I’m currently working on comparing the costs associated with doing 100 users in a shared desktop model. I was looking for resources around sizing storage and stumbled across these fantastic calculators by Andre Leibovici. He’s created one for both Xendesktop and VMWare view. Both leverage ESX as the hypervisor currently.

Here are the links:

VMWare View VDI Sizing Calculator

Citrix XenDesktop Sizing Calculator

Calculator Instructions and Parameters

Quest has released a handy tool for quickly refining your virtual desktop images to dramatically improve on performance. This tool makes a number of tweaks that can save on disk, cpu and even RAM usage in a virtual desktop environment. The tool works for all vendors and it’s free! So check it out:

Quest Desktop Optimizer

Here’s an excellent PDF outlining what licensing is required for what scenario in a VDI model.

Microsoft VDI Licensing Explained

With VDI established as a real approach to desktop delivery and management now more than ever, I think it’s important to ask “Why VDI?”. If we don’t ask why, then projects to design and implement VDI will never succeed. Without an objective or goal, how can you be clear that anything was achieved?

I think its important to define what I mean by VDI. VDI is a term that means many different things to different people. VDI traditionally stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and for a while seemed to be a term owned by VMWare for desktops virtualized on ESX. As in the case of kleenex, it now seems to be a much broader term and used much more in the public domain. I will define VDI in the more logical sense as the abstraction and delivery of a desktop experience, the Windows OS to users. VDI is an alternate way of providing Windows to every user rather than the traditional method of locally installed systems bound to a piece of hardware (desktop/laptop) on every users desk.

So this all sounds very confusing, and it can be. Which leads us to the question as to why would we want to do this whole VDI thing? Why not just keep doing desktops in the traditional steps of: install, configure, deploy and manage. This leads us to our first reason or driver:

Simplified Efficient Management and Administration

While many people utilize the old school method of desktop management mentioned earlier, many also agree it can be painful and waste the valuable time of busy administrators who could instead spend time being proactive. Time spent supporting single desktop issues can become a blow to the TCO of the overall solution. Gartner has a good document on how improved desktop management can reduce TCO (Gartner Desktop Mgmt). Think of VDI as perhaps the ultimate form of desktop management. VDI can be deployed in a way that means a user gets a custom desktop that is as good as the day it was built (we all know desktop performance seems to deterioate with age!). It is delivered with all customizations, patches, configuration and security fixes in place on the first day and every day. Any hardware problem can simply be addressed by swapping the problematic device out and replacing it with an alternate. The user can log back into their same virtual desktop, possibly even to the same state including that email they were in the middle of! This can save administrators lots of troubleshooting time as well as make for happy productive users.

The next part of management is that of updating and patching. While there are good tools for deploying patches to traditional desktops – there still is the inevitable mix of patched and unpatched systems. Imagine an environment where you know every user is on the latest OS including the latest patches, and to roll out a patch you only need to do it once, to one system. VDI can make this a reality. Now, expand that to security configurations, application updates… you’re starting to see the picture now aren’t you!?

So we have this amazing, pristine, secure image that is personalized for users… Wouldn’t it be great if that was available to them internally as well as externally? Well that leads us to the next point:

Remote Access

Right now I would say VMWare View and Citrix XenDesktop are the leaders in the VDI space. Both of these companies include simple to use gateway products for use with their VDI solutions. This means users can simply log into a webpage from home, and access their VDI desktop. The very same desktop they use when they are in the office with all their applications and data. Imagine how this would help for the work from home initiative, pandemic planning, DR scenarios etc. Now add this to the fact that it can be done securely with granular control over how the remote client device can interact (clipboard, drive mappings etc) and you start to see the power of this solution. Users can be given an environment where no data can move between the home device and the virtual desktop and vice versa. Extend this solution to cover the myriad of remote devices including, iphones, ipads, androids, macs and linux machines. You can see how the flexibility of VDI really prepares a company for what I call workforce 2.0, or you may know them as those teenagers with their faces buried in their iphone/ipad etc . With VDI based remote access, VPN access and the security concerns around adding a node to your network are eliminated.

So now you’re on board, sounds great…. In the words of those late night informercials – “But Wait! There’s more!”..

Flexibility and Scalability

Since VDI is heavily based on virtualization, it inherently scales well. Most solutions out there are designed with scalability in mind. For example, with an acquisition your company suddenly needs to provide desktops to 200 more users. In the traditional model this would have meant a couple weeks of work, with VDI this could be done in an afternoon.

Lets think of an alternate scenario, imagine windows 8 comes out, I know, I know… But lets say it does and you now need to migrate your 1000 users to Windows 8. In a VDI deployment this is a breeze, simply create your new image and assign it to users. On next logon they can be happily (or unhappily) using windows 8! Sure this might be a slight over simplification, but VDI will make it much simpler than the traditional visit to every desktop scenario.

Another example of the flexibility of VDI is that legacy hardware or thin clients can be used to run environments that they could never support. Don’t want to replace the aging desktops for all your users? No worries, just have them log into their VDI desktop where they can be running the latest OS and applications at speeds they haven’t even experienced on their local desktop.

Now I could go on and on about VDI… It’s my job, that’s what I do- But I think this is a good place to stop. VDI changes the game, and there’s a lot more to VDI and the various deployment options available. We haven’t even got into local mode, client virtualization, or desktop streaming etc., but that’s an article for another day. What matters is why you want to virtualize your desktops – and I think we’ve listed some pretty compelling reasons.

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