virtualization.info

Yesterday, while busy partying with Microsoft around the new VDI licensing and the additional revenue opportunity that RemoteFX will introduce, Citrix also announced the upcoming Feature Pack 1 for XenDesktop 4.0 (expected before the end of March).

In a corporate blog post, the company detailed the planned features:

• Streamed user profiles
  XenDesktop 4.0 FP1 will be able to stream user profiles in the same way it does for applications. Citrix reports that access to virtual desktops is 5x faster thanks to this.
• Integration with Microsoft App-V
  The Feature Pack will introduces the same integration capabilities included in the new XenApp 6.0
• Support for up to 100,000 concurrent virtual desktop sessions
  FP1 will support up to 100,000 shared virtual desktop sessions concurrently from a single site.

One thing that Feature Pack 1 will not introduce is the connection broker (Desktop Delivery Controller) and the management console support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

One hour before starting a joint webcast with Citrix about its new virtualization strategy for desktops, Microsoft briefly announces a number of new initiatives, upcoming technologies and licensing changes.

About hosted desktop virtualization:

• The Windows XP SP3 virtual machine that can be run on Windows 7 Virtual PC, called XP Mode, will no longer require hardware virtualization to be executed.
  This is probably the best way Microsoft found to solve the problems that Sony created to many customers with its shortsighted strategy.
  
  The new version is available now as a hotfix.

About bare-metal server virtualization:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 will introduce a memory overcommit technique for Hyper-V R2 called Dynamic Memory.
  The news leaked at the beginning of February.

About VDI:

• The remote desktop acceleration technology acquired by Calista in January 2008, now renamed as RemoteFX, will arrive with Windows Server R2 Service Pack 1 and will be integrated in Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
  RemoteFX can be considered an accelerator for RDP over the LAN for Windows 7 SP1 clients only.
• Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client Software Assurance (SA) will include the VECD license for free.
  Customers that don’t wont to subscribe the SA will be able to buy a new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license: $100 /device/year instead of $110 of the VECD.
• Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client Software Assurance (SA) and new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license customers will have the right to access their virtual desktop and Office applications inside it on secondary, non-corporate network devices, such as home PCs and kiosks.
• Microsoft and Citrix signed a new technology agreement to integrate and extend Microsoft RemoteFX with Citrix HDX.
• Microsoft and Citrix launched a joint trade-in program dubbed “Rescue for VMware VDI”, offering up to 500 licenses to VMware View customers at no additional cost, and offering to new customers a 70% discount on Microsoft VDI Standard Suite subscription license and a 50% discount on Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition annual license ($28 per device for up to 250 devices for one year).

Update: Brian Madden just published a video of RemoteFX in action.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI

Earlier this week, Citrix published an interesting article about average bandwidth consumption for different XenDesktop 4.0 remote sessions.

While the purpose of that post was to promote its Branch Repeater technology, which may or may not be interesting for you, the provided graph is valuable as a reference for VDI planning:

The graph comes from a 30-pages paper that describes testing environment and methodology: Performance Assessment and Bandwidth Analysis for Delivering XenDesktop to Branch Offices

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Papers, VDI

Citrix launches today the public beta of XenServer 5.6, which is released as open source since February, and Essentials for XenServer 5.6.

The list of new features includes:

• Dynamic Memory Control (DMC)
  This feature can increase the number of VMs per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing VMs to be compressed so that additional VMs can boot on the host. 
• Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management
  Workload balancing (WLB) offers the ability to reduce power consumption by consolidating workloads on the smallest number of hosts and powering off unused hosts.
  Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others. WLB configuration now includes the option to exclude specific hosts from WLB algorithms.
• Granular Role-based Access Controls
  Administrative users can be assigned one of several roles, which govern the actions they are able to complete from XenCenter and the command-line interface (CLI).
• Administrative Logging and Audit
  Administrative changes made from XenCenter or the CLI are logged and available in the Workload Reports in XenCenter.
• StorageLink Site Recovery Enhanced integration with storage-level replication enables recovery of an entire virtual infrastructure at a secondary disaster recovery site.
• Citrix License Server integration.
  Essentials for XenServer features are now activated using a license applied to a Citrix Licensing Server. 
• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4
• Support for up to 64 logical processors, 256 GB RAM, and 16 NICs per host
• Support for OVF import/export in XenCenter

Of course the first two features are the most interesting.

Dynamic Memory Control (DMC), a memory overcommit technique, auto-adjust the memory of running virtual machines, but keeps the memory within a range of pre-defined functioning limits (dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum) as specified by the administrator.
When DMC is enabled, even when hosts are full, XenServer will attempt to reclaim memory (by reducing the memory allocation of running VMs within their defined dynamic ranges). In this way running VMs are squeezed proportionally at the same distance between the dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum for all VMs on the host.
So, while DMC is on and the host's memory is plentiful, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Maximum Memory level. When DMC is on and the host's memory is scarce, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Minimum Memory level.

Citrix supports DMC only with certain guest operating systems and only within specific vRAM ranges:

While the description makes DMC sounds like the Transparent Memory Compression technology that VMware may introduce in the next vSphere, it’s evident that they are different technologies.

The Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management feature instead clearly offers similar features of the VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM).

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Citrix recently released a new open source tool to simplify virtual machines migration from the open source Xen hypervisor to its open source implementation XenServer and the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

The virtual to virtual (V2V) migration utility is written in Python and can either perform an offline conversion of a Xen VM into that XVA format that XenServer and XCP understand, or live streaming the VM to the two target platforms.

The tool supports both para-virtualized and hardware-virtualization-assisted (HVM) virtual machines but it still is in its early stage and Citrix warns about issues and bugs.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, Xen

Microsoft has a free hypervisor: Hyper-V.
Citrix too (and it’s open source now): XenServer.

Microsoft has a virtualization management console: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
Citrix too: Essentials for XenServer.

Microsoft has a VDI connection broker:  Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
Citrix too: Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC, part of XenDesktop 4).

Microsoft has an application and streaming virtualization platform: App-V (acquired by Softricity in 2006).
Citrix too: Application Isolation Environment (AIE, part of XenApp 6).

The presentation virtualization technology (below called “session virtualization”) at the core of XenApp is the only component that strictly depends on Microsoft platform.

Now, rather than competing head to head with Microsoft with such broad product portfolio, unlikely as long as XenApp represents the most significant part of its revenue, Citrix’s strategy is to support Microsoft overlapping technologies in a seamless way and add some features on top (even if this may cause some friction in the sales channel).

The company is doing so with Essentials, which is available for Hyper-V since early 2009 and it’s even free for SMBs. And it’s replicating with XenApp now.

With a provoking article Citrix just highlighted how the new XenApp 6.0 platform introduces tight integration with Microsoft App-V, in three areas:

Publish App-V packages directly from XenApp as "Dual-mode" applications
Through our new App-V integration, Microsoft App-V sequences can be published using the same workflows and wizards as all other applications managed through XenApp. Admins can leverage native XenApp Application Virtualization and Session Virtualization configuration parameters and policies to make Microsoft App-V sequences available for online and offline use.  Dual-mode fallback is also provided, enabling end-points to access App-V applications from a consistent interface, even if the device is incapable of running the application locally, for example when a user needs to access the application from a Mac PowerBook or iPhone.

Manage App-V client plug-in using Citrix Receiver
The Microsoft Application Virtualization Desktop Client can now be managed and delivered as a plug-in for Citrix Receiver. With XenApp, App-V sequences can now be delivered to lightly-managed endpoint scenarios, even if the end-point is not a member of the Microsoft Active Directory domain.  As a result, new App-V use cases and access scenarios are enabled, including the delivery of applications to a consultant or for companies with "Bring your own computer" (BYOC) initiatives.

Subscribe to App-V packages using Citrix Dazzle
With Citrix Receiver, users gain self-service access to applications through an enterprise app storefront. Admins can advertise App-V packages with all other XenApp published applications and services for easy, on-demand access by users.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

Microsoft recently launched a new, free TechNet Virtual Lab where customers can install and try Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 with Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2.

Users will work through the steps to simulate deploying multiple virtual desktops, and will first capture a reference image using the Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops. Next, the user will verify that the computer can be booted from a diskless client computer. The user will create multiple virtual machines using the reference computer as a template. Finally, the user will use the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to create a group of virtual desktops and deploy them to end devices. At the end of this lab, the user will have worked through all the steps required to implement Citrix XenDesktop using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

Set up an enterprise lab just to try XenDesktop may be expensive and certainly time consuming. So this is highly recommended to anyone interested in the Citrix VDI platform.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Training

Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment.
One of its partners, Claudio Criscione, is a long time columnist here at virtualization.info.

Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference.

VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit, one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry.
The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces. The basic function of the framework is a module launcher, allowing the user to configure an exploit module and launch it at a target system. If the exploit succeeds, the payload is executed on the target and the user is provided with a shell to interact with the payload. Hundreds of exploits and dozens of payload options are available.

What Secure Network released today is a number of open source modules that perform a number of different attacks: from hijacking a connection to the virtual infrastructures web-based management consoles (against VMware VI/vSphere, Server 1.x, Converter and even Citrix XenCenter) to password bruteforcing (against VMware and Xen platforms), up to a path traversal attack (against VMware ESX, ESXi and Server web interfaces).
The toolkit even includes an attack against VMware Studio.

The first round of beta version of the modules can be downloaded here. Secure Network promises more to come.

Labels: Citrix, Security, Tools, VMware

New month, new rebuttals in virtualization-land.
Evidently, virtualization players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales (virtualization.info has a slightly different opinion) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors.

Two of them are defensive, one is not:

• VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX
• Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales
• Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX

At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom.
The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions:

In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4

XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks

Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4

Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively

VMware answered last week, informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted.
Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point,

At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other. 
Luckily, Brian Madden jumps in and provide an impartial, long, detailed analysis that definitively is worth a read.

Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales

At the beginning of March, a blog independently run by VMware employees published interesting speculations about the sales volume of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

The article, written by Michael Hong, Senior Product Marketing Engineer, suggest that Citrix so far sold a very, very low number of Essentials for Hyper-V, because he apparently was the first one to recognize a major bug in the Workflow Studio setup.

Workflow Studio is part of the Essentials suite and the issue Hong encountered prevents its installation, but the Citrix support didn’t solve the issue and closed Hong’s support ticket without reasons.

Hong also notes that Citrix doesn’t have more than a bunch of posts on the its support forum about Essentials for Hyper-V.

For sure readers can’t wait to hear what Citrix has to answer on this…

Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

This is an old classic.
At the beginning of March VMware decided to cover a cost comparison table that Microsoft recently published.

The table compares several vSphere editions against a System Center bundle called System Center Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD), showing how the Microsoft way is significantly less expensive than VMware offering (at least half the price):

Of course there are a number of issues in the comparison that VMware pointed out.

In some cases VMware is completely right in highlighting how Microsoft doesn’t detail enough the difference between implementations of the same feature (vSMP support for example).
In other cases VMware wants Microsoft to drop comparison between some features because they are too different (VMware DRS vs Microsoft PRO for example) but here’s the a lot of room to debate.

While totally misleading, the sense of those marks is more like “We have this feature. The customer can use it in some way”.
Is it possible to pretend that a simple comparison table like this one (or the ones that VMware produces) offers an insightful qualitative analysis of implementation cost for each listed feature?
The customers that are looking for such in-depth side-by-side analysis aren’t going to research more on their own? Are they supposed to make their purchase decision just looking at this chart?

This is way the whole “my product is better than yours” marketing effort is a complete waste of time.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

At the same time the Novell commitment on Xen validates the hypervisor that Citrix is using as main foundation, keeping developers and customers engaged, and Citrix has all the interest to not disrupt it.
The increasing focus that Novell has on KVM must be clarified before customers start to think that yet another vendor (after Red Hat) is abandoning Xen.
This is probably why the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby offered a surprising insight about the value and shortcomings of KVM, the reason behind the Novell and Red Hat decision to invest on it, and the increasing interest for Oracle VM:

…

It's important to realize that for a Linux vendor, KVM significantly simplifies the engineering, testing and packaging of the distro. KVM is a driver in the kernel, whereas Xen, even with paravirt_ops support in the Linux kernel, requires the vendor to pick a particular release of Xen and its tool stack, and then integrate that with a specific kernel.org kernel, and exhaustively test them together - rather than just getting a pre-integrated kernel and hypervisor from kernel.org. So it is entirely reasonable to expect that over time the distros will focus on KVM as a hypervisor. I think KVM is extremely powerful in this context. But ultimately the choice depends on how the end-user wants to acquire/consume virtualization.

If the use case involves the customer buying, installing and running Linux to achieve virtualization, KVM will eventually do a fine job. If on the other hand, the user expects to deploy a virtualization platform that is entirely guest OS agnostic, using a complete virtual infrastructure platform then a type-1 hypervisor that is OS agnostic (xen.org Xen Cloud Platform, Citrix XenServer, OracleVM, VMware vSphere) is what they will go for. I have previously made the case that OS-bundled hypervisors have both inherent advantages and disadvantages in penetrating the market: The opportunity is to supplant the existing OS footprint with a new version of the OS that includes virtualization. The disadvantage is that no OS vendor has yet done a good job of virtualizing its competitors' products, and indeed strategically is never likely to do so. Let's be blunt: thus far they have done a mediocre job at best…

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, KVM, Novell, Xen

Exactly one year ago two well-known virtualization experts Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) released an independent, non-sponsored performance analysis comparing ESX 3.5, XenServer 5.0 and Hyper-V 2008.

The benchmark, specifically designed to measure desktop virtualization workloads (served by Terminal Services and VDI platforms), was so valid that Citrix decided to embrace the Virtual Reality Check methodology to measure XenDesktop 4 performance.

Twelve months later the two are back with a new comparison. This time they put side by side Citrix XenServer 5.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, comparing them against their new workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.0.

The most interesting thing is that all tests were performed on HP hardware equipped with the new Intel Xeon 5500 Series CPUs (codename Nehalem), and compared to Virtual Reality Check 1.0 results obtained on previous generation processors.
Performance are almost doubled with both XenServer and vSphere, and with Hyper-V R2, performance are up 154%.

Once again, if you are involved in a desktop virtualization project this performance analysis is a mandatory reading.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, Papers, VDI, VMware

Just in case you missed it, XenServer is now open source.
It’s confirmed by the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby, who answered a question about this topic on virtualization.info.

Citrix XenServer is a commercial implementation of the Xen open source hypervisor, as much as Oracle VM Server and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Xen.
XenSource, the company which sponsored the Xen project in its early days and that developed XenServer, has been acquired by Citrix in August 2007 for $500M.

Citrix first decided to give away XenServer for free (February 2009) and then announced its plan to release it as open source (October 2009).

The source code is now part of the XenServer 5.5 Update 2 download package that is available online.
To see the source code ISOs you have to log on:

As expected, the source code doesn’t include XenCenter, the XenServer management interface, which is a Microsoft .NET client GUI, and the hearbeat component required for the High Availability feature.

The open source version of XenServer is the foundation of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) that was unveiled in August 2009.
In his comment on virtualization.info, Crosby clarified that Citrix will first contribute to the hypervisor code that is part of the XCP, and then will derive from it future versions of XenServer (like the imminent codename Midnight Ride).

The question is: what Oracle and Novell will do with their own implementations of Xen now?

Update: The source code ISOs are also available without registration here.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

A couple of weeks ago Citrix published a new architecture blueprint for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The 38-pages document provides guidance to design scalable virtual desktop infrastructures based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1 and of course XenDesktop 4.0 (which includes the hypervisor and XenApp 5).

In this paper Citrix doesn’t push for the adoption of XenServer 5.5 but highlights that XenDesktop is hypervisor agnostic and can work with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V as well.
The company doesn’t even detail if and how different hypervisors will impact the scalability of this architecture but it offers some reference metrics in case you plan to use XenServer.

Labels: Citrix, Papers, VDI

At the end of January VMware revealed that is working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today, and VMware suggested that this record depends on new Intel Xeon 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs.

Anyway, that number came out during an interview, with no additional details, so there’s a lot of analysis to do before getting excited.
Nonetheless, the claim generated much interest (and skepticism), at the point that Citrix decided to answer.

The company says that it can cram into a single physical server up to 125 virtual desktops (and 500 hosted shared desktops and 5,000 local streamed desktops) with XenDesktop 4.0 and the Xeon 5500 CPUs.

Now, even if we know that Nehalem CPUs have four cores each, Citrix is not saying how many CPUs are powering this single server. We assume it’s a two socket system, which would mean 16 VMs per core.
The difference is that VMware seems to expect such density in future versions of View, while Citrix is claiming that it can deliver it today.

Can the two companies qualify these statements please?

Update: Citrix promptly answers with details: 130 Windows XP desktops on a 72GB, dual socket, quad-core Intel Xeon x5570 (codename Nehalem) host, running XenServer 5.5 and XenDesktop 4.0.

Citrix measured the density using the independent benchmark framework called Project Virtual Reality Check, which already raised a lot of attention exactly one year ago, when it was used to compare performance of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V for Terminal Services and VDI workloads.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers we report below, the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans.

Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue.
Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008.
Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%.

Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.
The company also counted over 20,000 XenServer downloads in that quarter.

Talking about the future, Citrix already has a Receiver for the just announced Apple iPad.
The prompt availability, well before Apple can start to ship the tablet worldwide, doesn’t surprise at all: for the last two years Citrix has openly discussed the idea of a Nirvana device that, coupled with their XenApp infrastructure, could finally offer mobility without compromised productivity.

Citrix rushed to deliver its remote desktop client, Receiver, to the AppStore when Apple launched the iPhone, despite its dimensions are less than ideal for the job. 
Now that the iPad features a much bigger screen (9.7” with a 1024x768 resolution) and remarkable processing capabilities (apparently an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore @ 1GHz), Citrix may have finally found the endpoint device it was waiting for.

For the full year 2010, the company expects that total revenue will be in the range of $1.74 billion to $1.76 billion.

During the Q&A session at the end of the call, Templeton also acknowledged the VMware presence and capabilities in the desktop virtualization market, but also said that Citrix wins most strategic deals when competing with them:

Question from Abhey Lamba - ISI Group
Mark can you talk about the competition in the desktop virtualization space, who do you see most and what is making you win projects there.

Answer from Mark Templeton

Obviously we see VMware mostly with their view product in the marketplace. Let's face it, they've been actually out in the virtual desktop space for a long time and have stimulated a lot of customer interest. Half of that interest when we get engaged, we talk with the customer really I think a lot more strategically about desktop virtualization and the full stack and so forth, and they realize that VDI which is really what VMware has been able to offer so far, just by itself is limited in terms of its applicability and with XenDesktop 4, we actually have a system that provides all these different virtual desktop delivery methodologies including apps on demand and all the very robust HDX technology.

…

When we go head-to-head in VDI, we are winning most of those and again based on having a superior user experience, as well as better utilization of network resources and equal or better virtual machine densities, so you know there are a lot of competitive sort of points but most of the times when we get to look at the deal we’ve got a very, very high win rate and you can tell that by the numbers we reported and you can certainly see that most of the business, 95% of the licensing was skewed towards the Enterprise and Platinum edition which actually have all of the features that I mentioned.

Even more interestingly, Citrix revealed that there’s almost no interest in the new VDI edition of XenDesktop 4.0, introduced in October 2009, after many users complained about the new price structure:

Question from Bhavan Suri - William Blair
Just a couple of quick questions here, you mentioned that 50% of XenDesktop was Enterprise and Platinum. I'm so, is it logical to think that the other 50% is potentially cannibalizing some of the XenApp base, so are folks from XenApp adding to the VDI version or the standard version of XenDesktop on top of their existing XenApp licenses.

Answer from David Henshall
Actually Bhuvan, let me make a correction. It's actually more than 90%, actually 95% that's coming from the Enterprise and Platinum edition, and very little revenue is coming out of the VDI edition. There’s just not real high customer interest in the VDI only solution.

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.

Labels: Apple, Citrix

Despite its huge potential, it’s pretty evident that the market is not embracing the application virtualization approach (to not be confused with presentation or desktop virtualization) anytime soon.

All the biggest vendors in the IT industry invested in application virtualization: Microsoft acquired Softricity in May 2006, VMware acquired Thinstall in January 2008, Symantec acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008, Novell distributes XenoCode with an OEM agreement since September 2008, and Citrix has its own engine as part of XenApp since a long time.

Regardless of this massive commitment, the top players above spent almost zero effort to push for application virtualization adoption.
The startups that were not acquired in the last three years are struggling to make any impact. See AppZero (formerly Trigence), Ceedo or Trustware.

Microsoft, which owns a large part of the application ecosystem, and can deeply influence the rest of it, doesn’t seem to have any interest in winning the race, even if it owns what was considered one of the best application virtualization engine in 2006: SoftGrid (now App-V).
This year we are going to see a virtualized and stream version of Office 2010, which is good start but nowhere near the kind of effort required to facilitate a mass adoption.

Or the industry is still too busy pushing for the adoption of hardware virtualization and its related applications (VDI, IaaS cloud computing), or the application virtualization technology is not mature enough to be useful outside specific niches, or simply there’s no need for application virtualization, and all the companies above just went deadly wrong with their investments.

On top of these options there’s another one: customers are looking for alternatives to application virtualization that are perceived as more flexible.
One of them may be the so-called offline VDI, powered by client hypervisors that expected later this year.

Labels: AppZero, Ceedo, Citrix, Endeavors Technologies, Microsoft, Novell, Symantec, Trustware, VMware, XenoCode

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced in August 2009, is the Citrix answer to the VMware vCloud initiative that a few hosting providers are implementing worldwide.

The first XCP implementation (version 0.1) emerged in November 2009.

This week the Xen.org community announced a little step forward which moves the platform to version 0.1.1, which includes a number of improvements.
The platform is on based on Xen 3.4.2 and its Dom0 is now based on CentOS 5.4.

The most important news anyway is that the team expects to deliver the alpha no later than early February.
It’s a good news but at this pace customers won’t have anything concrete (like a XCP 1.0 GA) before next year. And considering that the VMware partners have frozen their vCloud Express implementations in an “unlimited beta” status, maybe we should all reconsider the idea that 2010 is the year of private clouds. More likely 2012.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, Xen

While addressing the nth skeptic article about the destiny of XenServer, the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby provided some details about the company’s performance in 2009 and its plans for 2010.

Specifically, Citrix added over 35,000 new customers this year (it’s not clear how many of them bought XenDesktop and how many just XenServer) and plans to serve over 100,000 virtual desktops for next year.

With these numbers Crosby clarifies once again that Citrix has no interest in dropping XenServer to adopt Hyper-V and limit itself to deliver XenDesktop and Essentials for the Microsoft hypervisor.

Chris Wolf too, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, answered the article above, and his tweet seems to suggest that the upcoming version of XenServer will highlight the commitment on the product:

RT @aebarrett: VMW will cut prices, CTX will give up on XenServer http://bit.ly/75vDxc <- 1 for 2 ain't bad. even Nostradamus wasn't perfect
8:50 AM Dec 22nd from TweetDeck

RT @mreferre: RT @aebarrett: Citrix give up on XenServer: <- I thought they did already <-next release will change your mind
8:53 AM Dec 22nd from TweetDeck

Labels: Citrix, VDI

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots:

When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM'sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an 'Off-line Coalesce' tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.

Labels: Citrix, Releases, Xen

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix released a minor update for its orchestration framework Workflow Studio.

The new version 2.0.1. doesn’t introduce any change in the product but extends the existing activity libraries and delivers a couple of new ones.
Here’s the extended/new libraries about virtualization:

• [NEW] Citrix XenDesktop Activity Library
  • Activities that create, delete, and retrieve desktop definitions and manage desktop groups.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenServer Activity Library 
  • Automate the process of taking snapshots, backing up VMs, and backing up VM metadata for site migration and disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Automate the installation and update of tools on guest VMs.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenApp Activity Library
  Now includes activities that support automated application streaming packaging and application management.

On top of that Citrix also made available a new library to automate the Xen-based virtual machines that live in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform:

• Bundle Instance - bundles an instance within Amazon EC2 (using S3)
• Create Security Group - creates a new security group
• Delete Security Group - deletes a security group
• Get AMIs - returns a list of all the registered AMIs
• Get Instances - returns a list of all the instances currently running
• Launch Instance - launches a new instance (or instances) of the specified AMI
• Terminate Instance - terminates one or more instances

Labels: Citrix, Platform Orchestration, Releases

After a couple of months in beta, Citrix releases Essentials 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.

Labels: Citrix, Disaster Recovery, Microsoft

A couple of months after releasing the whitepaper Designing an Enterprise XenDesktop Solution (for 10,000 VDI seats), which was focused on version 3.0, Citrix is back with another interesting document, this time on version XenDesktop 4.0.

This one, titled High Availability for Desktop Virtualization - Reference Architecture, is an architectural blueprint to build an end-to-end environment that is fault tolerant at several levels: at the virtual desktop hosting platform (aka the hypervisor) one, at the guest operating system delivery one and at the application/user environment delivery one.

The architecture involves the use of technologies like NetScaler, XenDesktop Roaming Users and XenServer Pools and XenMotion.

Citrix also released a companion paper titled High Availability for Desktop Virtualization - Implementation Guide, which is a step-by-step walkthrough of the configuration described in the previous paper.

Labels: Citrix, Papers, VDI

Any customer interested in client virtualization knows that 2010 will be a critical year for VDI because a number of vendors, including leading players like Citrix and VMware, will begin to release their client hypervisors.

Thanks to the client hypervisors customers will be finally able to adopt server-based computing solutions without losing mobility and flexibility.

Citrix announced that it’s working with Intel on XenClient in January 2009. It was expected to be released before the end of the year, but it seems that it won’t come out before Q1 2010.
VMware too is working with Intel on its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), which won’t appear before sometime during H1 2010.

Both client hypervisors seem to rely on the Intel vPro technology. And this may be a problem.

At the end of November the Japanese website PC Watch published several Intel documents detailing the company roadmap for its new processors Core i3, i5, i7 and the imminent i9.
One of those documents clarifies which CPUs versions will have vPro and which ones will not:

Of course this may be a draft roadmap, and its legend may be misunderstood, but what it seems here is that only two CPUs have vPro: the Core i5 6x0 (codename Clarkdale) and the Core i7 8x0 (codename Bloomfield).

If this is correct and confirmed customers may have to be extremely careful when refreshing their desktop machines.
And even if the workstation/laptop model they selected seems to have one of the CPUs above, it’s worth to double-check with the vendor if the vPro feature is enabled. Nobody wants to have an enterprise-wide VAIO-gate.

Thanks to Engadget for the Intel Roadmap news.

Labels: Citrix, Intel, VMware

No matter how hard Microsoft and Citrix try to convince customers.
The whole idea that the two companies can recreate the Terminal Services-MetaFrame synergy on server virtualization doesn’t sound good. And it doesn’t sound good for a simple reason: in the first case, MetaFrame (or Presentation Server or XenApp) is a sophisticated add-on that enriches Terminal Services but can’t exist without it; in the second case, Microsoft and Citrix have completely overlapping virtualization platform which can fully replace each other.

The two companies may be totally aligned in terms of marketing effort to jointly attack the VMware leadership, but what happens when the Microsoft and Citrix sales guys actually visit the customers?
Aren’t they obliged to compete for the same account? If not, how exactly they suggest to the customer to choose between Hyper-V plus System Center versus XenServer plus Essentials? And even if there’s no friction there, which hypervisor do they recommend between Hyper-V and XenServer when the customer wants a XenDesktop-powered VDI environment?

The Microsoft and Citrix official position is that they don’t care which hypervisor is chosen, but virtualization is still pretty new for many. When the customer looks for guidance, how they will proceed?

Finally, somebody reports about this untold conflict:

…One instance where I was involved was where Microsoft actually brought Citrix into a pre-sales meeting.  The discussions were going well and the talk was about Hyper-V, among other things, being deployed in this customer.  Without any indication of what was coming, the Citrix Field Sales team proceeded to stand and step all over Microsoft and start talking about XenServer and why this needed to be the hypervisor of choice in this customer's environment.  Needless to say, the customer was confused and looked like a "deer in the headlights".  The discussion went downhill fast and the meeting ended with the customer frustrated, confused, and wondering why Microsoft and Citrix weren't getting along as was always talked about and that the message was so confusing.  So what happened?  The customer went with VMware and has since moved deeper into that technology…

Of course this is just an opinion, even if it comes from a well-known, respected and knowledgeable expert in the virtualization community.
As usual, virtualization.info welcomes other, different opinions. And if they come from the field level it’s much better.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.

Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:

• Latest Xen 3.4.1
• Linux 2.6.27 Kernel
• Windows PV Drivers, Microsoft Certified (Binary Only)
• XAPI Enterprise-class Management Tool Stack (web based management interface)
• VM Lifecycle: Live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
• Resource Pools: Safe live relocation, auto configuration, DR
• Host Configuration: Flexible storage management, networking, power management
• Event Tracking: Progress, notification
• Secure Communication using SSL
• Upgrade and Patching Capabilities
• Real-time Performance Monitoring and Alerting
• Basic SR-IOV Support
• CDROM and Network Host Installer
• Full Featured “xe” CLI and web services API

Xen.org also published a tentative roadmap for version 1.0:

• vSwitch Integration - first step to enabling multi-tenant network infrastructure, to enable firewall and routing rules to follow VMs as they migrate, and to enable flexible traffic monitoring of virtual ports
• Netchannel 2 Integration - improve scalability of xen networking on larger systems and to accelerate inter-VM traffic
• SR-IOV Networking - Although Xen support SR-IVO NICs today, configuration requires manual steps. By extending the control strack we can make SR-IOV simply a transparent optimization that is enabled automatically where possible
• Booting guests from SR-IOV HBAs
• Libvirt bindings
• Native support for OVF in the tool stack
• Drive DMTF standards for virtualization and cloud
• Smart error recovery to minimize impact of hardware errors
• Work closely with other projects and vendors to enable web-based mutli-tenant mgmt and provisioning; e.g. Eucalyptus, Enomaly, OpenNebula, etc.
• Increased management scalability for dealing with 1,000s of Xen hosts - federation of resource pools
• Aggregation of cheap local storage - integrated drdb/parallax
• OCFS2 integration

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Last week both VMware and Citrix announced their Q3 2009 earnings.

VMware reported its US revenue in decline for 1% (to $246 million) from Q3 2008.  International revenues instead grew 9% (to $244 million) from the same period of 2008.
Services revenues (software maintenance and professional services) increased 33% (to $250 million) from Q3 2008. 

Citrix instead reported a global decline of its license revenue for 18% (-15% in EMEA, -5% in APAC and +5% in Americas) from Q3 2009, while the revenue generated from license updates increased 7% for the same period.
Technical service revenue (consulting, training and technical support) increased 20%, while online services revenue (most likely the GoTo product portfolio) increased 21% from Q3 2008.

The two competitors are performing pretty well in the stock market if we look at the year performance:

Labels: Citrix, VMware

The article virtualization.info published just last week about Citrix joining the The Linux Foundation generated a lot of interest and comments.
Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, personally answered a few readers about the reasons behind the value of a free XenServer and the strategy behind it.

In doing so Crosby disclosed very interesting information. First he claimed that XenServer costs to VMware $300MM per year in lost revenue, probably a Citrix internal projection considering its current market share.

Much more important than that, today Crosby candidly unveiled that Citrix is about to fully open source XenServer.
You read right: the company CTO is not talking about Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community. He’s talking about its commercial implementation, XenServer, where Citrix invested so far, that is offered as a free product since February and that the Burton Group considered as enterprise-ready as VMware ESX.

Here’s his full answer that contains the breaking news:

XenServer is 100% free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capabiliy, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes form Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head to head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present.

Crosby further confirmed his words after the comment above.

This move may or may not increase the Citrix market share, and may or may not oblige VMware to drop the price of ESX earlier than expected.
virtualization.info will publish additional details as soon as they are available.

Meanwhile it’s worth considering what Oracle and Novell will do after this will be formalized.
Both companies have their own implementations of Xen, and both are working to release more sophisticated platforms that offer the same features that XenServer offer today.
If Citrix gives away the code, does it make any sense for Oracle and Novell to continue their own development of the hypervisor?

It will also be interesting to see if this move will generate more virtualization players, as it makes so much cheaper and easier to enter the virtualization market by focusing just on the management layer.

Update: Citrix reached out virtualization.info to add an official statement to this move:

XenServer is offered to the community as the basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).  There will be substantial additional contributions coming from other community partners, but we aim to make all of our technology in XenServer (other than XenCenter, which is a stateless Microsoft .NET client GUI and therefore not appropriate for the XCP community and its intention to make a great cloud platform for large scale clouds to consume and automate using their automation and management systems) available to the community in OSS. 

Other features will come in too, like the Open vSwitch, and we will drive from there to develop additional storage repositories and so on.  But the key emphasis is the use of XCP as a platform for the entire community, with a starting point, for which we have offered the code base of XenServer. 

Key partners such as VA Linux, Oracle, Novell, Fujitsu and Intel and AMD are all committed to the ongoing delivery of additional value to the platform, which will therefore have multiple routes to market, a strong ISV community and hopefully deliver revenue to a broad sector of the market.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced the newest version of its XenDesktop. While the product is about to deliver interesting features, many customers complained about the new licensing scheme because Citrix moved a concurrent user model to a named user model.

The product is not out yet (the release is planned for November 16) but Citrix, listening to the feedbacks, already changed its pricing strategy.

With an informal announcement on his corporate blog, Sumit Dhawan, Vice President of Product Marketing, describes the new rules:

1. Customers can choose between the “per named user” model and the “per device” model for XenDesktop Enterprise ($225) and Platinum Editions ($350).
   Same license for both uses. Same price.
2. The Standard Edition license is replaced by a brand new VDI Edition which has a “per named user” and “per device” license model ($95) as well as the dear old “per concurrent user” license model ($195).

The new VDI edition doesn’t include XenApp but still supports 3rd party hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware VI/vSphere.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

A week ago virtualization.info introduces a new comment system powered by Disqus.
It has a number of features we were really keen to offer: it allows our readers to log-in with their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID profile, it allows threaded conversation (and subscription to them by email and RSS), it allows to vote and flag for review comments, etc.
It even exposes a trackback URL so that our readers know which websites are continuing the discussion started here.

There's no way to know if this new system helped or if it’s just because of the articles we recently published, but for sure the number of comments we are receiving skyrocketed. 
Some of the last ones are very interesting like one coming from Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

In our article titled Citrix joins The Linux Foundation, looking for a Xen-powered kernel?, Crosby answers to Jagane Sundar, founder of Thinsy, and exposes a very interesting information about the competition with VMware that we don’t think Citrix ever published:

…is certainly true that lots of folk have not made money out of Xen - that is, it has become a competitive tool rather than a profitability tool. That is, none of Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or Citrix with XenServer, charge for the base platform. However Citrix XenServer is 100% a revenue generator for Citrix. First, it represents approximately $300MM in lost revenue for VMware per year…

This is probably an esteem that Citrix made internally, considering the amount of XenServer installations that customers report. It remains a claim until there are some numbers and 3rd party verification.
Nonetheless it’s interesting to report because it gives a raw idea of how much Citrix may be disturbing the VMware activity.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

In July VMware attempted to win those Virtual Iron customers left in the cold by Oracle with an aggressive discount program.

Now it seems that VMware has to defend against a similar move from Citrix, which launches today the Open Door program.

The rules are simple:

The Project Open Door promotion will be effective worldwide from October 1 – March 31, 2010. Customers who decommission five or more VMware vSphere 4 or VI3 servers and replace them with XenServer or Hyper-V plus the Citrix Essentials solution, receive the following: 

• A free five incident support pack (5 by 8 hours) for every five servers converted
• A voucher for six hours of online training for every five servers converted
• Free migration tools for seamlessly transferring virtual machines from VMware to XenServer or Hyper-V

The attempt doesn’t seem particularly aggressive and in normal circumstances we won’t cover it on virtualization.info. But there’s one thing that makes the announcement worth the mention: Citrix is investing its support and training money even if customers switch to Hyper-V (plus Essentials).

At this point it’s clear enough that Citrix wants to replicate the profitable synergy “Microsoft Terminal Server plus its Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp” with “Microsoft Hyper-V plus its Essentials”. 
But it is still notable that Citrix is now actively encouraging the adoption of a hypervisor that is not XenServer.

Of course the logic behind this move is always the same: “Both hypervisors are free. If the customer wants XenServer we are there to make money with Essentials. If the customer prefers Hyper-V, well, we are there to make the money with Essentials as well.”

The point is that who’s winning the most here is Microsoft. Citrix in fact may turn into a giant promotion and sales machine for Hyper-V. 
The Citrix sales force may not have any incentive to push for XenServer if the customers is more inclined to adopt Hyper-V. And if the customer feels that Citrix doesn’t XenServer at heart itself, then he will build no trust on it and will more likely go to Hyper-V.

Labels: Citrix, VMware

By now every virtualization.info reader knows that VMware and Citrix are completely focused on competing in the VDI space rather than on “simple” server consolidation.
For now most of the discussion is mostly around their connection brokers (and their remote desktop protocols), but in a matter of months it will be extended to their application virtualizations solutions and their upcoming client hypervisors.

Now, a question: What is one of the most viewed threads on the VMware VMTN forums dedicated to the connection broker View?

Answer: A thread titled “What made you chose VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop”, which was started at the end of April and so far collected almost 3,000 views.

The thread is full of interesting comments. Of course it’s impossible to say if all of them come from real customers. For sure many come from well-known VMware users.
Also, not every comment, even the genuine ones, reports correct information. Nonetheless the sum of them contributes to clarify the customers sentiment about both products, and most of all about VDI as a technology.

Some of the things they said so far are well worth a mention here and should be considered along with the architectural reference blueprints that both VMware and Citrix released so far (our emphasis):

…I have found View very easy to install, configure and manage, from bare metal to delivery of 4 nodes less than a day. you have two consoles, vCenter and View Administrator.

Now compare this to XD the same 4 node deployment was over a week of shoehorning etc, bear in mind this is on Tier one hardware. Also to get similar functionality you will be presented with I think 6 different management consoles. you also have the added benefit of Offline Desktops (albeit experimental) with view that is not available with XD.

True ICA is a better remote protocol that RDP, but form my opinion the pain points are too great for the product…

…Finally as for price, again, I can only tell you what we've gotten back and XD has come in more expensive than View and that includes purchasing Splitview as well.

…There is a learning curve for most who enter the Citrix world. There is a bit more complexity in the configuration as some has stated, but we are reaping the benefits…

…Basically the biggest reason is that most companies are a VMware shop. So it makes sense to only have to call one vendor for end to end support.

Also cost. View costs less per desktop compared to XenDesktop i.e licensing, more VM's per physical host, linked clones for storage savings etc. TCO is very important because desktop costs are already very low.

Stability. View has less components and VMware historically does great QA on the products that they release. Microsoft and Citrix, not so well.

Big reason, VMware views linked clone technology. SAN storage is not cheap, PC hard drives are. You need to be able to sell this to senior management. When you tell them the hard drive storage is going to be 4 times as much they will laugh at you…

…To be honest, we chose VMware for the cost. Presently we are having a few issues that have made us reconsider our choice.

One issue you need to closely look at is in regards to using remote virtual desktops, if that is your intended use, and the interaction with the OS of the clients who will be connecting in. Page 18 of the View Manager Administration guide is a must see if you want to use remote clients through the view portal. Information I wish I had during our evaluation…

…One of my vendors was giving me a lot of pressure to validate XD for my environment. I am PoCing View 3.1 right now. I'm not looking at XD for the following reasons:

1) I'm a VMware shop 1 throat to strangle.

2) Just because XD works with ESX backends now doesn't mean they will in the future…

…To be honest, the only advantage that Citrix has right now is their ICA display protocol. This is the only reason that Citrix is even being evaluated at most companies…

(please note anyway that all the comments above refer to View 3.x and XenDesktop 3.x and not the upcoming XenDesktop 4)

Citrix felt the need to address some of the points emphasized above, and published an article that covers the installation and management complexity, the RAM consumption, and the price.
This one is worth a read too.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

In 2007, when Citrix, one of Microsoft's strongest allies, acquired XenSource, a startup whose success depends on an open source product (the Xen hypervisor), nobody really believed the move would benefit the community in any way.

The major concerns were that, over time, Citrix would abandon the development of Xen to focus on a proprietary hypervisor, that Citrix could try to influence the Xen development to provide an indirect advantage to Microsoft and/or that Citrix could use its influence on the Xen project to damage all the competitors that were relying on it (at that time Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Oracle).

After the XenSource acquisition, some major vendors (Red Hat and IBM for example) and individual contributors lost interest in the Xen project and started to focus on KVM (IBM effort, Red Hat effort). Possibly because of this relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, possibly because Citrix has never been an open source champion.
Of course VMware did all its best to facilitate the exodus from the Xen project.

virtualization.info is unable to exactly track or measure the Citrix contributions to the Xen project since the XenSource acquisition, which made progresses in the last two years and has an impressive roadmap.
People more informed on this aspect are welcome to comment to the post with details.

For sure Citrix approached the open source world from different angles: it invested in the networking vendor Vyatta, which competes against Cisco an open source software router; it’s behind the development of the first open source virtual switch for virtual infrastructures, the Open Virtual Switch, and now it’s supporting the creation of an open source cloud computing platform, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Whatever the company has done so far, it was not enough to convince Linus Torvalds and the other Linux maintainers to include Xen in the kernel, side by side with KVM.
It seems like just a technical issue, but maybe it’s more than that.

The Citrix new move to the open source world is joining the Linux Foundation.

The official reason behind this move is to ensure that the Linux operating system works the best inside its XCP cloud and in the upcoming client hypervisor XenClient:

“The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaborative work on requirements for Linux and complementary projects such as the Xen Project, Xen Client hypervisor Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative,” said Ian Pratt, founder and chair of Xen.org and vice president of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems. “Citrix has joined the Linux Foundation both in its role as leader of the Xen Project and because it ships commercial products based on Xen.”

In addition to developing the Xen hypervisor, the Xen community is working on the development of complete client hypervisor and cloud virtualization platform products, which incorporate Linux as an embedded, secure, optimized run time for the Virtual Machine Monitor. The Xen community also develops open source technology to permit Linux to run with optimal performance on other hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server.

Anyway, it’s probably safe to speculate that more than anything else, Citrix wants to see Xen shipped out-of-the-box with every Linux distribution in the market. And becoming a Linux Foundation member may be the first step to achieve the task.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Xen

Just before the launch of XenDesktop 4.0, Citrix released a 42-pages reference architecture on how to build a VDI environment for 10,000 seats with the following characteristics:

The blueprint specifically applies to the previous version of XenDesktop and discusses the following areas of the project:

• Virtualization Infrastructure: A detailed design on the underlying virtualization infrastructure focusing on hardware, capacity, high-availability and storage.
• Operating System Delivery: A detailed design on the delivery of the base operating system to hosted and streamed desktops with a focus on farm design, capacity, cache and high-availability.
• Application Delivery: Focuses on the integration of the application layer in regards to desktop delivery, specifically applications, integration and application optimization.
• Desktop Delivery: Creates a design for the desktop delivery process, with a focus on capacity, groups and group settings.
• Virtual Desktop: Focuses on defining the components of a desktop image for hosted and streamed desktops. The section looks at virtual desktop specifications, desktop images and storage requirements.
• Access Design: Focuses on how internal and external users receive their resources.
• Business Continuity Design: Focuses on designing a solution that reduces the impact of service faults on users.

Independently on the decision to adopt Citrix technologies, it’s a good starting point that anybody interested in VDI may want to check.

In the past VMware published similar papers, like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Deployment Considerations and VDI Implementation Best Practices.

Labels: Citrix, Papers, VDI