Citrix, which claims to be the most widely deployed cloudware around, in part a factor of running both Amazon and Rackspace, is buying six-year-old VMLogix and its LabManager and StageManager products, old hypervisor-agnostic friends that automate virtualization management in private and public clouds.

The widgetry will turn up in Citrix' OpenCloud infrastructure platform, its tarted-up Xen stack, to help it take on VMware management.

Terms were not disclosed.

Citrix said it would add lifecycle automation so virtual workloads can migrate between production stages with a single mouse click.

The acquisition will let Citrix add an intuitive, self-service interface to its XenServer virtualization platform so end users can access and manage their own virtual computing resources in on-premise private cloud environments, much like they set up virtual services in large public clouds like Amazon or Rackspace.

The deal should close this quarter.

In the name of cloud interoperability Citrix is also planning to integrate its OpenCloud platform with the newfangled open source OpenStack orchestration and management technology now being developed under NASA and Rackspace's tutelage.

Users will be able to seamlessly manage a mix of public and private cloud workloads from Citrix' XenCenter console across different cloud providers. Xen is being integrated into OpenStack.

In addition new virtual switching capabilities will be going into OpenCloud that leverage the Open vSwitch project and support the OpenFlow protocol, an emerging industry standard that pools the resources of per-host virtual switches to create a dynamic, distributed, policy-controlled cloud fabric. Cisco and VMware already have this kind of functionality to virtualize network connections in a hypervisor.

The capabilities will make it easier for cloud providers using OpenCloud to create isolated, multi-tenant cloud environments, while offering dynamic, per-flow control, and per virtual-interface policies.

Citrix says they will enable rich packet processing capabilities at the network edge, including the ability to leverage advanced application networking capabilities in Citrix NetScaler, another key component of the OpenCloud platform.

Some of the new functionality like the self-service interface should be available in the next release of the free Citrix XenServer virtualization platform. The fancier stuff will be reserved for Citrix' paid editions.

VMLogix got funding from Bain Capital Ventures. Thanks to XenServer and Hyper-V OEM business from Citrix it seems never to have needed more than its $3.5 million first round.