integrated into vCenter and the ability to leverage pre-existing vCenter security roles and permissions, while taking advantage of Virsto-enhanced workflows.
• Full support for Citrix XenDesktop VDI: In the same way that Virsto supports VMware View on vSphere, Virsto now also integrates with XenDesktop to completely preserve the image, image update and image rollback workflows that XenDesktop administrators are already using in Citrix Desktop Studio, while delivering higher-performance, space-efficient VDI for 50 percent lower cost per desktop for storage.
• Improved integration with existing workflows: With Virsto for vSphere 2.0, customers can experience a seamless handoff between Virsto and Citrix Desktop Studio and menu-level integration with VMware vCenter to maintain existing provisioning workflows – delivering all of the value of Virsto’s space efficient, high performance VDI with no additional training required.
• Integrated wizard-based provisioning: Optimized for cloud scale deployments, Virsto’s integrated wizard-based provisioning can instantly create up to 10,000 high performance, space-efficient, cluster-aware clones. Virsto delivers significant capital expense savings, as well as significant operational efficiencies.
  

Virsto storage hypervisor provides the most efficient provisioning, management and utilization of storage for the software defined datacenter. A close partner of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, Virsto has a proven track record of innovation in storage and virtualization. Virsto's software lets all organizations reap the full benefits of server and desktop virtualization, increasing performance while lowering storage costs.

Pricing and availability

Virsto for vSphere 2.0 is available immediately with subscription based pricing starting at $2,500 per TB. For more information, contact sales@virsto.com