Tidbits on Citrix Presentation Futures, from the Citrix Solutions Conference in Antwerp

Posted by Brian Madden on November 07, 2007. send this link to your friendsprint this post
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Today I'm at the Citrix Solutions Conference in Antwerp, a Citrix event with 1500 people that is something like iForum for Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Brad Pedersen gave the technical keynote. He began with the technical history of Citrix's products and finished talking about their vision. Most of this was stuff that I'd heard before, but there were a few gems that were new to me:

  • Citrix is working on a "Print Server" for Presentation Server server, whatever that means. One assumes it might be so that you can use the EMF-based driver-free printing for network printers. (Right now this feature is limited to client printers only.)
  • Citrix is working on general USB redirection for all USB devices for Presentation Server. This will be based on some stuff from Server 2008 and will only work on Presentation Server running on 2008.
  • Citrix is working on WPF (Windows Areo glass) remoting, something they demoed at iForum a few weeks ago called "Project Apollo." As Brad sees it, WPF remoting could work one of two ways: (1) The server could have a GPU (or a GPU farm) and pre-render the Aero glass on the server, and then send complete screen images to the client. (2) The server could send raw WPF commands to the client, and the client could render them locally. (See yesterday's protocol article for more details on this.

This WPF remoting will be intelligent. The Presentation Server will analyze the client capabilities, the network bandwidth and latency, the application characteristics, the server capacity, and whether the server has a GPU. Then based on the results of this analysis, WPF remoting will be enabled on the server, the client, or not at all.

Reader Comments
Enjoyed your 'ask us anything' half an hour :)
Wednesday, November 07, 2007 5:47:39 PM

Guest
Hi Brian,

I have to say i enjoyed your session very much today in antwerp.
To bad theres no MAC support like u asked :)

Hope to see u soon again.

Regards,
Jeroen Speetjens
www.cis-group.nl
Re: Enjoyed your 'ask us anything' half an hour :)
Thursday, April 24, 2008 4:21:50 AM

Guest
correct Herr Speetjens. I Hope you're leg feels fine. To bad for you that spinning is off limits for you now. Anyway, don't forget the appointment we have on the 14th of June this year. Could you confirm this mail please
Provisioning Server
Thursday, November 08, 2007 2:09:22 AM
Hi Brian,

I was at the Conference and there was one question I did not find an answer to. Will Citrix with Provisioning Server (Ardence) remain committed to streaming an o.s. to a physical desktop computer or will they focus on streaming to virtual desktops? Do you know more?
Re: Provisioning Server
Thursday, November 08, 2007 6:22:42 AM

Guest
I'm pretty sure they will continue to develop both (after they catch up with their virtual desktop streaming).
Re: Provisioning Server
Thursday, November 08, 2007 6:26:42 AM

Guest
i talked directly o the Citrix Provisioning Server team in Vegas. They said they were very committed to using Provisioning Server to stream a desktop all the way to the end point as well. The only problem today is that PVS requires some advance knowledge of the device (drivers, NIC cards, etc), so it is more applicable for OEM deals where the device is known. Dell is using PVS in this way for the new diskless PC they just launched, and it sounds like Citrix is planning more deals like this. They also said that once the PVS tech is integrated into the new XenDesktop, customers will be able to use it to stream either into VMs in the datacenter or to the desktop. It sounded like they were working on a way to solve the issue of streaming to heterogeneous PCs by using a hypervisor at the end point, which makes perfect sense. I came away very impressed with the team and the technology.
Re: Provisioning Server
Thursday, November 08, 2007 8:55:34 AM
I can confirm that the desktop streaming will stay. They are also focussing more on streaming Citrix Presentation Server to both physical as VM based machines.

If you are interested more on what happened on the Solution Conference check my blog at: http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/forum/citrix-solution-conference-2007.html.
Re: Re: Provisioning Server
Thursday, November 08, 2007 2:04:03 PM

Guest
Wilco, thanks for that link, one comment: the XenServer person was John Glendenning, not Roger Baskerville
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