Brian Madden Logo
Your independent source for application and desktop virtualization.
advertisement
Gabe Knuth's Blog

Past Articles

BriForum Video - VDI Product Smackdown - Presented by Brian Madden

Written on Sep 29 2008 6,269 views, 12 comments


by Gabe Knuth

This video from BriForum 2008 is entitled VDI Product Smackdown, and was presented by Brian Madden.  From the session description:

There are several VDI products on the market now, including Citrix XenDesktop, VMware VDI / VMD2, Qumranet Solid ICE, and Quest's Virtual Access Suite. In this session, Brian Madden will compare the various solutions and look at what's real and what's not. This will be one of our interactive workshop sessions where we'll look for feedback and discussion from the audience about what people are looking for and what peoples' experiences are with the current products.

To view the presentation, click here or on the screen grab below.  The associated slide deck can be downloaded here.







Comments

Guest wrote BriForum '08 DVD
on Tue, Sep 30 2008 10:00 AM Link To This Comment
Any guesses when the '08 BriForum DVD will be be available purchase and shipping?
Gabe Knuth wrote Re: BriForum '08 DVD
on Tue, Sep 30 2008 10:23 AM Link To This Comment
I almost posted a comment in anticipation of that question :)  We expect to ship DVD's in the second half of October, as the video post production is 99.9% done, and after that we just need to get the DVD's pressed. 
Guest wrote why bother with VDI?
on Tue, Sep 30 2008 11:55 AM Link To This Comment
the market is still premature, companies are buying eachother out, too expensive....too much hype when there is other ways to provide a solution.
Guest wrote Ardence?
on Tue, Sep 30 2008 9:50 PM Link To This Comment
I'm still confused what Citrix call Ardence now.  I thought it was XenDesktop, but that is a VDI solution, and what I am looking for is the Ardence solution that does a PXE boot to a server where it then streams the OS down to a fat client, and the OS is a single image which is shared amongst all of the desktops, with each system getting their own delta which gets slip streamed into the final piece which the client loads.  What is this called now? I can't imagine Citrix threw the solution down the barrell.
Guest wrote Re: Ardence?
on Tue, Sep 30 2008 11:17 PM Link To This Comment
This product from Citrix is called Provisioning Server for Datacenter when applied to the server environment.  It can also be priced ala carte to provide the same service to a VDI environment.  For Citrix XenDesktop, I believe it is bundled into the Enterprise and Platinum editions.
Guest wrote Re: Ardence?
on Wed, Oct 1 2008 8:43 AM Link To This Comment

In regards to the XenDesktop bundles, the Advanced Edition starts with the inclusion of CVS (Citrix proVisioning Server).

Guest wrote Re: why bother with VDI?
on Wed, Oct 1 2008 5:24 PM Link To This Comment
There is no other way to provide a virtual desktop. Only through VDI.
Why bother? NEC is running 12,000 virtual desktops using VDM and they saved 45%. Nuff said?
Paschal Nneji wrote Re: BriForum '08 DVD
on Thu, Oct 2 2008 8:44 AM Link To This Comment
Video is very informative. Next best thing to being there...
Andy Eccles wrote Re: why bother with VDI?
on Thu, Oct 2 2008 4:05 PM Link To This Comment

>>NEC is running 12,000 virtual desktops using VDM and they saved 45%. Nuff said?

Hi Guest, have you got any more detailed information on that?

Thanks, Andy

Guest wrote support
on Fri, Oct 3 2008 9:05 AM Link To This Comment
I'd be interested in hearing more about the support options each vendor offers... I see that some of the support/maintenance prices are "included" in the pricing; what does that really get you?  For instance, it's my understanding you can't even get a support contract direct from Citrix for less than $7500 - rather unrealistic for smaller shops, I'd say...
Patrick Rouse wrote Re: support
on Mon, Oct 6 2008 11:27 PM Link To This Comment
At Quest staying current on your software maintenance entitiles you to phone & email support. We don't sell maintenance contracts. 
Patrick Rouse wrote Re: support
on Mon, Oct 6 2008 11:28 PM Link To This Comment
That was supposed to read "we don't sell support contracts"

(Note: You must be logged in to post a comment.)

If you log in and nothing happens, delete your cookies from BrianMadden.com and try again. Sorry about that, but we had to make a one-time change to the cookie path when we migrated web servers.