Citrix has announced the first upgrades to the Xen server virtualization products since completing the acquisition of XenSource last October.

Citrix emphasized that XenServer 4.1 and XenServer Platinum Edition, the new products, are designed to provision application workloads across both virtual and physical servers.

While analysts predict a majority of enterprises will use some virtualization within the next year or so, Citrix officials referred to industry estimates that say only 15% of corporate servers will be virtualized by 2012.

“We expect the virtualization market to continue to grow, but understand that our customers want solutions that address 100 percent of the servers in their datacenter today – both physical and virtual,” Phil Montgomery, Citrix’s senior director of virtualization and management, says in a press release.

Citrix says there are more than 50 enhancements in the new product releases designed to improve ease-of-use, performance and support for storage systems.

“While most virtualization products consume valuable server resources to run proprietary management tools to manage storage services, the new storage delivery services in XenServer 4.1 enable each hardware component to do what it does best by offering tight integration with native storage hardware,” Citrix states.

Citrix, an application delivery specialist, spent $500 million on XenSource, host of the open source Xen hypervisor project. Citrix hopes the acquisition will help it cut into VMware’s dominant share in the growing virtualization market.