There’s lots of info out there, all sorts of product matrixes and fact sheets. However time and again customers want to know, what does it all mean to me, what should I pick.

I’ve tried to go through and look at the features that really matter to customers and are clear differences between the two and list them here. I’ve not taking into account cost (although indicated where additional licensing would be required).

Effectively this is a comparison of Xendesktop Enterprise and VMWare View 4.6 Premier, the only items listed are items where the competitor can provide what the other lacks.

• View using PCOIP has no local drive mapping ability, must use RDP
• View cannot granularly turn off USB device, COM ports etc
• View has no webcam support
• View cannot support client flash offloading allowing higher density
• View cannot handle >4 Monitors when using PCOIP
• View has limited support for unified communications to key vendors (No MS Lync rich functionality)
• View does not have granular bandwidth controls over things like printing, USB, client drives, audio and video etc
• XenDesktop has clients that support more devices include android based devices and linux based
• XenDesktop has a full rich experience with HDX to Mac, while View uses the less rich RDP connection (no PCoIP to Mac)
• XenDesktop cannot directly adjust Adobe flash quality
• XenDesktop supports bare metal XenClient offline VDI while view has type 2 Client hosted offline mode which requires a base OS for the VM to run on
• XenDesktop cannot manage offline vDesktops integrated in VDI management policies
• XenDesktop supports image delivery through provisioning server to both vitual and physical devices
• XenDesktop has better support for clients for non windows OS’s such as Mac or iPhones, blackberries etc
• XenDesktop is Hypervisor agnostic (XenServer, vSphere, HyperV), View will only run on vSphere
• XenDesktop allows higher numbers of concurrent connections per broker server for better scalability
• XenDesktop includes Xenapp for application delivery and control
• View includes ThinApp for application distribution (Premier license)
• XenDesktop includes Edgesight management and reporting tools (additional licensing costs – Platinum)
• XenDesktop has CAG smartaccess controls for granular control over remote sessions and SSL VPN (additional licensing costs – Platinum)
• XenDesktop supports SSL proxying of sessions through a virtual appliance, where View requires a Windows based security server that handles proxying UDP over port 4172 which can be tricky in some scenarios

These items often change rapidly so forgive me if this list contains items that are no longer valid or incorrect. Feel free to comment below and I will maintain this list with any feedback I receive.

A key resource was this whitepaper by Ruben Spruit entitled VDI Smackdown

Here is a link to VMWare View pricing

I could not find a clear link to XenDesktop pricing but here is a link to the XenDesktop Editions List