Next week: exclusive video interviews with Citrix's and VMware's desktop CTOs. What questions should I ask?

Hi Brian,

I've got a couple of questions around the same topic:

VMware and Citrix have each invested in provisioning technologies, such as VMware View Composer and Citix Provisioning Server.

How does this affect the decision of what storage to use in a virtual desktop infrastructure?

Have you seen any friction with storage vendors who have their own VM provisioning technologies?

Is it always best to use your provisioning technologies, or are there circumstances when storage array based provisoning technologies are more effective?

First question first: Why is Scott Davis the _Desktop_ CTO -- shouldn't he be the _Virtual_ Desktop CTO?

Does Scott even believe that physical desktops have a place in the enterprise?

(Please don't let him answer with rhetoric about Fusion or Workstation being desktop products, therefore VMware is a desktop company).

What is the plan for ThinApp? Will it ever become enterprise ready? (No way to deploy, doesn't roam effectively, etc.)

Why doesn't View connect to Hyper-V?

Could you ask both for an updated roadmap on their client side hypervisors?

Scott did mention View 4 in a post last week, but it was an aside in an article about using regular PC's and Laptops as hosts for virtual desktops.  blogs.vmware.com/.../vmware-view-and-thick-clients.html

No mention on when Offline VDI will be out of beta or when CVP will be released, though (just that it will be after Offline VDI goes gold).

Agree with all of the above.

Would also like to have a roadmap on the RTO Profiles integration into View, including a technical explanation on if/how/when VMware plan on allowing persistent desktops without throwing out deltas when a master image is updated.

Also, do they have the capability and/or intention to further optimize PCoIP?

Might also interesting to get Harry and Scott's respective takes on the iPad, and what plans (if any) they have around supporting it?

Cut out the crap... For both, what is the 3 best point of your solution and what is the 3 problem you still haven't solved (and Client Hypervisor is not an answer for this one)...

I wonder how many vdi (view & xendesktop) they've really sold

1) PCoIP sucks bandwidth, why does VMWare continue to put out BS that it can be used in any real world scenario? Even Brian Madden is fooled by the bandwidth requirements as per his tweet yesterday (sorry Brain, don't agree with you at all here).

"9 reasons why the Hyper-V vs ESX debate is a waste of time" http://bit.ly/bVlQXw Bravo Alessandro! This also applies to View vs XenDesktop”

2) What is VMWare going to do with Tungsten Graphics?

3) What do you think about User Installed Apps. How stupid an idea is it really?

4) When are we going to get Reverse Seamless?

5) When are we going to get HDX/PCoIP Connect?

6) What do you most like/admire about VMWare/Citrix respectively?

7) Why does the XD product management team suck so bad?

8) Why not just use XA for desktops (Citrix)? You have no XA equivalent (VMWare)?

9) Client hypervisor futures? Is BYOPC real?

10) Implementation details for View/XD, real world are people running it. How big?

What about single image solution with a Block & File differentiation ala Atlantis Computing?

With provision server as a mediator between storage and OS instances Citrix has all the infrastructure for doing this.