After a couple of months in beta, Citrix releasesEssentials 5.5 for Hyper-V just before the holidays.

This version of the management platform for the Microsoft hypervisor includes a new technology called StorageLink Site Recovery.

This feature allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays without using multiple consoles. From the Essentials console they can test the recovery process with what-if analysis, and restore the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The notable thing is that StorageLink Site Recovery is available for every version of Essentials, including the Express one which is free of charge (but it won’t appear there before Dec. 23).
HP announced its support for this technology a long time ago and now confirms integration with StorageWorks SANs.

Citrix published a bunch of videos to show how it works here.

At the moment there are not many (virtualization-aware) solutions for disaster recovery of Hyper-V virtual machines and it’s not clear if Microsoft is going to release its own or not. So Citrix has a good chance here to be considered in most comparisons.