The Value of VDI Trade-Ups: XenApp to XenDesktop or VMWare View, Is It Worth It?

Which is better – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or Presentation Virtualization? If you have, say, a Citrix XenApp PV solution – you may may be tempted at the reduced cost per license of VDI – XenDesktop appears to be almost half the cost per user than XenApp. Maybe you’ve a VMware vSphere back-end and the thought of having one platform to manage is appealing. Maybe you have a different solution – perhaps Quest’s vWorkspace or Ericom’s Webconnect and are wondering what all this fuss about moving between PV and VDI is all about?

No waiting for bare-metal virtual desktops

Virtual Computer’s release of NxTop version 2.0 of this month continues to prove their leadership in client-side virtualization by delivering robust features to meet the needs of the corporate desktop. The delayed release of Citrix’ XenClient and VMware’s Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) to the market has left few options for customers whose virtual desktop implementations need to address a larger offline or disconnected use case.

Virtual Desktop Clients as the next Mobile Device ‘Killer App’?

Coming out of this holiday season there will be many who got new, more versatile, mobile devices and will want to use them to access information from work. In the nearly 15 years since the introduction of the two way pager, mobile device manufacturers have been trying to build a platform for business applications to take on messaging as the next “killer application.” Virtual Desktop Clients may be the application that finally steps up to the task.

Microsoft Adds Sentillion’s vThere to its Virtualization Portfolio

Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of Massachusetts based Sentillion extends its reach into healthcare solutions and added a new component to its virtualization portfolio. Sentillion’s vThere is a type-2 hypervisor (hosted virtual machine) built on Parallels virtualization whose strength is in its ability to provide a highly secured desktop image on a normally non-secured solution.

Desired End State for the Next Generation Desktop

Enterprises and mid-sized businesses (SME’s) face two significant challenges and opportunities with respect to the end user desktops in the next two years. The first opportunity and challenge is how to replace the aging Windows XP installed base with the recently released Windows 7 platform. The second is how to end up with a desktop environment that is inherently more flexible and manageable than what is in place today.