Citrix has opened up a beta of its CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand.

Citrix acquired the Java-based cloud management last year when it bought Cloud.com. A full production version of the branded stuff is supposed to be available later this quarter.

Citrix said CloudStack is already handling over $1 billion in revenue for more than 85 large-scale production clouds, including Zynga, IDC Frontier and Nokia Research.

CloudStack 3 is supposed to be for any size customer that wants to transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds in the IaaS fashion of Amazon.

The widgetry is supposed to give organizations a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale they can build production cloud environments on. "It is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top," Citrix says. "Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world's most innovative clouds are built - simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient."

New capabilities in CloudStack 3 include a cloud-optimized virtualization platform made out of Citrix XenServer 6; Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) integration; a built-in network services catalog; a reportedly simple user interface; and integration with Swift, the OpenStack object-storage technology for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data.

Although CloudStack is nominally hypervisor-agnostic - and although one would think the cloud-ready are already virtualized - Citrix's got CloudStack 3 pushing Citrix' own Xen, pointing out that Xen is used by Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and Softlayer, pretty much a guarantee of its scale, manageability, security, multi-tenancy and virtual switching integration, which Citrix claims is unavailable elsewhere.

The NaaS piece is supposed to be a key differentiator for providers looking to deliver advanced enterprise solutions in the cloud.

CloudStack 3 provides tight integration with Citrix NetScaler and supports NetScaler SDX and VPX appliances, making it easy to extend network-level integration to products like Citrix CloudBridge and CloudGateway. This is supposed to bring virtual networking to a new level, ensuring increased security, performance and connectivity between public and private clouds that are delivered as integrated services within the platform.

Citrix claims that since it acquired Cloud.com, the CloudStack.org open source community has grown 4x in user engagements, with more than 25,000 cloud builders now signed up as active members of the community. In the past year, the open source CloudStack product has reportedly been downloaded over 60,000 times and is currently averaging a 5x increase in monthly downloads.