Chris Wolf

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Chris Wolf
Research VP
4 years at Gartner
16 years IT industry

Chris Wolf is a research vice president for Gartner's IT Professionals service. He covers server and client virtualization, cloud computing, data protection, management and classification, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Read Full Bio

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Citrix Synergy 2010: Client Virtualization News and Thoughts

by Chris Wolf  |  May 19, 2010  |  Comments Off

As a follow-up to my previous post on Synergy 2010, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the client virtualization-related announcements. Citrix made the following product announcements at the conference:

The most significant first day conference buzz was around Citrix’s XenClient bare metal hypervisor, which is now available as a public beta. Our clients mainly see the bare metal client hypervisor as a late 2011 or early 2012 initiative, following the maturity of the core technology to go along with a much needed management ecosystem. XenClient offers some nice features, including the capability to access “corporate VM” apps from a user’s “personal VM,” but work remains on management as well as device support (supporting nVidia video cards would be a good next step). Citrix understands this, and realistically sees their first generation client hypervisor as a tool for IT professionals to “kick the tires” with the technology. It’s a good time to build institutional knowledge, get the technology in the lab, and start to think about security and governance issues associated with allowing user assets (i.e., personal VMs) to connect (or to not connect!) to internal IT resources. Is even bridging personal VMs to a DMZ subnet enough, or is it best to disconnect them from the LAN entirely while in the confines of the organization’s LAN? These are the types of questions that will need to be answered via organizational policy and enforceable through technology before bare metal client hypervisors will be ready for mainstream adoption.

I covered the client virtualization keynotes on Twitter, posting live reaction to each speaker’s comments. Here’s a summary of the points I made via Twitter:

  • When Citrix talks about “synergy” in client and application management, that synergy needs to reach beyond marketing brands to their point products. Six products under one marketing umbrella isn’t synergy. It’s added TCO our clients don’t want, and is an area of management Citrix needs to fix.
  • Mark Templeton described Citrix’s work.shift concept, which entails shifting work away from single devices to users. Device-centric computing (i.e., tethering a user’s work to a single piece of hardware) is a legacy model that isn’t compatible with today’s demands for user-centric application delivery. Users want to work on their terms, with their devices. Rather than say “No,” it’s IT’s job to securely and reliably give its customers what they want.
  • Mark Templeton also described user-centric delivery as “virtual workstyles.” Personally, I think virtualization is becoming so ingrained in what we do that we no longer have to explicitly call it out, especially with user-facing terminology.
  • With so much terminology being thrown around, I have one simple request. Can IT start thinking about service definitions in the context that if the service definition has to be explained to their consumer (the user), IT has already lost. Our user-facing terminology and service definitions have to be intuitive and not require us to spend an inordinate amount of time “educating” users.
  • Templeton noted that Citrix online services touched 100 million people in 2009, making Citrix a top-5 SaaS provider.
  • Citrix showed a nice public school case study for XenDesktop during the keynote. An area of licensing Microsoft still needs to address is Virtual Desktop Access “extended roaming rights” for students. K-12, higher education, and online universities would like to do more with desktop virtualization, but software licensing concerns are holding them back.
  • Citrix highlighted a recent order for 140,000 seats under XenDesktop. What they didn’t mention is that XenDesktop Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC) scalability is limited to 5,000 objects. This means that the 140,000 seat deployment would require 28 individual management domains (140,000/5,000), underscoring the need for better and more scalable centralized management.
  • Citrix’s work with McAfee on client virtualization security looks promising. See the following blog posts for more detail:
  • I couldn’t help but notice that as usual, virtual desktop technology was demonstrated by showing the two things we least want our users doing: watching movies and playing video games. I get it. Watching a user manipulate a Word document is pretty boring, but let’s not lose focus of how we’ll consume the technology.
  • Vendors love showing HD videos in their virtual desktop solutions, but shy away from articulating how they solve a use case that is pressing to our clients – supporting offshore developers over low bandwidth/high latency WAN connections. That would be far more impressive to me than seeing the movie Iron Man play in a XenDesktop.
  • Mark Templeton demonstrated dynamically shifting a user’s working environment from a Wyse zero client device to his iPad – impressive!
  • I liked the demo of Citrix Dazzle – the Citrix iTunes-like interface for self-service application delivery. However, Citrix needs to do more in terms of offering backend workflows and management/accounting/provisioning product integration. All self-service tools look good in a front-end demo. The backend integration is the hard part. Citrix’s lack of transparency on Dazzle’s backend capabilities is not a coincidence.

Don’t get me wrong. Citrix is doing some great things in the client virtualization space, and they did a very good job articulating their vision at Synergy. Work still remains, but Citrix is undoubtedly on course.

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Category: Client Virtualization     Tags: ,