VMware says: 'Citrix XenDesktop software is complex, consisting of different disparate components bundled together'


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	About Gareth James I have recently started working for Citrix South Africa as a Systems Engineer. I have been back in South Africa for two years prior to which I was working for a Platinum Citrix Partner in London. During the 9 years I spent in London, I also spent time working as a Microsoft and Citrix trainer. Contact: gareth@james.za.org


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Now before I jump in, I should say that I do admittedly have a Citrix bias, but here are my thoughts on the latest VMware Channel Flash:

The jungle drums have been going and VMware has put out their latest "Competitive Marketing" trying to stop the momentum that Xendesktop has been building.

Quote:"Citrix XenDesktop software is complex, consisting of different disparate components bundled together"

Xendesktop is an in house developed product; I'm a bit confused as to how VMware's acquisition of Propero will ever be better integrated. The software is a simple extension of the tried and tested IMA. Their own competitive table of capabilities includes two Alliance Partner products and two Tech Preview bits of vapourware; it probably would have been in their best interest to exclude those Citrix capabilities. Also not included is a VDM requirement for a third party load balancer for their broker, yes that's right folks, they don't have a load balancer, now, if I think really carefully I can think of a company that has been doing robust, multi-master, session based load balancing for over a decade! *see quote from VMware document below.

Xendesktop - integrates with Xenserver (obviously), Hyper-V, Physical Bladed Solutions and lastly VMware

VDM - integrates with VMware

Xendesktop integrates directly into AD, you create an OU in the area of your choosing and create a "Controllers" group. VDM requires that you install ADAM. Personally I think the Citrix approach is simpler.

VMware also mentions a "broad desktop ecosystem support" One of the arguments being touted is that the RDP solution is effectively clientless (being built in to most operating systems); this is unfortunately not entirely true. The VDM solution does use VDM2 client which must be installed and is a modified RDP client. In fact it may be a weakness in the VDM2 solution. Every thin client I have ever seen already includes an ICA client.

Here is the list of supported thin clients for VDM2:The following thin client devices have been tested to connect to VDM 2.0:HP Compaq t5730 Thin Client, HP Compaq t5735 Thin Client, HP Compaq 6720t Mobile Thin Client, HP Neoware c50 (XPe), Wyse S10 VDI Edition, Wyse V10L, Wyse V90,Wyse V90L

Which means that existing thin clients don't work natively with VDM, ouch, now there is a basic connectivity capability using Java if there is a browser and Java and compatibility etc. etc. but that's not really apples with apples -it excludes USB support. Required for VDM Java client : "Java JRE 1.5.0 or 1.6.0 and Firefox 1.5 or 2.0" enjoy, you tell the client they need to rebuild or replace all their thin clients, and rely on Java.

Additionally Citrix has clients for:Windows Vista/XP/2003/2000,Windows 98/95,Windows NT 4.0,WinCE/PocketPC,Macintosh,Java,EPOC/Symbian OS,BlackBerry,Rove Mobile,UNIX,Linux,IBM OS/2 and DOS

VMware also goes to great lengths to discredit Provisioning Server, on the one hand, and in the next breath tries to sell its roadmap product(not even close to release) SVI. It just comes off as sour grapes.

VMware also make the assertion that Hyper-V will replace Xenserver, which is frankly a blatant falsehood. Perhaps someone is confused, Citrix and Microsoft are working together such that their respective hypervisors can be managed by each other's tools and such that the virtual machine formats are compatible, and this is great for both Citrix and Microsoft.

Supporting Notes:

Resiliency / Load Balancing of the Connection Broker

*"The load balancing requirements for VDM Connection Server are to support standard HTTP(S) load balancing with session affinity. Load balancing solutions for VDM Connection Server can include Microsoft Network Load Balancing (NLB), standard hardware-based load balancers, or Virtual Appliance load balancers that can operate on VMware ESX Server. Users in a load balanced VDM Connection Server environment use a load balanced URL to make the connection. This is an alias URL used by the load balancer to direct the connection to any of the available VDM Connection Servers in the group."

The session affinity bit means that it needs to connect to the same sever within a session (the https connection bit) and as such the load balancer must be "session aware". Furthermore the Connection Servers are acting in isolation from each other Citrix on the other hand has been doing intelligent load balancing since the old Metaframe days. The Citrix "Desktop Delivery Controllers" are pooled and are aware of each other. There is no requirement for a third party load balancer.

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Article Comments

posted by Jessy - 04/06/2009

CTX Supporter - Yep, now, I am sure that Citrix is the real and the most dangerous competitor of VMW. By the way, looking about the product, its make sense to use all these bricks in order to make the VDI working properly. Reacting like that is revelating the level of stress at the board !! So VMW team, enjoy, you are on the panic mode

» reply

posted by Warren Ponder - 04/06/2009

Minor Corrections and clarification - Gareth, you know I am always here to help clean up with minor corrections :) - I think momentum of XenDesktop is a strong word. You might be surprised to find that after studying their implementation of CDDC with several back end solutions and XenDesktop as a whole, we encourage customers to try it out and let us know what they think after trying a VMware VDI based solution If a customer wants a CDDC based solution with a VI3 backend we also gladly work with them to make that happen. - The Propero technology was taken down to the core code base which was a modular Java code base. The UI was completely redesigned and rewritten and the entire new code base was ported from Linux to Windows. If we are successful at adding additional features and executing releases at a rapid pace, maybe our strategy will gain some credit from the more bias :) - XenDesktop is complex when compared to other solutions. A VMware / Provision / Leostream solution is less complex than a XenDesktop solution for some. Keeping in mind that VDI touches a much broader audience outside the traditional Citrix Consultant or Admin that has no Citrix experience. Even some of the most dedicated CTP and Citrix partners say 9 management consoles, as the relive past nightmares. - The ADAM install is completely hands off and there is NOTHING to manage for an admin. VDM is a single MSI installer that installs and configures all the required components for brokering. Each of the required XenDesktop components is installed and configured separately several will require additional servers or VMs to make them highly available so they do not become single points of failure. With VDM ADAM is used to store configuration information and is not a database that needs to be managed separately or clustered for HA. Because it is LDAP based and is multi-master the architecture is inherently HA as you add VDM servers. The point is we are non-intrusive to AD we do not require that you add OU's. If you want you can but it is not a requirement. - You are 100% wrong that the VDM client MUST be installed and that its a " Modified RDP Client". The VDM client is optional, but it does offer features not available in all uses cases today. We leverage the clients RDP implementation on the local device. For example, on a WYSE device we leverage the local RDP client, no VDM Client required. If you want USB redirection, which is provided by the VDM Client for Windows you can use the WYSE USB redirection. For XP, Vista, XPe based clients etc. we actually leverage the Windows RDP client and nothing is modified. Today there is a VDM Client for Windows platforms and there are thin clients that integrate using a API not Java. The " Supported " clients you mentioned are only ones that VMware tested itself. There is a long list of other devices that are supported and have been tested by our thin client partners. You might have also missed the announcement of our thin client certification program and all the thin client partners that will be integrating with VMware VDI, using a variety of ways, not java based, shipping clients that support VMware VDI out of the box. In that list you will find thin client partners for who XenDesktop has no support. The webAccess that is java based on non Windows based platforms is just that, webaccess for access from a common web browser.

» reply

posted by Gareth James - 04/06/2009

Response - Thanks Warren, good to know someone actually reads this stuff ;) If I may just comment on your comments; “ Keeping in mind that VDI touches a much broader audience outside the traditional Citrix Consultant or Admin that has no Citrix experience” – Yes, but who would be best equipped to implement a VDI solution? Surely VDI is a logical extension of Terminal Services, and as such those best equipped to implement this would be the guys who actually wrote Terminal Services and have been writing the code since NT 3.51. (Citrix that is). “Even some of the most dedicated CTP and Citrix partners say 9 management consoles, as the relive past nightmares.” – 9 consoles? Please I challenge you to name them – You can do pretty much everything through one console, which based on the existing Citrix XenApp console, very intuitive and any Citrix Admin could easily navigate the console. ADAM – I have no issue with ADAM per se, my issue is the contention that ADAM is simpler than the Citrix mechanism, which is one OU containing a group. I just don’t believe the Citrix approach can be accused of being more complex, quite the contrary I feel. “You are 100% wrong that the VDM client MUST be installed” – I didn’t ever contend that you couldn’t get basic connectivity without the VDM client, what I said is that it isn’t apples with apples, without the VDM client you don’t get the USB redirection. My real gripe is for those legacy thin clients, which are normally linux based and these use – as you say: “The webAccess that is java based on non Windows based platforms” In other words you are reliant on webAccess for these older clients, and this has browser and Java dependencies that these thin clients may or may not fulfill. I am sure I am not the only one out there who doesn’t like Java based clients; I have found Java based clients to be cumbersome and unreliable. Xendesktop is still the most complete solution, as I said of VMware: “Their own competitive table of capabilities includes two Alliance Partner products and two Tech Preview bits of vapourware” Additionally VMware still has the issue that in any Enterprise implementation they will need to rely on a third party load balancer.

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posted by Warren Ponder - 04/06/2009

More responses - My comment about the audience was not related to who creates technology, but who deploys and manages it. My point being, the typical Citrix Admin or consultant might not find deploying and managing - Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller, Citrix Provisioning Server, Licensing Server, XenServer, XenCenter, A separate database for the farm store and - All this just for the Advanced Edition, before we even get to Enterprise with XenAPP a complex chore. However, in my experience with VDI I work with and communicate regularly with customers planning and deploying VDI desktops that do not have Citrix or Terminal Services. I disagree that VDI is simply an extension of Terminal Services for everyone. As a SBC professional myself, it's easy and natural to look at it that way, but for a lot of customers again, who do not use SBC technologies its not simply an extension or easy comparison. Back to ADAM, there is no correlation between ADAM and the Citrix OU. The comparison is between ADAM and the use of a database with CDDC. CDDC uses an outside database for configuration information that needs to be installed, configured, managed and made HA. VDM 2 uses ADAM to store the configuration information, it's installed and configured as part of the VDM 2 install and there is nothing for an admin to configure or manage and its self contained. Making it HA is handled by adding one or more VDM 2 servers, replication between them is automatically handled by VDM. The VDM 2 client does provides advanced USB redirection for Windows based clients. Basic redirection of standard Mass Storage, HID devices etc. is supported across clients. Although Linux clients come in third in global thin client market share, they are an interesting platform to target for feature parity such as what is provided with Windows today. WebAcess is not the only way a Linux based client can connect with VDM, there is also the API available under the recently launched thin client certification program. In addition, for webAcess Java is only used to launch the local RDP client of a device. I might be mistaking you, and reading Citrix's information wrong, but I do not think XenDesktop has an edge here? XenDesktop is not unified across clients today nor between the XenDesktop's use of ICA and XenApp ICA http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/qa.asp?contentID=163057&faqID=1340768&title=Citrix+XenDesktop%2C+Technical+FAQ . XenDesktop also includes tech preview components. Citrix also partners for solution development, Microsoft, Akamai and recently partnered with a VMware VDI partner, Appsense before acquiring a competitors technology and releasing it as a tech preview to round out more of the XenDesktop solution There are other tech preview bits in with XenDesktop also. I agree, integrated load balancing is nice, we do not offer that and did not peruse it based on customer feedback I can see the value in having an optional solution included though.

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