Today Citrix ynergy 2012 is kicking off, a gathering that will focus on the virtualization, mobile and other areas where host Citrix has a major foothold. This year’s event is expected to attract about 4,000 IT professionals.

Right of the bat a few of the companies that reserved a booth at Synergy announced their product updates – data center software and the cloud are two of the earliest topics.

A developer called Virsto unveiled at the conference that it’s unique ‘storage hypervisor’ supports Citrix XenDesktop on VMware vSphere. The company’s solution installs on a physical server and parses I/O into a log file that can run on both flash and a traditional drive in a SAN – that results in a VM performance increase and less strain on the shared storage.

The partners demonstrating their products at Synergy are integrating Citrix wares into those competitors without leaving out the biggest ones. ComTrade announced that it now enables clients to connect Operations Manager, the monitoring tool included in the latest Microsoft Systems Center release, to Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager. Systems Center 2012 was launched earlier this month.

“ComTrade’s Management Pack for Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager helps service providers to measure, monitor and manage provisioning of hosted apps, desktops and cloud services, and delivers a complete end-to-end view of their Citrix portal environment from within Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager.”

The third update from Synergy arrives in courtesy of Racemi, which confirmed it will be showcasing its Cloud Path migration-as-a-service at the event.

Now that the event is starting to pick up momentum it’s also a good time to recap on the highlights of Synergy 2011. SiliconANGLE.tv attended last year’s event, interviewing a number of Citrix execs who in turn covered a variety of key areas from security and privacy in the cloud to virtual desktop deployments enterprise.