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back to article Citrix goes storage light with XenDesktop

Citrix is throwing its hat into the desktop virtualization ring. Okay, we know what you're thinking. Citrix already has a desktop virtulization play. It's done the whole pumping applications out of the data center to the desktop thing for ages. And it has that whole desktop-like kiosk thing going on with XenApp, which used to …

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  1. Florian Hwigl
    Stop

    First things first

    Citrix should make it's "XenServer Enterprise" enterprise-ready before building products on it.

    I'd hate to see all my "virtual" Desktops go topside down just because they still didnt hire anyone with enterprise storage experience or HA-clustering experience.

    "Whats a failover..."

    Go see their forums... they barely know what the difference between active/passive and active/active storage is...

    Not to mention that a normal Citrix Terminalserver + any cheap "thin" client would appear save many times more money than this virtual vapourware.

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  2. Mike Laverick
    Jobs Horns

    VDI is NOT VDM...

    For clarity...

    VDI is a concept. Not owned by VMware. The key is the i bit. It stands for initiative/infrastructure.

    VDM is product bought by VMware some months ago... You can tell is a VMware product because it has the word "VMware" in it. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure/Initiative is open concept that vendor could develop.

    Incidentally, Citrix bang on about the storage costs. Huh? Haven't these guys heard of snapclone and dedupe from people like EMC and NetApp... The real pain point is management and printing. Currently, VMware don't have a solution for this - whereas at least Citrix has its pants "Universal Printer Driver". Having just bought ThinInstall, perhaps we should all buy shares in ThinPrint quickly. Perhaps I should found a company with the word THIN it in somewhere, and see if I can sucker some venture-capitalist out there...

    Citrix should tone down the FUD, and get on with it. I'm sure Citrix could make a much better job of client access than VMware a currently doing - after all the company was built on the concept of remote-thin access... Those of use work both in the Citrix and VMware community - have been waiting for Citrix Broker for bloody months.... Promises; Promises...

    Regards

    Mike Laverick

    RTFM Education

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  3. Jack Pastor

    Netapp Integration

    Duhh ... Did you notice that NetApp integration is BUILT-IN to XenServer ?? Anyway, did anyone read the Press Release far down enough to learn what Platinum is ?? Well, I'll explain just in case.

    Platinum includes PROVISIONING SERVER (from the Ardence acquisition.) What this buys is that a SINGLE OS IMAGE can be STREAMED over the network to the VMs hosting the desktops. Therefore, instead of housing 1,000 9GB desktop images, they can store ONE 9GB XP or Vista OS image and STREAM it over the NETWORK via PXE boot to an awaiting DISKLESS VM !!

    If that were not enough, they can then stream the apps INDEPENDENTLY of the OS through the old Citrix technology XenApp (AKA Presentation Server) thus DECOUPLING the apps from the OS sparing not only DLL HELL, but meaning only a SINGLE OS IMAGE needs to be patched, scanned for viruses etc. If an upgrade breaks someting it can instantly be rolled back just by rebooting the guests.

    Basically, that means 1,000 desktops can reside on a 35GB or disk. Think that pisses off EMC ???

    I am guessing that is what Ashlee meant by storage LIGHT.

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  4. Florian Hwigl
    IT Angle

    ohmygod they invented diskless terminals that use a fullblown OS image

    Thank you for the happy buzzword blurb and welcome to retying what failed in 1995.

    "...and fail miserably"

    old saying and oh-so-valid.

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  5. Jack Pastor

    instead of posting childish whiny cryptic junk ...

    Why not explain what you are talking about, with maybe .... oh .. examples ???

    Are you trying to say that in 1995 some company was PXE booting entire Win95 images over a 10 megabit network, and THEN streaming apps onto it ??

    If they were. do you think perhaps the technology was possibly not yet robust enough to accommodate the technique ??

    Feel free to use buzzwords, in your reply, but CONTENT and facts would be nicer..

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  6. Dave Howe

    And how does this differ..

    From the usual thin client desktop?

    Citrix pretty much invented the concept of a mutiuser, remote terminal windows server (of course, unix had been doing that long before, but xwindows is hardly "thin desktop")

    Over a decade ago, their winframe product was delivering complete desktops to wyse dedicated terminals (or dos based 386/486 machines running a client) using ICA to stream the display and keyboard/mouse events in each direction (plus share the local drives in the case of the dos machines). This is what eventually became the Terminal Services (RDP) app that comes with almost all windows servers now.

    at the same time, DOS machines were pxe booting from and loading a complete win3.11 environment from netware servers, running applications (from the same servers) selectively depending on if they did (or didn't) have permissions to them at the netware level.

    either way, I can recall this technology being in place a decade ago - ok, its a *lot* harder to just run modern software from a remote server; apps have got much, much bigger and rely on registry keys rather than easily-redirectable ini files, but I am not seeing anything new or novel here.

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