There's been a bit of discussion on the topic on http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=82241&tstart=0
The big question among VDI users seems to be: why chose the broken one?
Yeah, but VMWare VDI is better because it's from VMware and VMware is "hot" and it costs like 3 times more than Citrix (including all the storage, server, and licenses) and is way harder to manage...:-) So it MUST be better right?
People found this in their S1 forms for the IPO. From what I have read they were purchased LAST YEAR in like June and They ahve kept it complety quiet, but had to reveal it for the IPO.
Ron O
Please, if you haven't got anything sensible to say, don't.
VDI not better or worse than anything else. it is a different method of deploying desktop infrastructure to the end user. unlike Citrix/Terminal Services it is a single machine image to a single user, but unlike a standard desktop it is virtualised on ESX. it is not manna from heaven. but coupled with Citrix/TS, and Blade PC's the ability to completly centralise your infrastructure has just got closer.
there are still issues, USB support and a lack of IDE support in ESX VMware guests. but it is there and it is a valid paradigm.
Posted by Tom Howarth- Forgot to login
In case you missed it, it sounds to me that the longhorn hypervisor is not "going to rock" since they have removed quite a few of the compelling features from the initial release that were originally planned. See http://www.betanews.com/article/Critical_Features_Cut_from_Windows_Server_Virtualization/1178824664
IMO it is going to be another Terminal Services vs Presentation Server battle where Citrix is always staying quite a few steps ahead in the game as they are more dedicated to the product, have been developing it longer, and have more invested in the product line.
Early versions of WinFrame did have published applications, however, you were locked into a fixed screen size (640x480, 800x600, etc.).
What the previous person posted about VMware being hot so it must be better. . .although written poorly, that post does seem to have some validity in the field. Admins at customers are always looking for the next best thing and they all think they want VDI. However, if they are serious and really have budget, what they find is that VDI is really only needed from anywhere to 10 - 20% of their user population.
A lot of resellers today are leading with VDI because it is sexy and gets the door open, but then end up selling traditional Citrix Presentation Server. Citrix Presentation Server (or MetaFrame or WinFrame or whatever you want to call it) has been out since 1996, is mainstream now and frankly, not sexy (no matter how many features you throw at the thing). But guess what, it gets the job done and it works like a champ!
Not True? Care to comment, or just a 'not true'. It was found on their S1 with no announcements from Vmware. word is (around the community) that it was last year in 2006. not true from a guest doesnt say much other than a vmware troll is trying to say its not true while hiding
T
It could be not true, but I have heard it from two sources that they were not just purchased 2 weeks ago. They have held them for a while and kept it under wraps
hell Like he said it was on the IPO disclosure forms, not some press release. Thought is that they didnt want to upset their other partners, which of course -if true- is more than underhanded. I mean hide a pruchase while you work out YOUR PRODUCT then slam the market your partners are working on, the whole time telling them nothing and playing like you love them. Underhanded if true at all
I guess greed is not good for Leostream! :)
I look forward to your updated article (although it would have been interesting to see what you have written before this EdgeSight announcement). There's no doubt EdgeSight has tremendous potential for end-to-end monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting. I say "potential" because I have heard the marketing hype and it sounds like this is the perfect software tool but only to find out that oops, it can't do this yet - it can't monitor these devices/OS's yet - but it will! Really!
I got a perplexed look on the face of a customer when my response to their EdgeSight softball lob to me came back to them as "version 5 will be astounding, but the current 4.2 just isn't there yet". Again, they were just reading the hype and not asking deep questions about what it can do now.
It sounds like with version 4.5 the shovel has at least begun to touch the new ground it is supposed to be breaking. Here's to a strong future in EdgeSight!
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=658481
Well it is great to hear that Citrix is coming along following their roadmap for Edgesight, however i personall dont like the fact that they now seem to grind a bit more gold making every new feature a new product. One thing is the fact that it will most likely be licensed on it own, which is ofcourse something customers do not appreciate the real problem as i see it is that the thought of Citrix solving you problems is turning into .. "We solved one problem, if you want another problem to go away, buy a new product."
I would go for fewer products, more features, a bit more expensive licensing, more tools in the toolbox to approach solving problems for companies.. any day..
/LamerSmurf
Maybe if the load testing was just part of EdgeSight, rather than being a separate product, Citrix were thinking it wouldn't be taken as seriously in the load testing market, against products like Mercury's etc. I thought the load testing was going to be part of EdgeSight, instead of part of the EdgeSight product range though, and it looks like I'd have to part with more money and have a yet more complicated licensing model to use that. It would surely have placed EdgeSight in a better position too, with load testing built in - after all, Citrix are trying to convince us that EdgeSight has the advantage over the likes of PinPoint, PerformanceGuard etc, and an all-in-one product would have helped.
Hi Gabe,
A little while back I had a Customer (Education) asking me how he could integrate EdgeSight Agents with his many Thin clients that we deployed over a large area. He had some Contractors have a go, but we all know it's going to be an uphill battle unless it's designed correctly in the first place? and Even then it's an odds on bet that it probably still won't work?
What I would like to know is how many people (organizations) would be interested in Thin Clients **IF** it could be proved to work correctly?
I am now working with Neoware as the SE covering ANZ/Asia and I have a feeling that this **might** actually be possible, but it would take quite a bit of work, and I'm just wondering if there are other Organizations who would be interested?
If so I'll have a chat to Steve Gorman and the rest of the EdgeSight crew to see what can be engineered?
Cheers,Dave
EdgeSight for Presentation Server doesn't require an agent on the client. EdgeSight for Endpoints does, however you'll only need this version if you have local running apps (or in case you have both published and local apps, you would need both EdgeSight for CPS and EdgeSight for Endpoints licenses).
Version 4.5 of EdgeSight for CPS now uses the CPS license server. Previous versions have their own licensensing server, but that can run on the EdgeSight server, hence no separate licensing server required.
Also, where is the "tighter" integration with NetScaler and WanScaler that was promised? Now I understand it is supposed to be in the 5.0 timeframe, but when is that going to be if the actual 4.5 bits are not ready yet? We looked at PerformanceGuard but it is too expensive and doesn't scale that well. What is PinPoint?
This is a ridiculous rumor. Who makes this nonsense up? I've worked for Leostream since 2002. I know just about everything that happens in the company.
VMware has never offered to buy the company either formerly or informerly. A few years ago, some VMware folks did a technical review of our P2V product, but that's it. The reasons VMware bought Propero over a company like us or Provision Networks is more complex than "they wanted the best connection broker for the cheapest money," although I do not pretend to know the reasons for VMware's decision.
I'm sure a term sheet from VMware would be a very welcomed thing at my company. However, I don't believe such a document will ever happen for a variety of reasons.
Leostream and VMware currently enjoy a very positive and mutually beneficial relationship.
As for Leostream being "greedy," I'd suggest that we're no greedier than other for-profit ventures out there.
I assume that "EdgeSight for Load Balancing" should write "EdgeSight for Load Testing" at the beginning of the last but one chapter? Or is that one more product in the product line? :-) And what would be the licensing scheme for that product? :-)
Regards Josef
In my opinion a "End to End Monitoring solution", and this is what Citrix claims Edgesight to be should be capable of monitoring the complete way of a application delivered to a user/client.
E.g. in a SAP envirnment we have to have an eye on the SAP database servers, the SAP application servers, the Citrix Application server, the citrix client devices, the networks in between these components and many more things not to mention here in that listing.
Separating Edgesight for CPS and Edgesight for Endpoints makes no sense for me, except from a licensing point of view (earning additional money).
Do I get something wrong here?
The main features appealing to Citrix for us will now be in Windows Server 2008. While Citrix's resource-based load balancing is great, with the amount of users we have, its not worth the $1 million spend just to get it.
Heck, for that, we could hire several FTEs and have their whole job be to babysit Terminal Server weights on the load balancer and we'd still save a ton of cash every year.
Our only challenge will be getting some rather old software to work in Windows Server 2008.
Citrix keeps adding more and more features we don't need - and while I'm sure some companies need them, we don't need 90% of them. Windows Server 2008 is almost a complete package unto itself.
agressiv
I would not confuse session-based LB with round-robin DNS. Round-robin is "random" load distribution, not even load balancing.
Round robin doesn't work that great for TS work-load, but Session Broker load-balancing IS NOT ROUND-ROBIN DNS!
If you have 70 users on the box using similar set of applications session-based load balancing will be very close to any other "resource-based" load-balancing metric. A lot of Citrix customers runs with session-based load balancing.
Resource-based load balancing has some other advantages like "blackhole" prevention, which is important for example in case of sudden significant loss of farm capacity (ex - switch failure leading to "loss" of several servers, users from theses servers connect back to the farm and overload all existing servers - all farm is down).
Session Broker load balancing also implements logon throttling and "maximum session" limit per server to coupe with such a disasters, but it is harder to configure (WMI scripting required)
From my experience (and those of others) I tend to see that session based load balancing (indeed not to be confused with Round Robin) at the end of the day yields a better spread of the load. I feel this is especially true in environments where there's an obvious peak in Logons, like offices for example. One reason could be the Load that the logon process itself yields. The biggest culprit would however be a human one I guess. Think about it: ALL people usually do the same things when they are starting their working day: drink coffee, check email, drink more coffee, surf web, drink even more coffee, check the intranet and so on..... It's only after that, that they start to really "use" the system. So one does 80 MB Word Documents and tries to rival E=MC2 using excel combined with surfing 5 websites and searching trough a 500 MB Inbox while his neighbouring session does.... well nothing except for outlook. This means that approximately every user yields the same load during their first hour of work or so. In the office scenario this means that 75% are logged on in that time frame. After that hour or so, the system gets its "real load" by users starting to do their actual work. So now the resource based load balancing will make the right decisions but it's too late now.... the users are already logged on. What's your experience on this?
Depending on what you call the black hole effect, resourced based load balancing will not help you out. Session Broker load balancing does indeed implement logon throttling (in multiple ways) but as far as I can see this is enabled by default and doesn't need any explicit configuring. The Max session count is indeed something you need to configure in the registry.
For those interested, I'm (slowly but surely) doing a series of posts on my blog regarding load balancing. In one post I specifically discuss session-based load balancing.
Dan
Even though Session Based Load Balancing might sound attractive, there is one thing missing in your article and that is that Microsoft's scope for this technology is an environment of two to five identically installed servers. Also the impact of the complete lack of central management is much much larger than your article seems to suggest. Stop comparing apples and oranges when it comes to Windows 2008 vs Citrix Presentation Server. It just doesnt work that way.
Citrix has been doing everything that MS is trying to do, for more than4 years now.
1. Citrix's Server User Load Rule, which is part of the default Evaluator, is what Microsoft is now calling Session based load balancing.
2. Citrix's IMA Service runs on every server, so the single point of failure that exists with the Session Broker, is not the case with Citrix. Your load balancing will work just fine when a Citrix Presentation Server goes down.
3. Citrix's load balancing based on metrics such as CPU, Memeory usage, Disk I/O etc seem to be far more realistic and advanced than baby sitting Term Services servers with weights.
4. The "drain" feature sounds cool, and certianly something that will benefit both Citrix and Microsoft since its a core Windows Server command.
Citrix seems to be well ahead, and MS is playing a catch-up game. Plus Citrix seems to be making more and more improvements to LB in their forthcoming releases... (http://citrixcommunity.com/blogs/presentation_server/archive/2007/04/12/Load-Balancing-Ideas.aspx)
Also, regarding the specific points you raised:
1. You can have multiple Session Brokers in a single farm, so no single point of failure
2. Citrix may support other metrics, but their default load evaluator is session based. I'm guessing many (most?) installations just stick with the default.
3. The "drain" feature relies on using the Session Broker. I doubt people will use the Session Broker in tandem with Citrix because they will get in each other's way.
The official statement by Microsoft (as they told me) on target environments is "an easy point-and-click out-of-box solution for low to medium complexity environments". It's no secret that the Kaisers of this world would have difficulties pulling it off with just 2008 Terminal Server ....I think that the lack of central management tools indeed is severe, but I highly doubt it will be that severe in the two to five server environments you are mentioning. Lets take an example: an average five servers farm with about 250 CCU. I think there's plenty of shops out there how are willing WS08 Terminal Server a go if it saves then....well you do the math. It's about what the business is willing to pay for, no what features we as techies think should be in there.I think that there are going to be lots of plain 2008 Terminal Server farm beyond five servers farms. It all depends on the complexity, not on the numbers. It's like I said: I guess it all depends on what percentage of all Windows based Server Based Computing environments turn out to be complex …
2. I'm lectured to be "real and truthful" by someone who doesn't even post under his own name
Both your responses were weak. Just because Citrix is a competitor to yours, don't use your blog as an advertisement for your own products. A blogs purpose, in my opinion, is to be real and truthful.
". . .it is my blog so I can write whatever I want. . ."
You were the kid you took your ball home because you were never picked to play ball on either team.
The "drain" functionality has existed in Citrix for quite some time now. Simply configure a load balancing rule based on IP and User Load. Set the IP rule to only allow access from the IP of your admin machine (so you don't lock yourself out), and deny everyone else. It's something Citrix admins have been doing for years now. It's nice to see it in the base OS finally.
I believe the biggest point missed here is that Citrix wrote terminal services for Microsoft and Microsoft is indeed playin catchup. This is a fact and was a result of the Picasso project. In this project Citrix again was going to license the OS from Microsoft just like it did with Winframe and write Multiwin in to the kernel just like it did with Winframe. Microsoft seeing the potentail revenue loss with this had the forsite not to license this to Citrix, however contracted Citrix (and still does) to write the terminal services piece of their OS.
Although the features in 2008 version are very cool and will be an alternative to Citrix for very small deployments this is no way near enterprise deployment scale due to lack of central administration. For larger deployments you can look at other competing products that basically give you the same functionality / features, but at the end of the day your going to use what you like and makes sense for your businsess or customer
Session Broker Drain feature allows users to connect to their existing sessions (and gracefully close their application) regardless from which physical client they are connecting. Plus, it works automatically for all the users who have existing sessions on this particular server - no need to modify hundreeds of load-balancing rules.
Citrix is a very strong offering. There is no need to "defend" it by oversimplifying what WS08 does.I don't think there is a competition between Honda Civic (or Chevy Cobalt) and BMW 3 -series. Microsoft is targeting different buyers :-)
"I know just about everything that happens in the company."
Well, it looks like you missed this one. You should probably put your resume out there and get another job since Leostream and its 12 person company will be going under soon enough thanks to the Propero acquisition.
Propero's original broker was written in Java and ran on top of jboss, so even if they are switching OS it's not necessarily as huge a leap as you say. I find it hard to believe VMware bought a product and was then "shocked" at its shortcomings - care to be more specific on "rumor has it"?
If it is going to run on Windows, will it continue to also run on Linux or come as a Virtual Appliance? A VMware created Virtual Appliance for smaller setups would be great.
I have no idea what they do either, but they already have competition: http://www.simtone-vdu.com/
Simtone has already raised $12M and is looking to raise more.
I noticed that Harry Ruda who was Softricity's CEO has signed on as Desktone's CEO. Maybe Tim Mangan can fill us in.
I would be very curious to know what the "Dynamic Best Fit Connection Agent" is in more detail. Do they prefer a thin device? There are so many question I could ask Clint. On the surface it looks like very cool technology. Check out this link:
http://www.desktone.com/platform/
I have been watching these guys for a while. I am very interested if they have any early adopters.
As you are by now aware, Citrix announced its intention to acquire Xen-based virtualization provider, XenSource, for $500MM. I wanted to take this opportunity to address VMware’s valued partner community and provide our position on this acquisition.
First, I want to thank-you for your continued investment in VMware. We all have a tremendous market opportunity in front of us with a huge potential for VMware partners and I look forward to working with you to achieve it. Together we have already achieved great success, with 20,000 customers adopting VMware virtualization solutions, but we are all just getting started!
Regarding the new Citrix/XenSource combination, while we will always encourage you to sell the solutions that best meet customer requirements, we are also confident that VMware solutions are a superior offering. This acquisition should have no impact on VMware’s market position. As VMware has the expertise and the technology to enable unparalleled customer success today, customers will continue to demand VMware solutions.
One thing I do want to make clear is that VMware will continue to fully support those customers that have chosen to deploy both VMware and Citrix solutions. While we acknowledge that VMware and Citrix will now compete for some new accounts, current joint VMware/Citrix customers will see no change in VMware support.
VMware’s commitment to you, our partners, is that we will continue to build superior virtualization solutions, we will continue to innovate, and we will continue to work with our channel partners to enable the success of all our shared customers. All of you, our world-class partners, are very important to us, and we at VMware will commit to doing everything possible to ensure that your investment in us and our shared future will be greatly rewarded.
VMware Analysis
VMware Offers a Superior Solution
The following points articulate why VMware is the best virtual infrastructure partner and solution provider.
XenSource failed to gain measurable market share. Its upcoming XenEnterprise v4 release still has major shortcomings compared to VMware Infrastructure 3.
Citrix provides impressive technology, but its competencies and resources are not in the field of system-level virtualization, which is what XenSource needs in order to deliver an enterprise virtualization solution. VMware has an unmatched infrastructure in place to develop, certify and test virtualization solutions. We continue to invest massively to extend our R&D and support.
In spite of recent acquisitions, Citrix revenues and energies are still heavily focused on Presentation Server. Citrix corporate and field organizations will need time to develop the expertise required to support partners and customers with unfamiliar virtualization products.
XenSource still cannot deliver the capabilities of 3rd-generation VMware virtual infrastructure. Citrix technology will
Virtual Iron has had LiveMotion and other VMware-like features for much longer that XenSource. Compared to Virtual Iron's features, XenSource's are pretty untested and immature. Virtual Iron is also credited with a lot of the improvements made to the Xen hypervisor; they are one of the most active contributors to the Xen project.
XenSource has less than $1M in revenues. The $5M that's been floating around is really $1M + $4M. The $4M was a one-time fee collected from Microsoft for the Xen/Viridian interoperability project.
VMware of course has started bashing XenSource...it was good to see the Virtual Iron comments.
I think whoever can get it right for the SMB business bracket will win out...all the companies *except* VMware provide decent management software for free or a nominal cost -- VMware charges $5000 for Virtual Center, plus you have to buy Windows and SQL licenses.
ESX remains the best in terms of market share and overall support, their forums are fantastic, but VMware at this point really caters more to big business that can easily afford 6 grand for a management server...IMHO.
Thank you, Tom
I thought it meant job title!! LOL
Could the moderator please change it to 'VMware costs are not good for SMB market'??
Have read this: http://www.crn.com/software/201400070?pgno=1
VI is a solid product, but very complicated to get up and running. In short they all do the same thing, it is just who does it better. "
Compared to Virtual Iron's features, XenSource's are pretty untested and immature."
Do you have facts?
Yes, I do have facts. As of last March, they had absolutely nothing to speak of, while VI has been supporting these advanced management features for over a year. Meanwhile, VMware has been watching VI like a hawk, silently acknowledging them to be the only viable direct threat.
Do you have facts to the contrary?
Gabe,
First of all excellent job bringing everyone up to speed.
I want to make a couple of comments on the deal price, forecast and the transaction in general: first, I believe there was a bidding war for XenSource; second, I am highly suspect of forecasts calling for $50MM for next year; and finally, a transaction like this one can be very risky because it can either make or break a company.
The reason I believe there must have been a bidding war is, realistically, who could have turned down $250MM or $350MM if there was no other bidder? The announcement indicated there were $109MM in outstanding options. $250MM more than doubles that -- If you are Peter Levine it would be hard to go back to Ian and Simon (one of the other founders) and say that you turned them down (especially if you knew Citrix's reputation to only make one offer). It seems to me the only way to negotiate like that is to have someone else waiting in the wings.Regarding the estimated $50mm in revenue for '08 -- I have never seen any company no matter how good their product is or how hot the market is increase their revenues 50x year over year. The reason is that the infrastructure to complete the transactions is not in place. A relevant recent example of this is the Reflectent acquisition. EdgeSight's competitors were able to pick off quite a few deals in the six month period following the acquisition because Citrix resellers weren't trained or authorized to resell EdgeSight. Also, it took longer than expected for all of the Citrix SEs to cycle through EdgeSight training. Without the resellers or SEs available, deals that could have gone EdgeSight's way went to other companies. If history repeats itself than Citrix won't have the staff in place to do $50MM worth unless they steal resources from other products and that brings me to my last point: XenSource could be every bit as successful an acquistion for Citrix as they hope and this could still backfire. Paying out 1/2 billion dollars will leave some rank & file Citrites hurt and others jealous. You just have to figure that there is some internal strife from a percentage of the long-time-hard-working Citrites not getting their share. You have to believe that management will be laser focused on seeing this succeed and that means that other projects may go wanting or get eliminated. But, to get from a $1B company to $5B company takes risks and you have to give Templeton credit for trying (Sequoia not withstanding).
Kevin
Anyone considered the fact that Citrix bought Xensource by mistake and is now looking through articles and forums to find the best use for their newly purchased company? :-)
In all honesty i think the guest comment is the best suggestion i have heard so far, and i think we have all heard alot. But it would make sense as Microsoft ventures into uncharted territory that they would want one of they strong alliance partners with them. And to spice it up, i am pretty sure that Microsoft would have had their hands full legal-wise if they had tried to purchase Xensource(like another BM.Com reader commented). So this works out for all of us i think.. We need virtualization of OS, Apps, Phones, Pizzas and whatnot to spice up our Centralization and consolidation Toolbox.. and now we might get solutions from the vendors we already do business with... Provided ofcourse that Microsoft finishes up Viridian and delivers a decent product :-)
I don't think Citrix would shell out $500M by mistake...I'm sure that whatever their reason is, they had the price tag justified long ago. Granted, to us, it's hard to find enough uses for XenSource to make up $500M dollars, especially in the short-term, but I'm optimistic that they have a plan in place already.
I think it's interesting that they picked XenSource when SWSoft or VI would have been a better choice. For $500+ million dollars they could have had access to a hypervisor AND OS Virtualization (Virtuozzo).
From a "Let's spend money" page, how about we petition Citrix to dump some money into building up Presentation Server. Sure 4.5 came out recently that made a few improvements over 4.0, but lets be honest, it's nothing more than a feature pack at best. How about adding some real functionality like "Session Virtualization", the ability to Migrate Session to another servers. Application Templates, Server templates, ability to filter applications via policy, ability to take a server offline and still be able to adminster it via RDP AND ICA, ability to publish apps via policies, EVEN the ability to add a NEW server to a group of published applications (with out having to open each app, use a script, or use a 3rd party product), and may finish the CMC to AMC conversion.
Joe
Sounds like a lot to ask from a 7 year old architecture.
Washington had to cross the Delaware, Citrix will get past it too. <para-phrase>
Seems to me that Citrix may be looking at purchasing Virtual Iron to complete the set. After all, it's built on the same Xen platform. I'm sure they've got an extra one or two hundred million to make another purchase.
"I think it's interesting that they picked XenSource when SWSoft or VI would have been a better choice. For $500+ million dollars they could have had access to a hypervisor AND OS Virtualization (Virtuozzo)."
It's not just about buying software/technology Joe, XenSource is UK/US based while SWSoft is Russian.
That is very true. Even Cisco has been know to aquire companies because they are in the general area of their corporate offices.
But at the same time, $500 million dollars is a lot of money to pay for location and a handfull of employees. I'm sure it will all work out.
Maybe they wanted into this field and this is the only one who would sell.
Don't put to much credit into Citrix, there a big 'C' now.
VI would have been a better buy but either they were not selling or asked for a lot of $$$s.
Hey Guys,
Had a few comments from readers about their experiences with virtualized terminal services and citrix. Only a few have had any good experiences and i would like to point out more clearly that this article is in no way meant to encourage virtualizing your entire TS or Citrix Farm, it is meant as an aid to make the experience the best possible with a more or less virtualized TS or Citrix platform. Virtualizing part of the farm is also in my oppinion a strong tool in preparing for a possible disaster recovery.
We moved to a virtual citrix farm and if we could go back to physical we would. We were expecting great things using vmware and citrix but that is not the case. we only use standard apps like Office and a few 3rd party citrix certified apps and as soon as we hit 18 users per Server the farm dies :-( When we have 2000+ concurrent users this is a problem as we have 80 Virtuals (25-28 Users per box). We've started to add our old kit (Physicals) into the farm and from some extensive testing users notice performance improvement on a physical when the same amount of users are connected to a physical or virtual.
Spend your money on physical Servers instead
I dont think anyone really suggests virtualizing everything should improve performance compared to physical hardware. However virtual hardware has benefits too and as a wise man said not too long ago "its really a question of seeing the tools we have and apply them in the situations where they most beneficial". Virtualizing, Streaming, monitoring, optimizing ... Tools.. for us to apply where we get the best use.
Using a hammer to put a screw in a wall IS possible, but it is alot more elegant and beneficial to use a screwdriver.
Could not agree more about the LSI Logic storage adapter. We have also found that there are different flavors of this beast, some of which exhibit complete lockups under heavy load. This is worth double-checking. There are many VMWare articles on this and it is a bit confusing.
We have seen major performance improvements with the new hardware (8-core, dual processors) and SAN attached storage instead of direct attach. Which are you using?
One final thought - our performance team complains that they cannot get good data on VM's due to time drift. This is an obvious problem if you want to measure performance. Is this still an issue on the latest flavor?
Regards,
Greg Askew
Perhaps, but most of the benefits of VMware and DR can be achieved by using Ardence and since Presentation Server is already fault tolerant why spend/waste the money on feature like HA?
How so? That is a very ingnorant statement... ESX is suited only for a handful of implementations as there are better virtualization techniques that will yield the same benefits. If you wish to save a tree, don't use ESX and you will end up using less hardware for a typical citrix deployment than you would with the ESX tax.
We saw similar performance (15 users per server) with a VSMP dual-processor virtual machine configuration. We found a single processor VM performed much better (40 users per server) than the dual. IIRC, monitoring showed the dual-processor VCPU %Ready stats were very high; indicating the dual-processor VM was ready to process, but the host could not allocate available CPU.
In this particular case, we had an application that required local deployment at remote sites and 40 users per server was sufficient to run the application. We did not consider converting the centralized farm of 1500 users to VM because we could get 60+ users on a physical server.
Vincent Vlieghe also created some nice guidelines. Always usefull when you consider running CTX/TS within a VM
http://virtrix.blogspot.com/2007/03/vmware-best-practices-for-deploying.html
Use Xensource with Presentation Server?
Has anyone tried?
This will be the challenge for Citrix. I am sure Citrix tested PS on Xen before the purchase.
There has to be more to this purchase than Citrix is admitting.
Citrix will make 50M in revenues from Xen next year? They would have been better off investing 500M for a 10% return each year. Better yet - they should have jumped on the VMWare IPO for a 100million return already. I know there is something we are all missing.
Works like a champ! Just watch out for drive remappings.
In fact, I hear more and more Citrix customers are looking at XenSource now rather than VMware. :)
Xen working with PS is one thing but how is the performance compared to VMWare.
I am sure more Citrix customers will be experimenting with Xen but we need performance comparisons from a non-biased source.
The limitation with the scheduler and vSMP did not change.. With 2 vCPUs you need to have 2 logical Processors free in order to schedule a thread.. Stupid if you ask me, but that is the limiting factor as appies to both versions. The reason people think it's better in VI3 is because the new hosts have 2 and 4 core CPUs thus giving ESX more opportunities to schedule (have 2 processors in a READY state)
I think it really comes out depending on your environment. I have an old Dell PE2600 dual 2.4 Xeon, 3GB, ESX 3.0.2, with 4 VMs running on it with one being a PS4.5
This PS VM server has 20 concurrent users and is working like a charm
PS4.5 VM config : 1.2Gb RAM, 1 vCPU and VMDK on a CX3-20 Raid 5 LUN
On the other VMs I have a Domain controller, Printer Server (All business apps prints goes through it) and McAfee ePo server
Perf stats:
CPU constantly less than 50% with some pikes during backup time frame
RAM using 2GB out of the 3GB
So again, for some, using TS or citrix in a VM is very interesting. i have a copy of the VMDK and i can swap it at any time since on this server nothing is saved as i have a seperate file server (in a VM)
As I understand VMWare suggests VI3 AND QUAD core cpu's for Citricx PS. I do not know (no experience) if QUAD core CPU's have the same problem (X2) as DUAL cores.
Anyone????
This is truly a great idea, and ofcourse closely tied to Microsofts eval-vhds.
I am beginning to doubt that MS and Citrix are gonna be at war at all on the virtualization market, seeing as XenSource seems to also be able to run VHD machines.. A virtualization market with a common platform for the Guest machines so the customers can choose the virtualization method they want, and chance platform when a better solution arises.. sounds wonderful.. and would most likely keep the key players like MS, Citrix, VMware and othersa on their toes when it comes to development :P
Just imagine having Xensource for Presentation Server virtualization(we could hope they are gonna look into this), Virtual Server for more low priority machines and ESX/Viridian for high risk systems and being able to move the guests around as one would like. Would give a varied experience and a broader acceptance even with customers just starting out in the virtualization area. I think alot of customers are actually holding back because they dont want to choose the 'wrong' setup.
bit of a vague statement, any reasons why? pro's & con's. have you had experience using both?
I have really struggled to find a good FAQ on Active directory and information related to win 2000, win 2003 and win 2008. I have created one and its available at http://activedirectoryfaq.blogspot.com
I am sure its will be a good read for you.
There are limitations of this SFT filesystem. That's why for example the maximum package size is 4Gb, that's also why x64 isn't so easy to support. System Center includes alot of solutions that will fit together (in the near future). Maybe Citrix and/or others can integrate there solutions within System Center. Or maybe this is the second signal that MS wil buy Citrix ;-)
Why would they (buy Citrix). It will be expensive, it will raise questions (market dominance etc) and in this way MS has another company helping them with development, gaining marketshare and a sales force out there...for free
It will be expensive indeed, but Microsoft is trying to become a one stop shop for big enterprise solutions (Build for Big). They could be offering this as extra (paid) functionality which you can buy, meaning you don't have to. There are plenty of solutions which 'compete' with Citrix. And if they buy Citrix, those resources are not gone all of a sudden. There will be an Enterprise TS division, Xensource would be integrated in System Center, Ardence in virtualization and so on.
On a sidenote, I don't see MS buying Citrix anytime soon.
To answer Brian, let me point to a second, easily missed, announcement Microsoft made at VMworld, "MSI Utility for Microsoft Virtualization". Enough to make anyone click next. But don't. You'll need to stay with me here as I'm taking the "end around" route to your question. If you remember back when Microsoft bought Softricity I said that the value might not lie in the product, but in the parts.
If you look at how Microsoft is [going to be] doing published apps in Windows Server 2008, you ultimately end up the RDP file and icons packaged into an MSI file and installed to the user's desktop (or start menu) as shortcuts. SoftGrid also needs to put shortcuts on the desktop, although with an OSD file and icon instead. Today the streaming server does that, although SMS shops can disable that and use SMS to push that out using something called the "SMS connector for SoftGrid". Microsoft previously announced that they were dropping support for this connector, and rumor was that they would package the OSD and icon into an MSI and use the same method.
This second announcement is what we expected, but more. Once the OSD and icon are on the user's desktop, the content of the application, the SFT file, must be streamed down to the client PC and cached. Then the user acquires authorization (a "license") to run the application from the server. In this announcement, the SFT also arrives in the MSI, and it sounds like the "license" is handled there as well. So you get application virtualization without the server. Mostly this sounds like just a hack (include the SFT and a script in the MSI and you can do all except the "licence" today). Virtual Application without streaming. Just a part.
There is still a bunch of stuff going on in the announcement that I don't yet understand. It is all wrapped up in System Center stuff and naming, which can only confuse. Plus there are some odd statements.
For example, "The MSI utility deploys applications to stand-alone SoftGrid client only. Clients (occasionally) connected to a SoftGrid Virtual Application Server typically use streaming for application deployment". But I think that most large customers today would prefer to push out the virtual application without streaming. So why is this method second-class??? In every SoftGrid training class I run a customer asks exactly for this.
Then there is a line which states this utility will be supported for only 12 months after the release of SoftGrid 4.5 (which they don't say when, but is expected to be released in 2008). And a small chart which mentions a "native implementation" between SCCM 2007 and SoftGrid 4.5 that seems to eliminate the need for this connector. But they don't explain what that is!
So back to your question... The SFT is a special file system created to remotely stream applications. It has "different" attributes than a normal file system. For example, if you open a file (run an exe or open in Notepad) on a mounted share, CIFS needs to bring the entire file over to your local system before operating on it. The SoftGrid file system can just bring over the part that is needed (streaming). If you break things up and don't need streaming, you don't need that special feature. Also, because the user can't write to the SFT (all writes are redirected to the user's virtual copy) there is nothing in the way of ACLs. Sometimes we want to mark something as "you can't even try to write here" to keep the user from writing into their cache (like to add a plug-in). Then there is that 4G limit, which frankly isn't much of an issue (how many apps are bigger than 4G?)
[Note to brian: Your system let me type a longer reply than it would post. So the end of my post was lost. Argh! ]
So the SFT is just a file system. If, as you suggest, the SFT is to move to a VHD format (or any new format) it would be like going from FAT to NTFS. You can bring over the content. It is very important that customers can bring their old sequences over to anything new, and Microsoft seems to ackowlege this. So if VHD is a convenient format that can simplfy Microsoft's life and maybe provide customers new features, OK. I am, however, suspicous that VHD would be used with SoftGrid 4.5 (but I have no inside information on this) because 4.5 code should be close to completion given the TAP dates.
No way will Citrix let VMWare have a booth at the "App Delivery Expo". Nor Packeteer, nor ...[fill in the name of your favorite vendor no longer able to attend :-() ]
Whoops! Sorry about that bug. We'll get that fixed.
But I want to point out that this is Gabe's article, not mine.
Great insight though, as always, Tim.
I might have been dreaming but i am certaing Diane, CEO at VMware said in her keynote that VMware is gonna standardize their virtual machine layout together with Xensource and Virtual Server. So it will be possible to move the virtual machines around from one system to another in the future.
If you plan on testing the Enterprise EVA make sure you apply the latest hotfix. Without the latest hotfix you will receive license errors when you try to stream apps.
Sun Microsystems just announced that they want to join this club. On http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-09/sunflash.20070912.1.xml they say that they want to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technology and that Windows runs well on Sun virtualization technology. Additionally Sun has signed on as a 64-bit Windows Server OEM. This means that in the future you will get Windows Server on Sun hardware!!!! And joint Sun-Microsoft solutions will cover the support of Remote Desktop Protocol on Sun's SunRay thin clients. What happened to the traditional rivalry between Sun and Microsoft that used to be so much fun for us watching it?
Benny
Yeah and thats what the Novell guy said back in the 90's.
We have a client with 3 Vmware 2.0 Servers, hosting over 900 Citrix Users on a poorly designed San, (Raid 5)Quad x Dual Core cpu's, And Performance Rocks. over 30-40 Users per server- no problem.
Now with VI 3.0, we are pushinc the boundry even more. We have a different customer with a hard core limit of 22-23 users per Physical server. No mater how many cores. With VI3, on Same server, but upgrade of ram-, We are able to 6x the amount of users per physical server. IE 6 VM's 21-23 uers per VMCTX server. There are places this works, but it needs to be tested, / tested/ tested. for full capability. With todays new procs.. i can envision much more density..
ALSO as a note.. RULE of thumb.. OVerload the ESX server With NICS!!!.. In my analysis, with CitrixVM's,, the amount of packets flowing from a ESX server climb way past 5000 packets per second. I have nt ran into issues with user limititations, except, when i under load the servers with network connectivity. Then it starts to suffer quickly. Nics seem to have been the cluprit in most of my installs..
One other clarification. Easy call does not require the customer to have implemented VOIP. It will work with most standard PBX systems as well.
To expand on this the Net6 acquisition came with 2 appliances. The CAG and the CAG. err I can see why they didn't bring them both to market at the same time :)
While Mark T was singing the praises of the Citrix Access Gateway they also were talking quietly to some customers about the Citrix Application Gateway. This product has been available either through Citrix for some systems or through the phone vendor for others. The supported platforms have been Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. This appliance has a MUCH better phonebook than Cisco, paging, text alerting, the easy call type functionality, and the ability to refactor web applications for use on the screen of a VoIP phone.
Now this (or a subset of it) is called the Citrix Communication Gateway and is used to route easy call into the phone system either over VoIP or a legacy T1 based upon model. Retail on this is only $3500 and the potential time savings for some workflows are immence.
What is still unknown is the complete feature set of the CCG. IS it the Citrix Application Gateway or is it just easy call and phone book integration?
Hi Guest,
I have to say I'm not sure. How do you know that Citrix did not use their PM technology to create the number recognition bit?
I don't know about that, CPM uses control ID's a phone number in a web page or PDF document would have to be captured by analyzing text as it is displayed and comparing it agains some patterns. Quite a different task.
Also the technology was developoed by Net6 before Citrix bought them, but that does not sound as smart :)
Here is the page for the Citrix Application Gateway (no rebranding yet, hmmm.) Very cool product but in a different space that most of us play in.
http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=15058
The files are available now from the product download page at www.citrix.com.
EasyCall/Communication Gateway and Application Gateway are two (completely) different products. Sure, the underlying hardware and parts of the platform might be the same, but the what is does is very different. Application Gateway is mainly used for the delivery of applications to the screens of VoIP enabled phonesets, which is obviously something quite different from what EasyCall does.
I believe that EasyCall uses a couple of different technologies, including screenscraping. Won't be surprised if you run into issues with security products on client devices. As for running it on CPS: wondering how it will impact performance (screenscraping can be quite memory intensive).
Brian, why don't you buy an appliance and do some testing for us ;-)
Hi Rich,
I checked with Citrix. You're right. The EasyCall technology comes from Net6 and uses screenscraping but not like PM does.
I see http://support.citrix.com/kb/entry.jspa?externalID=CTX113690 has CPS 4.5 with Feature Pack 1. The interesting thing is that it has an updated date of July 27, 2007. I would have thought that it would say September 21, 2007.
The question I have now is whether it includes the HR01 or if you still have to apply that after the fact.
Amazing to see how Citrix not only copied all the stuff we had on RecordTS since day one but they also copied all the same descriptions we used for its features! Things like:
"Smart Auditor packs advanced features like digitally signing recordings (tamper proofing recordings) and adding important metadata to the recordings which you can then use to find a particular recording. Think about metadata like user name, client name, client IP, Published application name, session duration etc."
Amazing. Copied bit by bit. Time to see a lawyer I guess. :-)
We have had this for almost a year now. And we do not only record ICA, we record RDP as well, at the same time. Plus we work for all Presentation Server versions and we do not require any Platinum thing. :-) Whatever you have we will get it working on it.
Cláudio Rodrigues
http://www.tsfactory.com
No update to the crappy console?! We still have to use both the AMC and PSMC? Geez! I'd hate to see what Citrix does with Ardence, XenSource, Desktop Server integration if they can't get a simple console right.
Why would I want to record all those sessions? I could see recording a session for training purposes or auditing purposes. I am not impressed with any of these new features.
Will Citrix please ask us what we want? The customers / partners have no say. We are continually dictated as Citrix comes up with more ways to raise prices on us.
1) We want everything to be managed in one utility - Citrix Access Management Console - Access Suite Console or whatever they are calling it.
2) We want simplified licensing. We want one license without having to carry all the previous licenses. We want all license subscription advantage synchronized to expire on the same date. How hard could this be?
3) We want unbundling. I want to choose what I want to buy. Why should I buy Enterprise version if I just want streaming Applications? I guess I'll just buy Softgrid.
4) Will you please stop all the name changes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The old names are still in new products. The code writers cannot even keep up with all the marketing name changes.
5) We want a Citrix who cares about the customer and partner. Will Citrix ever ask us what we desire?
Cramer was right!!!
Recording sessions a waste??
Well in the Health industry, and the LEGAL industry alone, this is well worth it. We have a number of Banks alone, that Want this and want it yesturday. With remote users, possibly stealing sensitive data, a setup like this is important. Before we could monitor the printing , but with this, it shall allow for even more safeguards.
Simplified licensing- Well if you are living in the past that is all you. Citrix's licensing is easier than pie, it is Getting the licenses in the first place t the hard part.
Streaming APPS- You dnt need Citrix servers to stream the apps. It is just a add on. Go with the soft grid if you are unhappy. Citrix is not in the market of making 100% happy, just to make product and sell.
Namechanges- DUH, new product = new name. Get over it.
There are ways to buy singular based solutions.
Call your Citrix rep and learn something and then post.
Claudio, whilst not a released product, ICA Session recording has been around for a while as Project IRIS, in my estimation about 4 years. At least two technical previews of the technology have been available.
So, I would say that while you probably got to market quicker, Citrix have had plans for this for years.
If the text you mention has been copied word for word then hey, thats probably not too fair, but I'm sure Citrix have a few patents which cover this technology going back a few years.
Only if you use Softricity. If you want to use Citrix App Streaming, you must have at least some version Presentation Server. You can buy App Streaming a la carte for PS 4.5 Advanced Edition, but having PS is still a prerequisite for a la carte licensing.
hi guys,
im a little bit confuse of the FR1.. base on the article it implies that fr1 is only applicable to PLATINUM EDD.?? im a correct?
Why should a CPS 4.5 Advanced customer spend additional money just to get the management console when they can just get App Streaming licenses a la carte and get the console for free? Your solution sounds like the endeavor of someone who was looking for a loophole in the licensing when it would just have been cheaper to ask your sales rep if you can do streaming without Enterprise or Platinum.
That link is dead. Nothing to doanload there.
I guess they arent offering Vista support for CAG anymore?
http://www.mseventseurope.com/MMedia/TechEdITF/07/WinniVerhoef.wmv
Winni Verhoef, Senior Product Manager, Windows Vista MDOP, makes a key announcement about Microsoft Application Virtualization. Formerly known as SoftGrid, this includes new capabilities designed to help IT support large-scale virtualization implementations; globalization; Dynamic Suite Composition and Trustworthy Computing
The two video can also downloaded from:
http://www.virtuall.nl/videos/Various/TechEd07DavidGreschler.wmv
http://www.virtuall.nl/videos/Various/TechEd07WinniVerhoef.wmv
64-bit is a big topic for the terminal server customers I talk with. The ones with SoftGrid are unhappy there is no roadmap because their terminal servers are now consolidated to a virtual farm and a non-virtual farm but the virtual farm's servers run out of memory before CPU on a two socket dual core system. They want the addressable ram to scale more users per box.
Discontinued after MS took over. Though it worked well for a smaller environment, not so well in larger ones. Microsoft will release this Self service capability in System Center Service Manager. My last client still uses the Zerotouch peice. Custom Web jobs could be created to support the same functionality.
Troy
My goal while creating this flowchart some time ago was to give the readers a detailed overview of the decisions which can be made when you deliver Windows applications. I really hope that both Brian's article and my flowchart makes sense for the audience. When you have remarks about my flowchart, feel free to send me an email. I think every consultant needs to understand these steps when they are consulting in the application and desktop delivery space.
Hi Brian,
I always read your articles and all the comments from the community very carefully. But it´s now really time to ask you guys if you ever thought about the the costs for the licenses, implementation and operations of such solutions (e.g. in huge customer environments)? Desktop Virtualisation e.g. sounds technically very cool! Perhaps I´m wrong to comment this here - however...
Have anybody ever calculated the costs of all neccesary parts (hardware, licenses, implementation costs) and the operational cost over a period of 3 years? Hey, regarding desktop virtualizsation you need a powerfull server hardware, a hypervisor, an OS Streaming/Deployment tool, an App Streaming/Deployment, a remote secure connectivty protocol (RDP/ICA) and a client deviced. Building it once is not a big thing. But running it with high SLA requirements, DR, change/release management (ITIL), regulatory compliance requirements and last not least - with the lowest operational costs - is that possible? Each longer I think about - each more I´m concerned.
In technical test environments it´s really cool to play arround with such technologies. But if it comes to an commercial/business level in the executive decision board and the guys there ask for ROI, TCO, SLA, legal compliance - the technical cool stúff will be rated from another foucs - the business focus!
Within visionapp with have a lot of experience on: technology vs. economics. Since we also offer hosted application solutions (SaaS), we try to delivery the most attractive prices for such solutions. But: each more (cool) technology with costs we put in, each more expensive our offers become (and each less we sell, because customers are price sensitive). So the lesson we learned (from the cost side): keep it small and simple, but secure with a high performance!
My experience is: each more technology parts you add on the stack, each more complexity and costs you will receive. And this rule is indpendent on the fact, that you offer hosted apps as a service or run them in your own environment.
Would be happy to share my thoughts with you guys! Any economical experience available of combining Presentation+App+OS+hardware virtualisation?
My opinion: dedicated approaches (with one or two virtualization technologies in combination) make sense - but all together - isn´t that a little too much (also regarding a high performance and a managable complexity).
Thanks for your feedbackFrank
PS: I also like Ruben´s flowchart. But show that to a business person and he will ask you: "Costs and Complexity - sure that both seriously under control?"
FINALLY... regional server support is back, with no SQL issues and no Blackrock utility for keeping servers in synch. For the previous 'complaining guest', all I have to say is that regional server support is fantastic for large sites over slow connections. You don't need to install one at every location!
Furthermore, I'm curious to know why some people choose to come here and MS-bash instead of sharing ideas constructively? We all have our qualms about MS I'm sure, but let's keep this constructive. It's a good tool, getting better and better for large enterprise as time goes on. Let's point out the flaws, and discuss potential ways to address them.
fredd@itmountain.com
Dan:
You mentioned before you only posted technical information and you were not into marketing your solutions. Are you so sure?
Are you going to become the new Chief Marketing Officer at Ericom? You should!
> But this post definitely comes across as marketing
My post is ndeed marketing I don't deny it, but then again, so is this entire article. Its a high level overview of features of a future Citrix version that doesn't exist yet, and nobody yet knows exactly when it will be available or what it will actually contain. Given that Citrix is certianly getting some free publicity here, without proving any real meat, I thought I'd provide us with a bit as well. And since Delaware's main feature appears to be its support for W2KB, I thought my post was actually quit pertinent.
> Congrats on the W2k8 compatibility, btw
Thank you. I'll be blogging about this in the upcoming weeks.
I never said I don't do any marketing. I did say that marketing is not my focus or my main intent. I strive to make sure that anything I post, here or on my blog, is:
Given that this article itself is essentially marketing and very light on technical details, e.g. "I know this is a rather vague description", there wasn't a lot for me to respond to on a technical level.
> Are you going to become the new Chief Marketing Officer at Ericom? You should!
No I'm not - we already have an excellent VP of Marketing. But, it's always important for an R&D person like me remember that a great feature nobody hears about is worthless. Marketing is not a dirty word.
"Given that this article itself is essentially marketing and very light on technical details, e.g. "I know this is a rather vague description", there wasn't a lot for me to respond to on a technical level."I don't agree that an article that isn't very technical makes it a marketing article. In any case, I did not write it to please Citrix nor do they buy me coffee because of the article. I wrote it because I know the community is interested in abot Delaware.If there wasn't enough in this article for you to respond on a technical level then just don't respond.
Dan,
What you did was cheap and did nothing to help your company/cause. In my option, there is nothing worse then a vendor taking jabs at other vendors (which is what you did). The old school Compaq guys use to do this crap all the time back in the 90s and I never understood what they thought it was going to accomplish. If you have a good product, it will speak for itself, especially in our community.
Charlie,
Which jabs did I take, and at which product? What have I written that is incorrect? Please enlighten me. I don't doubt Michel's sincerity or his integrity, but the fact of the mater is that this article is free publicity for Citrix, the kind of publicity that no other SBC vendor ever gets here.
This is taken word for word from your blog, about what you write:
". . .keep the content both technical and as accurate as I possibly can. No marketing fluff here."
So, you only post marketing fluff on Brian Madden's site? I think what is happening here is that more and more people are finding out that your posts are INDEED only an advertisement for your products and solutions. You even infer in a post below that we should feel sorry for you because CITRIX gets free advertising and no other SBC company (meaning Ericom?) gets its on BrianMadden.com.
Not true! You do enough of it to make this community sick. Please stop.
Thank you.
If marketing is not a "dirty word", then why did you refer to marketing as "fluff" on your own site?
Have you shared that marketing is fluff with your "excellent VP of Marketing"?
Hold on while I break out my violin...
The jab that I'm referring to is the implied tone in your comment that Delaware is vaporware. I know you didn't state that it was, but you said it without saying it.
Let me know how the violin sounds and I hope it helped you as much as it did me.
I want to clear some myths surrounding Preferential Load Balancing. I am Prasanna Padmanabhan, one of the developers from Citrix who worked on this feature. PLB is more than assigning CPU shares via the administrative UI.
PLB brings improvements to two areas of CPS, both of great importance to enterprise customers - a) Load Balancing b) CPU Management. In CPS 4.5 and previous releases, all sessions were considered of equal importance for both Load Balancing and CPU Management.
Most readers will know about the Server User Load Rule which is part of the Default Load Evaluator. This load rule simply load balances a session to a server with the fewest number of sessions. There is an underlying assumption here - all sessions are of equal importance. But this is often not the case. Important sessions often need a higher level of service, and should be kept apart from other important sessions to avoid contention of a servers resources. This is what PLB does for load balancing. Each session is assigned a weight (a number called "Resource Shares"), and sessions get load balanced to a server with the fewest number of Shares.
How does PLB improve CPU Management? This is along the lines of what Brian talks about. Once load balanced, important sessions enjoy a greater share of the CPU (based on what the resource share for that session is). Fair-sharing is still the default.
Resource Shares are assinged via the policy mechanism. Not only is this far more sophisticated than assigning user shares via the registry (which most administrators don't know about), this gives great freedom and flexibility to an administrator - the administrator can not only assign important groups of users (such as doctors and nurses in a hospital) more shares than normal users (like front-desk or ancillary staff), you can also assign Resource Shares based on location (IP Address range). Doctors treating a patient in a life and death situation in the ER, will get a higher level of CPU (which translates to a more responsive user experience just when needed most) than when accessing the same application from their office or home.
More information on PLB is available in my blog post http://citrixcommunity.com/blogs/presentation_server/archive/2007/04/12/Load-Balancing-Ideas.aspx
Stay tuned to a video demonstration on PLB on the Citrix Community Blog in late December.
I got mine about 3 weeks ago now and honestly... it is one of my favorite gadgets at the moment. I've loaded all sorts of other portable applications on the stick and have them accessible from the Applications menu.
Cheers
Rt
I never said any truth scares me. What I stated was that you said that you like to "". . .keep the content both technical and as accurate as I possibly can. No marketing fluff here."
You DO post marketing fluff. Please stop. Thank you.
Also, if you only want Brian Madden, Doug Brown and Wilco van Bragt to read your blog please make it password protected so only those three and yourself have access so the rest of the world doesn't have to stumble across your marketing filled site. Thank you.
Do you know if it works on all three versions of the Access Gateway? I checked their site and didn't see anything version specific.
Facts don't threaten me, but whiners really annoy me.
I think facts threaten you. Like the fact that no crediable INDEPENDENT author has written a review of your product. That fact alone speaks volumes.
Stupid is as stupid does...
I am William Wright, one of the original Aurema developers (now working for Citrix) that wrote the CPU Optimization feature for Citrix. I want to clear up some confusion about CPU reservations in the CPU Optimization feature that is mentioned in Michel Roth's summary of the new Delaware Preferential Load Balancing feature.
Michel mentions that a user can claim up to 80% of the CPU, when in fact a user can claim up to 100% of the CPU provided that the processes owned by the "Local System" account do not need any CPU resource.
I think that the confusion comes from CPS documentation that talks about 20% of the CPU being reserved for the OS. There are two problems with this simple description:
#1 The CPU reservation is applied to the Local System account, and if the processes running under that account do not need all of the reservation then other users (processes running under other accounts) can claim that CPU, i.e. there is no CPU wastage with reservations.
#2 A default CPU Reservation equivalent to 20% of one CPU is assigned to the "Local System" account. For example, on a server with 4 CPUs, the "Local System" account gets a default reservation of 5% of the entire CPU resource on the server.
A more detailed explanation of the CPU Utilization feature is available in a Citrix knowledge-base article that I recently updated, see http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX106021
All - keep in mind, it's no accident that the only 'vendor' noted in the home page title is 'Citrix' - "Brian Madden – Citrix, Terminal Server, Virtualization, and Application Delivery Information".
To say this forum is bias towards all things Citrix is obvious but certainly many other great alternatives exist such as Ericom (great job on the 2K8 cert!), Provision Networks, NSuite, etc... It's great to hear about other solutions that are beating Citrix to the punch on something and no sense trying to shoot him down for bringing this up to the rest of the community. If anything, it spurs inovation and keeps us Citrix zelot's sharp!
It's a good site for us to all co-exist but let's face it - it is what it is.
Why did you post as guest above? :)
If you post as guest, does that mean you are afraid?
Also, the post above seemed more like a joke. Looks like Dan Shappir is a little jumpy!
If I was a customer and seriously interested in Ericom software while reading this board, I sure would think twice after the posts that guy replies with.
Jumpy? No. If anything very much bewildered. Reviewing my posts here I do not see that I’ve made any derogatory remarks against anyone or any product. On the other hand, very derogatory remarks have been made here against the company I work for, our product and towards me personally. If you’ve read other articles on this site you’d see that this is not the first this has happened. And yet, according to you, I’m the one at fault.
Was the poster above joking? I don’t know. I do know that he doubted my integrity without really knowing anything about me. Putting a smiley at the end of the post doesn’t change that. And he did it from behind a comfortable mask of anonymity.
I’ve grown tired of this thread – I’ve got better things to do with my life. You can feel victorious for having successfully “run me out” if it makes you feel good about yourself.
Can't wait to try this...
BTW - does it support SmartAccess and SmoothRoaming?
Hey Charlie,
The SSO feature only works with Advanced (I'll check on Enterprise since its on different hardware). I had no problem using it with our Standard CAG - just without SSO.
Just got word that Enterprise will be supported in the next release (due out in a couple weeks), along with CSG/WI and Advanced. The release after that will support all the versions.
Frank,
There have been may whitepapers on the TCO/ROI of SBC environments. Thare are even a few decent ones on the economics of virtualization but I've yet to see one on the economics of TS vs VM (let me know if you know of any). Perhaps that's because they are really just different flavours of the same thing. As Brian has said (forgive me if I over simplify or misrepresent), one is virutalizing a multi-user OS and the other virtualizes multiple singlle user OSes.
I think that the flow chart helps to identify the solution that will best fit the custoemr needs for the majority of application delivery requirements and then it's a question of how to deal with the exceptions.
Secondly, I think the flowchart helps to minimize the complexity that as you correctly state is directly related to overall TCO.
Colin.
Dan, I've read your 'fluff' before. And after reading all your posts here, you've not got any better.
Firstly, the Delaware article provide some good insight into the product; your 'marketing post' does not.
Secondly, Contrary to you comment, I feel the post does include some 'meat on the bone' about what the features will actually do; yours does not include anything about the product..
Thirdly, when you do read the 'fluff' link, it's all marketing blurb, fluff and gubbins. Where is the 'meat on the bone' about what your product actually does? It speaks about being at the forefront of this, ensuring privacy of blah, leveraging improvements of Windows 2008, but still doesn't say what your product does! TBH, you would have had a better reception if you had actually said what your product does and what the improvements were in the first posting you made, and then had a link to the product, rather than the 'fluff'. You should know by now we don't do fluff.
Fourthly, and finally, I do hope your Sales & Marketing Department don't tear your a new ass for the trouble you have now caused. Stick to R&D.
While I certainly wouldn't defend Dan's inappropriate post, your comments are not accurate as the 'marketing' doc that he linked to talked about MS certification, it wasn't a product datasheet. Apparently MS sees some value there. These guys are clearly a Citrix competitor, it's a simple concept as stated in their release:
Ericom's enhanced Server Based Computing solution, PowerTerm® WebConnect, provides secure access to Windows Terminal Servers, Virtual Desktops, Blade PCs and legacy host systems.
Again, this is not a joke and I am not 'Dan'. We all think Citrix is great but certainly no problem in learning about new solutions here so cut the guy some slack already... The only Ericom product I have ever used was PowerTerm emulation on a Wyse terminal!
This is why I posted this:
Dan has made his case the community has made its case now let this petty squabbling stop it is annoying and not very productive. To be honest I am annoyed at the way people are behaving from the community side and from Dan.
Agreed. I think we can all agree that Dan's comments (thread jacking) were not appropriate. The article was able Deleware features and not about Ericom. If Ericom has a news worthy article then they should submit it to Brian for him to post? If that channel was exhausted and no response, then that typically means the news was not news worthy.
Again, Citrix is relevant and news worthy. Ericom is a nobody or perhaps a wanna be but still they are irrelevant and not news worthy. And just like Dan's stunt, just riding on the coat tails of someone elses success.
Isn't Citrix now riding on VMware's coattails? Haven't they been riding Microsoft's coattails from the start? That's how it is in the software business, or are you too focused on making stupid comments to notice???
Dude, you're pathetic. Your immaturity won't allow you to post without taking a cheap shot. Brian, isn't there an age restriction? How did the 15 year olds take over your site?!
Come on Dan, insults will not further you companies reputation...
Citrix did not ride Microsoft's coat tail... If you remember correctly, Citrix was founded in 1989. Long before Microsoft was a relevant company. Microsoft built their success on the backs of other companies (including Citrix). Citrix had to build TS for Microsoft.
As far as VMware tail? No, the XenSource aquisition happen not more that a month and half ago. The whole purpose of that aquisition is to build up their xDI solution. Since there is no clear cut winner (or even a solid, complete solution) in the xDI space, you can't claim coattail riding.
Thread-jacking, that's coattail riding and immature.
First of all, I'm not Dan, he obviously has no problem posting under his own name.
Your history of Citrix is distorted to the point of being comical. Yes, Citrix was founded in 1989 however their first product (multiuser) FAILED. Not only that, Citrix licensed the OS/2 code from Microsoft. And there's more - Citrix was almost out of business in 1995 and Microsoft had to bail them out with an investment! This is all public record if you had bothered to check.
As far as your comments about Microsoft and those about the virtualization space, your are quite naive and ignorant, and I don't have the time to educate you here.
Evidently you can't help yourself with the childish behavior, perhaps you should look for a healthy outlet for your anger. Try asking a girl out on a date. And keep drinking the kool-aid in Ft. Lauderdale.
I didn't see the release covered on this site. RC1 is available for download and eval. SBC vendors mentioned are Citrix, Quest and Ericom.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/dec07/12-05WS08RC1PR.mspx
This forum is really getting frustrating. We (the adults) come here to have intelligent, educated discussions about TECHNOLOGY that enables our respective companies. Some of you are more intersted in a debate about who did what in the industry when and if someone is a marketing guy or not. Thank you to the author for a fair statement of the facts as I guess they exist today and thank you to the guys from Citrix (and i apologize if I have left anyone out) guys who gave factual, detailed updates.
Can anyone point me to a deployment architecture guidelines or diagram which can tell us various deployment touch points for softgrid sequencing.
Thanks,
peter
It's not that bad! Just beware that now it will take longer and longer to recover from those Brazilian BBQ 'Meat Hangovers'.
Happy birthday and keep up the good work!
-Richie
Right now I'm sitting in "your" room down in the basement of the "Tritsch Home Base" in Germany. I can see lots of BriForum Europe stuff around me, waiting to be re-used next year. This is the perfect place from where I and my family want to send you our congrats to your 30th birthday. So, HAPPY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY from all of us. We are looking forward to see you back here soon.
Benny Tritsch
Happy Birthday from the French Citrix community... (yes, there is one) :-)
Laurent
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj6cbM-h8xg
Happy Birthday Brian, a wish you another 30++ healthy and blessed years!
Ruben
Hey Brian, Happy Birthday man... hope you have a blast tonight wherever you are in the world! Just remember you are only as old as the woman you feel!CheersRichard
Brian,
Happy B-day and congrats on making it to 30!
TMI on the Brian's photo of working from home! Thanks for the visual...
CW
Hey Brian,
Today is my birthday also. I am 39. Went to my first Briforum this year in Chicago.One Briforum + DVD set is well worth more than Citrix Partner Summit + iForum. Now after hearing your latest podcast I find 2 other things we have in common - Kemp Technologies loadmasters and visionapp are my other 2 add-on interests. Did you get screwed when you were growing up like I did since your birthday was so close to Christmas? Combining birthday and Christmas presents? Thanks for all of your free advice!
Hej Brian,
Happ birthday Brian or as we say "Tillykke med fødselsdagen" in Denmark.
I became 30 in 15.th October this year and first SMS I got from my friends was "Hej Buddy, Welcome to the adults club! "
If you believe Chinese astrology, you could check the site, we are Snakes!
http://www.holymtn.com/astrology/snake.htm
/Mahir
happy birthday and all good luck. Consider being adult now... *LOL*
Thorsten
Happy Birthday Brian!
While I reserved my snide old people comments for the private email, I'll just say nice things here ;) While you weren't here in Chicago, I said a toast on your behalf. Many more good years ahead!
Shawn
Happy B-day... and a special one as well!!! 30!!!!
Bastiaan.
I hope your 30th was memorable. Seems like mine was just yesterday.... and that was four years ago. Time flies when you're having fun. Hope to see you at BriForum 2008, MVP Summit 2008, some other conference or if you're ever in San Diego.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
Cheers!
And the best wishes for all years to come ...
/Kjetil
Congratulations. That's version 9.1 in Citrix years!
-Jason
quit a while ago : )
Enjoy it Brian!
From the Citrix Team @ Azlan Tech Data Belgium
All the best from from the sepago team!
Brain,
Congrats form Citrix Channel Team Netherlands
"...video killed the radio star"... !
;O)
Happy Birthday - and thanks for all the support and assistance through the years!
well it was bound to happen sooner or later right??? Welcome to 30, it's the new 20 remember, so feel free to continue your ways amigo....that's why we like you so much!!!!
I've been out of touch for the past few days, so Happy belated birthday
Hi,
Thanks for the comments so far, just to answer a couple of queries and a little bit of extra information. It is possible to use the RSA soft token with the AccessStick and this was something that we were demonstrating at iForum in October.
As for Mac support, we are aware of the need so watch this space!
Bri-
Hard to believe I remembering you waiting to buy a drink at the bar--legally. Hope this was a good one.
One non birthday question--Why does Gabe always seem to have pictures of you half naked? Scary thought, eh?
Look me up when (if) you get back to DC
-Buszta
well on the brainmadden website , it would be nice if more people could blog.
we will get more and more an hybrid environment and i think that profiles in a hybrid situation could become more complex when the customer wants the same look and feel on sbc,vdi,etc.
and all the new cool stuff such as ardence and vdi bring other challenges such as how to deal with an up to date viruscanner client in ardence etc.
i wish the brianmadden company a good new year.
regards
bjorn bats
new employment opportunities.... :)
I'm still not drinking the VDI Kool-Aid and I'm sick of the hype it gets here (and at Bri-Forum). Ardence brings some appeal to VDI but I'd rather use Ardence to stream a TS OS.
The handy citrix features still require a windows client. For instance look at 'hot desktop'. It will only work on a windows client...
I need better tools that speak English. There are plenty of tools that can pinpoint all sorts of things, but you need a PhD to understand them. I want the magic bullet: tell me what's wrong and how to fix it. If you can flag the error, why not offer a useful suggestion on how to fix it? I don't have the time to spend hours troubleshooting something even though I may want to. I just don't have the manpower.
How about better vm and storage mgmt tools. I like the idea of Balancepoint and a few other products which tell me something is amiss from the user perspective. I can't count high enough the number of times people have said the system is slow or not working properly, but all the diag tools show everything being fine. This is where good baselining comes into play, but I need tools that actually tell me how long a transaction takes etc, (ie..balancepoint, eG Innovations, etc).
Realistic Expectations. Customers need to understand that fancy, whizbang technology costs. Not everyone can afford the latest/greatest, nor is it always needed. Give me real requirements and tell me how not meeting them affects your business (with the metrics used to determine the affects). I want to provide the best solution that meets your needs and then some, withought breaking the bank.
Adam
I just need Citrix to focus attention on their core product, Presentation Server. I need IMA to be stable. I need the flood of hotfixes to stop. In short, I need Presentation Server to be more stable and less buggy.
DP
There is a diference between Published Application and Remote Desktop, We were using a complete citrix enviroment (Remote Desktop) citrix 4.5 and then evaluated ESX 3.0 togather with citrix. We found citrix works well in an ESX enviroment slightly less users per box than a hardware solution (to be expected). ESX excels as a backup/DR solution or for sandboxing / underutilized servers however if your citrix enviroment is allready on limit ESX will not be a solution. In the end we went for a hybrid Physical Citrix servers with back up on the ESX farm, several under underutilized servers also on the ESX farm then we virtulized everything DC's Mail, DB's file servers etc... this proved to be the best solution reducing the number of physical machines but not performance. during a disaster recovery we would have less preformance for sure, but it is allways available. Hope to have been of asistance in this complex question.
The really interesting thing that VMLogix does that VM Loab Manager doesn't is the build and test automation. They give you quite a few scripts and tools to automate the build, testing, and teardown of a virtual machine. You can add your own scripts as well. I saw this in their demo at iForum and Summit, and was very impressed. You can see a screen shot at this link -
http://www.vmlogix.com/images/tour/Job-1-Operations.jpg
While not everyone needs the level of sophistication this tool provides, for those that need a complete test and dev environment VMLogix is defintely worth considering. When I get time I am going to blog about their solution and do an interview with their product team.
Barry Flanagan
I followed the webbased training from citrix. Looking at the overview, it seems that that training is allready outdated.
Although I don't have any experience VMLogix LabManager, I have some with VMware Lab Manager. I still find it strange and confusing that those competing products have *almost* the same name (well, except for 1 space.. which is probable the catch "trade markwise").
I don't know which product was first with that name though (VMware Lab Manager was formerly known as Akimbi Slingshot, before the Akimbi acquisition in june 2006).
Brian, I think you are missing an important reason for this name change: promoting XenServer. A lot of Citrix resellers also sell VMware. Citrix would like them to sell XenServer instead. In this case they are promoting the Xen brand by attaching it to their leading product (which, as you pointed out, doesn't really have anything to do with Xen).
> It will be easier to understand what-does-what
OK, if I need to publish desktops which product should I use XenDesktop or XenApp?
Well it certainly sounds alot better than Secure Access Presentation Manager Suite 3.0 FR4, which would be given the history of Citrix naming conventions, much more within the line of expectations.
I agree with the infamous "guest" above though, on the subject of "what does what", it doesn't make things a whole lot clearer. So XenApp isn't a full server? I see the confusion coming.
I was at Summit to hear Mark T announce the XenApp branding, and my first thought was the same - here we go again. After a couple of days to think about it (helped by hearing Citrix explain their vision) I am now really impressed with their strategy. I can see the product lines maturing and seemingly disparate products starting to be consolidated into a well thought out range.
I have also been talking to my clients about XenApp, XenServer and XenDesktop and how they fit together and work to deliver a full range of desktop and application virtualisation (though I admit I throw SoftGrid in there for some of them as well). They see how the suite works together, and how using ICA to deliver the XenApp and XenDesktop desktops makes more sense than RDP. Through in Provisioning server and XenApp straming (or SoftGrid) and you really do have their dynamic desktop and dynamic dacentre starting to rock.
I'm a sandal wearer from way back in the day (WinFrame), and I disliked MetaFrame and Pres Server names. I love XenApp, and the Xen Family. I love the Platinum range of products, and the approach Citrix are adopting. And so far, so do all the customers I talk to about it. There is a buzz about Citrix again, and I find it reinvigorating.
Mark
I totally agree with the new naming direction as well, but I'm not so sold on PS being the 'truest' form of application virtualisation..
Ok, so 'virtual' it's just a word which means different things to different people (or actually means nothing specific now that it's been diluted so much), but to me a published app is just a 'physically installed application which is presented remotely' - nothing much "virtual" about that!?
Nevermind - just my little rant for the morning! ; )
Outside of IT Managers and System Administrators this name change is completely immaterial. The nature of virtualisation is that the whole process is transparent to the end user so most of the time users aren't aware that they are using a virtualised environment.
> OK, if I need to publish desktops which product should I use XenDesktop or XenApp?
Did you really ask that question?
The answer seems pretty straightforward to me. Sure, you could use XenApp to deliver apps as part of a full desktop, but that's really only valid for the 10 million or so folks who work in call centers, order ops, or other large groups of task workers all doing similar functions. It's not a mainstream approach. No way the mainstream of the market will use a published desktop in this model as their mainstream corporate desktop. If they would, Citrix would already be a $10B company.
For the VAST majority of employees in the middle of the market, you'd be much better off using XenDesktop to deliver a virtual desktop and XenApp to deliver virtual apps INTO that desktop. That's a MUCH better model than what other VDI vendors are preaching, BTW. It keeps the delivery stream separate. Apps execture either on the server or in a virtual bubble on the desktop, but they never get munged up in the desktop OS. Every time an employee fires up their desktop, they get a new clean Windows and new apps delivered into it that aren't corrupted or conflicting.
That's the other reason this move is smart. VDI is going to be a huge market. Citrix gets this. By marketing XenApp and XenDesktop, they're able to tell a much better story at the client than other vendors.
Hi Brian
Just a note of clarification - though I think most people would agree that XenApp Server is a cool name, Citrix actually named it 'XenApp' sans 'Server'. I believe the consensus from partners at Summit was 'XenApp Server it is! XenApp alone sounds far too much like a standalone app'...
Maybe it's just the way my brain does word association, but this is the first time since WinFrame that I can easily categorize what each product does. I never preferred spending hours on the Citrix web site trying to figure out what the heck a new or newly named Citrix product does by sifting through the long, meaningless and vague paragraphs that were written by a well-meaning marketing department. Either that or the words were put together by a highly technical group of people who tried their best to talk in non-technical language for the "executives". Whatever it was, in the end they always left me more lost in what the product does and how the product generally works.
I still find the product outlines on Citrix's site below average when I'm looking for a meaningful summary, but at least the names are easy to remember and categorize. This reduces the frustration of navigating the marketing drivel.
It's a big step in the right direction. Congratulations Citrix!
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't it Citrix who preached to concept of Triniti: publish desktops from TSs, VMs or blades? Despite this, with Citrix you will need two separate products to achieve this, where as other VDI solutions (Provision, Ericom, ...) are able to do it with one product.
Also, AFAIK Citrix are not removing the ability to publish desktops using XenApp so this is a question you will likely encounter. A lot. And as your own post demonstrates, the answer is not trivial.
Finally the ability to publish applications into VMs is something other VDI vendors are able to do as well: from a TS using a single product (as described above) and streaming using MS SoftGrid. Still comes out cheaper than XenDesktop + XenApp
I think that Citrix customers will be using a combination of the different technology buckets we are used to. Virtual Machines, Presentation Virtualization, Virtual Desktops, Application Virtualization, and Streaming are going to be combined in varying combinations to create a solution. Not all combinations make sense, but many do.
(Whether or not they thought about this beforehand,) Citrix unifying the different technologies under the Xen name brand makes sense. I view what people will be buying from them like the kind of menu where you pick this from Column A and something else from Column B. Column A might be what we think of as one of these technologies today - but we won't be picking the entire column, just the item we need. I don't think Citrix, nor any of us, really understand yet what the favorite combinations are going to be today. A couple of years from now we may see entirely new (named) products that formalize these combinations, along with all the glue integration that is needed.
Needless to say, it will be exciting times (especially since the competition will be spicing things up too).
Could you, Gabe or Tim post a cross reference table? The headings could be "Previously called" and "Now Called". It would make a great cheat sheet for those of us who didn't go to summit. And, does it apply to all products? Is Ardence part of the Xen line now? How about password manager or the access gateway? Go-to meeting? NetScaler? If not, maybe those products could have the same name in the "Now Called" column.
> "Xen" has a nice Eastern religion "enlightenment" ring to it.
For me (and I dare say a fair few others my age) The name "Xen" conjurs up an image of large hexagonal computer as featured on late 70's early 80's british Si-Fi series "Blake's 7" - I'm looking forward to having my own Xen computers, it'll be fullfilling a childhood dream !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_Seven
(looks like it was spelt "Zen" in the TV seriers - but I'm not going to let spelling get in the way of a dream)
I am glad to see there is a lot of positive reaction to the new name. I can tell you that many of us went through similar phases of denial, anger, understanding and acceptance (as well as a few other stages) but in the end most people at Citrix do like the new name and the way that it helps to tell the end-to-end virtualization story from Citrix's perspective. Today it is easier to talk about the entire Citrix product portfolio and vision than ever. XenApp just fits in to the grander scheme of things much better than anything else we had or could have come up with. Just the fact that it is so much easier to say helps immensely!
Here at Citrix the transition has been the smoothest ever. Old timers love it and even the engineers who have to put in the effort to work on things like product and documentation changes are seeing the big picture and are on board with what we are trying to achive.
Our vision for end-to-end virtualization is coming together nicely and our very successful application virtualization product now has the right name - in my opinion anyway.
And just to clarify, the previous poster was right about the name, it's "Citrix XenApp", not "Citrix XenApp Server". This was done to avoid confusion with XenServer and to avoid clumsy verbiage in documents like, "...set the parameter on the XenApp Server server management node...".
Orestes
I think keeping the product name simply XenApp actually helps this situation. XenApp is a true product brand. The product has a broad architecture that covers many parts. There are XenApp clients, XenApp licensing servers, XenApp login servers, etc. If you saw a full rack of servers running this product, you'd call them "XenApp servers". Works very well in my mind. The old way never really worked. What were you supposed to call them, "Presentation Server servers?". Most people didn't both and just called them Citrix servers. By changing the name to simply XenApp, Citrix is making it much more likely that its individual product brands get traction inside IT. Names like XenApp, XenServer, XenDesktop and NetScaler are real product brands that are cool. I can see them getting traction independently. When you start adding all the other stuff to the names, they get so complicated no one bothers to use them (or they just use acronyms).
XenApp is the only name that changed. The topline hierarchy looks like this.
Citrix Delivery Center (overall product family brand - idea is to transform static datacenters into dynamic "delivery centers")
- XenServer (server virtualization)
- NetScaler (app optimization for delivering web apps)
- XenApp (app virtualization for delivering windows apps)
- XenDesktop (desktop virtualization)
- Workflow Studio (a new tool used to orchestrate them all together)
Each of these are really product lines that integrate other smaller products. Provisioning Server (ardance) can still be bought on its own, but it rolls up into a platinum edition of XenServer (it'll actually be integrated into XenDesktop as a feature as well). Similar with things like Access Gateway, WANScaler, Password Manager, Application Firewall, EdgeSight, etc. You can buy them separately, but they're also "features" of the above four main products. That's the way it was presented at Summit.
The names Citrix have used and the frequency of the name changes have caused much confusion.
MS names their product "Terminal Server" and they stick to it.
I suggest that Citrix stick to the new current names and rename Web Interface back to NFUSE and I'll be happy.
Where are you getting your "cheaper than XenDesktop + XenApp" numbers from? XenDesktop hasn't even been released as a product yet. We don't know how much it's going to cost.
I completely disagree. Assuming that we use the definition of "Application Virtualization" being an app that is isolated from the OS it's running on, XenApp is Application Virtualization on steroids. Not only can I use the streaming feature of XenApp to provide Application Virtualization for client apps on client OSs, but I can also stream apps to terminal servers and deliver the virtualized application to the client remotely. So your claim that a published app is just a 'physically installed application which is presented remotely' isn't entirely true. While I could "physically install applications" on my terminal servers, why would I want to do that? What a pain! We all did that for years before Presentation Server provided app streaming. As Brian pointed out Presentation Server has greatly evolved, so let's stop claiming we have to manage applications on terminal server the old way.
XenApp gives me the ability to provide client based application virtualization and server based application virtualization... AND more importantly, I can setup policies to determine when the client should receive client based or server based application virtualization. This is HUGE!!! The policy can determine whether a user is on the corporate owned PC at their desk in the office, or they are using their wife's home PC in the kitchen. It's the same user, but in the first case I want to give the user client based application virtualization, and in the second case I want to give the user server based application virtualization. But the user didn't have to be trained for two different scenarios. He just clicks the same icon no matter where he is. The policy determines what he gets. Try setting that up with other application virtualization products.
Agree that name changes can cause confusion, but I hardly think NFUSE and Terminal Services are great names. Microsoft actually has a pretty rich track record of ugly, complicated names on the infrastructure side. Things that are so impossible to remember everyone uses meaningless acronyms (and btw, they've made plenty of changes too).
If you look at the product names at Microsoft that actually are successful, they're all great product brands: Windows, Word, Office, Excel, Outlook, Exchange, Power Point, etc. Trying to copy the brilliant marketing guys in the Terminal Services group is what gave us the awful Presentation Server name in the first place.
You watch... there will 10x the interest in this product by the IT bigwigs just by changing the name to something cool like XenApp.
I think Citrix is copying the good side of Microsoft here with names that are actually great product brands (NetScaler, XenApp, XenServer, XenDesktop, etc).
I'm tired of constantly having to justify TS Presentation Server investments to the VP bigshots each year. They simply don't get it and have no idea what a strategic role this plays in their overall IT infrastructure (or how critical their PS administrators are). I like the new name because it's something the execs will get. They're all over virtualization and really get it's value well beyond server consolidation. Talking about XenApp as a key part of their IT infrastructure will make the job for techies much easier as well.
PS 4.5 is technically still PS 4.5. The code will reflect the new XenApp brand at the next release (presumably 5.0 this summer according to rumors at Summit).
Agree it would help if Brian and team could publish another chart. It makes a ton of sense when you see it all laid out, but it's not clear on their website yet.
I'm sure VMware will try to follow suit with ThinStall. Then we'll have two vendors with an end-to-end story that are both about the same size. I'd still argue that VMware will be much weaker in the app/desktop arena for years. Very difficult to do, and just buying a couple of little startups won't get them there quickly, especially since most of the company are datacenter folks by trade.
Similar could probably be said about Citrix in the opposite direction as they have more experience on the app and desktop side than in the datacenter. Either way, I think customers win big time here. MUCH better than having either of these guys dominating one segment with no competition.
I preferred Metaframe, perhaps I'm getting old but the whole name changing regime at Citrix ain't making it easier to navigate in their ever growing product list.
If they stick to Xen as a brand for the next 10 years, good, if they change it again (which they will likely do) in 2 years then it is boll***.
Just my two cents: When is the product XenSation gonna come?? ;-)
Because I go to Summit I can't really put a table out today, because of NDA (and quite frankly confusion on when Citrix has actually announced something that releases the NDA). This is why Brian and Gabe don't go to Summit. But I see that "guest" (who I guess was at summit but doesn't post with his real name) has given the outline of how it works. It no doubt will take some time for all the details to work out into an accurate table, but one would expect that Citrix will be showing such a table by iForum.
Nah, keep the new names and rename WebInterface XENFUSE :D
I'm agree with the new names, and think they make good sence... so much easier to write too..
But does this mean my CCIA will change name to "Citrix Certified Integration Architect for Citrix XenApp 4"?
Agree Citrix has some work to do on management consoles, but did you see Workflow Studio yet? It looks like they're going to put more emphasis on drag-and-drop management of processes in a graphical way than trying to create one monster consolue GUI that manages everything.
The thing I like about this direction is that it will work equally well with NON Citrix products. Even if they got one master console to manage all their stuff (which is doubtful as no large vendor ever seems to get this right) it would only manage their products. With Workflow Studio, you'd be able to link XenApp to VMware to NetScaler to any small vendor product you might have, etc. That is a VERY cool idea and I give Citrix major kudos for going that direction, even if the consoles for XenApp have gotten out of control. Now let's just see if they have the courage to have some of these competitors with them on stage at iForum in May proving it (anyone want to take a bet on that?)
www.frameworkx.com has a cool write up on Workflow Studio. Can't wait to get my hands on it.
Two important point to note when there is a talk about Office communicator 2007 and Citrix clients. Make a note that IM and presence works but audio and video neither works nor supported.
Simply put, Xen is synonymous with virtualization, and NetScaler doesn't do virtualization of any kind. Hence, no reason to Xenify it.
At my office we are all over the new name. It's fun!
Give me a break. They bought the company three months ago and just launched it to their channel two weeks ago. Unless you work for Citrix and know something we don't (which I highly doubt from the tone of your email) this is a stupid statement.
From what I can see in the first three months they:
Launched a new version of XenServer (4.1) with tons of new features, announced a new platinum editon of XenServer that combines Provisioning Server for physical and virtual machines (and still priced below what a single license of ESX), announced XenDesktop that will integrate all the Xen VM infrastructure, image provisioning and deliver it all over ICA, announced a partnership with Microsoft where both XS and XD will run on HyperV, announced a partnership with CSC where their entire desktop virtualization practice will be based on XD and announced deals with the big server vendors.
I have no idea how they're tracking toward that $50M goal, but they hardly seem to be sitting still or acting in desperation. They've done more in 90 days than most big vendors do in the first year of an acquisition. Based on their track record with the past few acquistions, I'm certainly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
And BTW, I agree with Brian that the XenApp name is a great move. I don't know who you work for or what your bias is, but calling Xen a "worthless company" seems pretty harsh no matter how you slice it. I somehow suspect your neutrality in this.
We have started to look at AppSense for the profile management. Have you looked at this? Just curious what your thoughts were on thsi.
I had a look at the policy preferences at Teched in Barcelona.
The implementation into Windows Server 2008 feels like it is trown in the mix as is. By this i mean that many preference and GPO's serve a common goal, i which they overlap each other. Don't get me wrong, these preferences will give us more control over user and computer environments in ways we could only dream in previous versions, but it is just the way it is trown into the product to add more functionallity.
Great article Brian. My best practice going into any engagement (as you said, there are as many different environments as there are people reading your article) is an tool by an old HP colleague of mine, Richard Egenas (now with EnvokeIT in Sweden). It is called the TS Checker/Tuner and is one of the best ways to add in the necesary settings for environments. I can create a high level template like you mention in your article above and then tweak it to the customer environment. For the profiles and folder redirection my best practice is the triCerat Simplify Suite.
Sure, but Gabe wrote this article, not me!
I like AppSense. And RES. And RTO has a cool virtual profile solution too.
This happens a lot. I guess we need to start posting photos along with articles. Maybe this is good then and readers will want more from Gabe. We were both at a party at a friend's house about ten years ago. At the time Gabe was single and I was in a relationship. We both had conversations some random girl there, and friend of ours told her later that Gabe was single. "Which one was Gabe," she asked, "The cute one or the tall one?"
I'm 6'3"