Quest Software releases Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite 5.10

The GDI Compression/Acceleration additions to RDP are NOT in 5.10, but are slated for 5.11 in October, and should be on display at VMworld.  These were never slated for 5.10 as we saw the prototypes for the first time in June.  This specific extension to RDP should bridge the performance gap that currently exists between RDP and ICA. 

This is different technology than Multimedia Redirection or Flash Redirection, but rather is compression of anything that goes thru the GDI. 

Exciting times....

I checked them out during BriForum and I think they have a great product and I was very interested in bringing them in and testing it out until I asked one very important question.  Do you have a migration tool to take me from my Citrix environment to your product?  The answer was no.  :0(  I was very disappointed because I know that I don’t have the time to re-create my entire environment, test it and move it into production.  I think that if they want to pull any customers from Citrix, like my-self, they need to have some sort of a migration tool to help us.

Provision Networks has cool product 1 year ago but now they don't support Windows 2008 / Vista and all existing x64 platforms (including 2003).  I think it is time to concentrate on new generation operating system support ("must have" features) before implementing some "nice to have" addons.

NF

Provision Networks has this habit of laying low for months at a time, only to suddenly emerge with 20-30 new features. I think they're gearing up for yet another huge surprise between now and the end of the year.

We create the features that:

A.  Give us a competitive advantage

B.  A paying customer is asking for.

The reality is that the percentage of users on X64 TS and Windows Server 2008 is so small that it isn't even 1%,so focusing our time on something that only a handful of customers is asking for, rather than features that appeal to the masses doesn't make sense.

We now have an impetus for supporting X64 (our partnership with Parallels) , on TS and VDI so it will exist (as far as I know) in 5.11.

I'm not sure what you mean about not supporting Vista.  The features may be different right now, but if one wants to use Vista Clients, or Vista for VDI we can do that now.

If you have a specific need, let me know and I'll see what we can do to help you.

There is enough "word of mouth" to get Guest Citrix Employees on this thread throwing dirt to protect their cash cow.  I have no dirt to throw, as Citrix makes great products, and I have many friends at Citrix, but the facts are that when we ship our RDP Graphics Acceleration, the whole "ICA is the only performant WAN protocol" pitch will be dead. We don't have this today, so you can breathe easy for a few months until it's in a shipping product. :)

I am curious if i understand this correctly. With the new Provision Networks is like a XenDesktop and XenServer? Or like Spice - Qumranet Solid Ice? The reason, is I am looking for something that streams great multimedia from a datacenter. It can provision new desktops to my users as well. So I hope I am thinking of this GDI is better than ICA speedscreen and RPD.

Quest Software's Virtual Access Suite is analogous to Qumranet Solid ICE or Citrix XenDesktop and our Enhanced RDP Protocol is analogous to Qumranet's SPICE or Citrix' ICA Protocol.  The difference is that ICA and our Enhanced RDP Protocol use less bandwidth across the WAN than RDP and provide better performance that RDP across the WAN, whereas SPICE is a LAN only Protocol, and Solid ICE (as I understand it) reverts to RDP over less than LAN Speed connections.

Protocols like SPICE, RGS, Teradici work great on a LAN Speed Connection, but are (as far as I know) worthless over WAN or lower speed connections.

These should clear things up even more:

http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2008/06/26/vmware-offers-a-vdi-bundle-so-why-would-i-use-provision-networks-connection-broker/

http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2008/07/10/but-xendesktop-has-ica/

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
Sr. Sales Engineer, Western USA & Canada
Quest Software, Provision Networks Division
Virtual Client Solutions
(619) 994-5507
http://www.provisionnetworks.com

Check out the Official Provision Networks Blog:
http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision 

Hi Patrick

With the experience optimization pack is possible to use a local attached webcam to make videoconference or bi-directional video?.

Patrick,

Most customers that are looking at VDI >90%, plan to put thin clients out, or when PC dies. So does Provision work on thn clients. And when I say thin clients, I mean low cost ones running on Linux, CE or even thinner OS's. XPE is not an option for most customers because it is impossible to manage and expensive. If the answer is yes, do all features work. The attractive thing about XD is the fact that Manufacturers are building complete support for its features. 

Quest had good relationships with all major Thin Client vendors. This means that we do indeed supply them with a client and work with them to embed our client into their Thin Client OS. These, like you mentioned, are the true Thin Client OSes like Linux, CE or ThinOS for example. Most features are available in these clients although it depends on the vendor because they have to implement our client into their OS.

We support vendors like HP, Wyse, ChipPC etc. Check out this post for more info: http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2008/07/08/provision-networks-and-thin-client-support/

I think the most important part is that we work with every vendor that wants to integrate our client. 

How does this compare with Citrix price-wise??
For say 100 users of the "ICA" type solution??

Or alternatively comparison of the per-user costs??

itrix is very expensive the first year, after that they are more reasonable, though one still has to go to a 3rd party to get reasonable support.

The migration would be helpful, I'm sure, but isn't it generally better to start "clean"??

Why would small businesses buy this instead of Citrix??

Is there a Win98 client?? We have lots of old white boxes that can't even run Linux and are slow with even Win98.

The cool people with lots of money to spend who are commenting above may be able to buy whatever they want, but ordinary people like me need to know!! Cheaper?? Cost/benefit?? SMB benefits?? Quality of support?? Etc. etc. 

The Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite is licensed per concurrent user.
We like to say that we have realistic, competitive pricing. We have three product editions. Here's is some pricing examples (this can differ per country or reseller). Suggested Retail Prices (SRP):

·         Standard Edition: our product that turns Terminal Services into an enterprise platform (similar to Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp).
SRP: $60 per CCU, SA + Support $12. For comparison: as far as I know Citrix’ equivalent Presentation Server 4.5 Enterprise Edition costs $450, SA $50 without support.

·         Desktop Services Edition: our well-known VDI edition that also supports Blade PCs and other Physical PCs.
SRP: $50 per CCU, SA + Support $12. This edition is pretty competitively priced, especially against Citrix XenDesktop 2.0.I have lost track of which edition costs how much and what functionality you get. Perhaps some readers know?

·         Enterprise Edition: combines the functionality of the aforementioned editions into one product. As far as I know, this is the only product in the market that currently supports SBC, VDI and Blade PCs from one product, from one console. Note that there is not real separation of the Standard Edition or the Desktop Services edition; it is just a license key that unlocks the relevant features.
SRP: $99 per CCU, SA + Support $20. There is no real comparison since (some of) our competitors provide this functionality by combining separate products into bundles (like Citrix) or cannot provide it at all (VMware).

A Java AppPortal Client is in development.

One bit of clarification to Michel's post, is that Standard edition does NOT add application publishing & load balancing, but rather adds management features like User Profile Management, Universal Printer Driver (client, session and remote relay), Application & Host Access Control, Logon Scripting, File & Registry Redirection, ADM Templates (w/o using GPO), Add/delete registry keys/entries...

Only Enterprise Edition and Desktop Services edition offer application publishing, web interface, secure gateway... and Enterprise edition adds load balancing and Terminal Services Support + VDI Connection Brokering in addition to the Standard Edition Features. Standard Edition is also referred to as Power Tools for Terminal Services, and can be installed on TS or Citrix, as neither offer these features.

Another thin client option is our Linux PXE Boot client, which can turn any PC into a thin client (for free).

Hi Guys,

For those interested: there's a new demonstation of Provision Networks Graphics Acceleration at our blog http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2008/08/03/provision-networks-graphics-acceleration.  

Hi guys

 Really interesting thread, thanks for all the info. Was wondering - what's the score on your deal with Parallels. Is it for a seamless integration between your technologies. Read about it in an announcement somewhere but the details weren't all that clear and don't know all that much about it as a technology. had a look a some of Parallels stuff and they're making lots of noises about the density of desktops they can get on a server, and also application deployment. Can you guys shed any insider light on this....?

As far as I know the anouncement of the partnership between Parallels and Quest is the same as what we have with Virtual Iron, i.e. we can each sell eachothers products as a bundle SKU and Parallels may not do this with any other connection broker vendor.  The features of Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite 5.10 were complete when we announced the partnership, so you won't see Virtuozzo integration in the Provision Management Console and connection broker until 5.11.  I know there is development of this integration happening now, but until I have seen  it, it would only be speculation as to the feature set.  I would "imagine" that we'd deo what we do with other hypervisors, i.e. automation of cloning/deletion + power management of VMs (Virtuozzo Containers).

I'll write a blog post as soon as I have the exact details. 

Hey Paul

Thanks again for the info, I'll keep an eye out for your blog then. The Parallels offering looks really interesting/promising - albeit from what they themselves say about it - but I'm always a bit wary of something that makes big promises, sounds great etc, but where its from someone you don't hear much about elsewhere. I know a bit about them on the Mac side, but this is pretty different to what they do there by the looks of things. Do you have any view on whether Parallels VDI is going to be a serious contender in the market - it's distinct, that's for sure, but is it really going to be a competitor to the bigger boys (I appreciate that might be a tricky question for you to answer ; )

The Parallels Virtuozzo product is quite different than hardware hypervisors, and Paralles makes one of those too.  I consider Parallels VDI offering as Terminal Services with full isolation, meaning each session/container has its own hostname, file system, registry, IP address... so one can install different software in each container (if necessary).

Where it differs drastically is that the containers/VMs run Server 2003 X64 Edition, instead of XP Pro or Vista and acheives very high scalability, as each container shares the underlying OS binaries and memory.  This means that each container uses significantly less disk space and memory than a traditional VM, so one might be able to get >100 containers per server.

We have used Provision's Enterprise software for almost 3 years, I have never experienced a more tuned in, and customer friendly company, or set of professional individuals that are committed to providing real world solutions for real world WTS problems. They actually listen to their customers and add the feature requests into the software. 

We have roughly 550 thin clients, and 200 FAT's, laptops and PC's. I personally would like to get rid of all FAT's, they are too much hassle.

Like all software it has it's pro's and con's and Provision in my experience has more Pro's.

Keep up the good work.

Gary Parkinson

Like the sound of all this multimedia extensions and improvements over WAN access, we are here in NZ where the WAN bandwidth is rather random.

 However we'd be looking at using it as a competitor to Citrix and afaik you don't include a reporting function ALA Resource Manager / Edgesight.  What do you guys use for this functionality or is this on the roadmap.

Thanks

Mark

I'm looking at our roadmap right now and integration with Quest Foglight is scheduled for 2H09. 

Foglight is our enterprise application and service managment console that does monitoring and root cause analysis for just about everything one can imagine.  It's a modular product has cartridges for different applicatione, i.e. Virtual Center, SQL Server, Oracle, Java, .Net...

In other words, this is the mother of all monitoring products.  We will be adding a Foglight cartridge (module) specific to Provision Networks.

For those of you not familiar with this product, an overview is here:

http://www.quest.com/application-and-service-management-technology/vmware.aspx

http://www.quest.com/application-and-service-management-technology/

http://www.quest.com/application-and-service-management-capabilities/