Later this month, Citrix will launch an upgrade for its virtualisation software that will allow it to more efficiently deal with different types of users within an organisation.
The new software, called Desktop Broker, is designed to support power users and desktops that are wholly dedicated to one application.
Currently Citrix supports a "shared machine" model, in which a company had a single image of the desktop and makes it multi-user. With Desktop Broker, companies can support dedicated machines devoted to single tasks or single users who need a lot of system resources.
The ability to split resources in a dynamic way between different users is part of Citrix's latest take on virtualidation.
"The critical part of virtualisation is the management involved in connecting many different types of users to their virtual desktop," Citrix's manager for product marketing, Calvin Hsu, told ZDNet UK.
"This raises issues such as securing connections, identifying the user, role-based provisioning of different types of desktop, pooling the desktops and whether you can allocate one on the fly and then re-allocate if necessary. Desktop Broker can handle all of that," Hsu added.
Citrix has gone through "many generations of providing a virtualised application experience", said Hsu. "We are now bringing it to bear on the desktop".
According to Hsu, Desktop Broker is generating a lot of interest with organisations that have to support a lot of power users, but want to centralise and secure that information as well.
The move is an important one for Citrix and marks a major advance for the company. Citrix has a good story to tell in the world of thin clients, helping organisations build systems that support many users as economically as possible. Desktop Broker is one of the tools the company is building to show that, through virtualisation, it can support users of all types, including the most power-hungry users, in an environment that comes with the right tools to cover security and other issues.
Citrix Presentation Manager uses the shared model today, which poses some challenges, Hsu explained. "They can't customise it, they can't reboot the machine, they can't crash it if they need to [reset] which limits it, but offers a lot of control for the business."
Citrix will announce Desktop Broker at the company's annual conference, iForum Global, on 22 October.
Talkback
The other interesting company in this space is Provision Networks (www.provisionnetworks.com). They announced their VDI solution in a press release last year at VMworld 2005, and they're about to release it in a few days. This is the same company that's been reported to be giving Citrix a run for their money in the application deivery space (see #13 - https://baird.bluematrix.com/docs/html/47413.html).
Provision's existing solution is based on Terminal Server and is thus RDP-centric. It's also been met with great success over the last 3 years and is pretty extensive insofar the features that it offers (i.e., app publishing, load balancing, seamless windows, SSO, universal print driver, user profile management, PDA redirection, resource optimization, Web portal, SSL VPN). Of course, Citrix continues to own the general mindshare, but Provision is making some big and important inroads, too.
Tech-savvy folks should give this company a close look. Their solution known as the Provision Management Framework (PMF), is pretty unique in the way it integrates Terminal Servers virtual machine pools running windows XP. If you're familiar with Citrix Program Neighborhood, the PN Agent, and the Web Interface, Provsion Delivers pretty much those same access methodologies. The difference is that the published applications that the users see could be published on either Terminal Server or virtual Windows XP desktops hosted on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. The user simply doesn't know where these apps are published. In essence, each WinXP desktop becomes a single-user Terminal Server providing a completely isolated standard desktop environment for its owner. Terminal Server, of course, is a shared environment.
Citrix's approach is to publish the Remote Desktop Connection client in the Presentation Server farm. In order to access an isolated Windows XP desktop, one must establish an ICA session with the Presentation Server and then RDP over to the Windows XP desktop. With this approach, VDI customers are forced to implement a Presentation Server infrastructure whether or not they plan on using Presentation Server for other applications. Sounds pretty kludgy!
Provision's Connection Broker is also top-notch. It implements most of the VM management functions found in VMware VirtualCenter. It is also policy-driven, allowing Administrators to establish VM pool management policies pertaining to access and security.
Keep an eye on these guys. They're exhibiting at VMworld 2006 in November.