Citrix, VMware Assess the Future of Desktop Virtualization

This week both Citrix (CTXS) and VMware (VMW) independently outlined a future of desktop virtualization that relies heavily on the cloud to simplify the deployment and ongoing management of the virtual desktop.

At the Citrix Synergy 2015 conference Citrix announced a public beta program for Citrix Workspace Cloud, an implementation of its desktop virtualization software that relies on a control plane hosted in the cloud to create modules consisting of everything from specific types of desktops to entire sets of services that can be provisioned to an end user via a few clicks of a button. Citrix Workspace Cloud is scheduled to be generally available in the third quarter.

The goal, said Natalie Lambert, senior director of Product Marketing for Citrix, is to give IT organizations more control over the desktop environment in a way that still allows them to respond quickly to rapidly changing end user requirements.

In addition to developing Citrix Workspace Cloud, Citrix also is making it easier to migrate to the latest versions of XenApp and XenDesktop. Earlier this year the company launched a beta of the XenApp upgrade service, a cloud-based web tool that gathers information on XenApp's and XenDesktop's configurations and settings, then automatically generates a script for migrating those settings into the new XenApp environment. Citrix claims that even though this service is still in beta, more than 36,000 applications already have been migrated to XenApp 7. An update to the beta version, slated for  release this quarter, ostensibly will make it easier to create blueprints that can be used to help automate the migration process.

As part of an acknowledgement that many customers are caught between upgrade cycles, Citrix also released an update to XenApp 6.5 that makes many of the features of XenApp 7.6 available to customers now. Citrix also said it is now extending the End of Maintenance (EOM) of XenApp 6.5 for 2008R2 through the end of 2017.

Finally, Citrix showed an update to its Citrix Receiver software that unifies the desktop and mobile computing experience via tighter integration with Citrix StoreFront 3.0 app store.

Meanwhile, VMware took advantage of the focus on desktop virtualization this week to reveal the existence of Project Enzo, currently in development. Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager for desktop products in the End-User Computing division of VMware, said the EMC business unit is also working to transform the management of virtual desktops and applications via the cloud.

In this case, VMware is centralizing the management of its virtual desktops via a control plane that will be hosted on the VMware vCloud Air platform. VMware Smart Node software will then be deployed on an EVO-RAIL hyperconverged appliance or server to create a master instance of desktop computing environment that can then be cloned multiple times and distributed at will.

Dhawan said this capability will reduce a process that once took days and weeks to about 20 minutes to provision as many as 20,000 virtual desktops. In addition, Dhawan noted, a “just in time” approach to managing desktops means no longer will there be a need to overprovision IT infrastructure to support virtual desktop computing environments.

The end result, said Dhawan, is not only a single pane of glass to manage to entire virtual desktop environment, but also the elimination of updates because new features now are just streamed into the environment at will.

While VMware has not committed to a delivery date for Project Enzo, Dhawan said VMware expects as many as 20 percent to 25 percent of all desktops to become virtualized. In comparison, currently fewer than 10 percent of desktops are virtual.

Both VMware and Citrix freely admit that the complexity of managing desktop virtualization has greatly limited its adoption. But now, faced with running multiple versions of Windows and raft of mobile computing devices running different types of operating systems, IT organizations seem more in the mood to, at the very least, re-evaluate their options. For solution providers, that means there’s an opportunity to start a conversation now about relieving a point of IT pain for many IT organizations.