Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems

PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.

Citrix XenClient Enters the Ring

Citrix Xenclient enters the bare metal hypervisor for desktops devices market and challenges the incumbents – Neocleus and VirtualComputer. As a solution to reducing management costs and improving the user experience such a funtion is undoubtedly a contender to change the way you think about your PC lifecycle management.

Citrix invests in Kaviza – VMWare's VDI to suffer from EMC demands?

Citrix have invested an unspecified amount of money in Kaviza whose grid architecture eliminates the expensive infrastructure that VDI solutions. With Kaviza’s solution all the functionality needed to provision and manage virtual desktops is consolidated into a single virtual appliance that scales on commodity servers. Will this announcement herald a major take-up of VDI? Indeed, can you really offer a turnkey solution to support your desktop centralisation strategy?

Does XenApp 6 Keep Citrix Ahead of the Pack?

Citrix has released XenApp 6 which finally provides support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 – what is available in this new release for your business. Besides R2 support, what does XenApp 6 offer your business, what WOW factors are provided to help justify the cost of using XenApp6 to springboard your x64 Presentation Virtualization implementation – be that a new implementation, or a migration from your existing environment.

Microsoft and Citrix offer a "Rescue for VMware VDI"

On March 18, Microsoft embarked on a major offensive to focus the desktop virtualisation market away from VMware View. Microsoft announced updates for their desktop virtualization technologies and solutions, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The question is, are these announcements marketing hype or do they actually help deliver an improved VDI experience? Indeed, are you a VMware View in peril? The announcements from Microsoft and Citrix to little to impact on this marketing statement especially when we consider that, licensing changes aside, this announcement is an announcement of things to come, not an announcement of things available now.Perhaps an effective rescue for VMWare’s VDI will be to for VMware to deliver their client side hypervisor first and offer a single management environment for a business desktop delivery, regardless of device.

Citrix/Novell Partnership SLES and PlateSpin

In a slightly strange “didn’t they already have Xen in the kernel” kind of way, Novell has certified Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a “perfect guest” running on Citrix XenServer, allowing joint support of the combined solution. The deal is asymmetric (it wouldn’t really make sense to run XenServer on SLES) but it reflects an open approach characteristic of the way Novell operates, in embracing the reality that customers will want to use one of a number of possible hypervisors, and that Novell has to get along with everyone. In return Novell is starting to push it’s PlateSpin Recon product through the Citrix channel.