A few weeks ago I sat down with Citrix to discuss their upcoming announcements at Citrix Synergy. Due to my coverage area I was very interested in many of the changes made in XenDesktop 7. As many of you are now aware Citrix has completely overhauled this solution and attacked the complexity issue straight on. However a great conversation broke out at this meeting between myself and Vishal Ganeriwala (@VishalG), Director of Technical Marketing at Citrix, that really made the changes in XenDesktop 7 clear to me. [Read more →]
Gunnar Berger
Research Director
1 year at Gartner
14 years IT industry
XenDesktop 7 is XenApp 7: The missing ingredient at Citrix Synergy
by Gunnar Berger | May 23, 2013 | 2 Comments
Micro servers and virtual desktops. Crazy idea or eventual reality?
by Gunnar Berger | April 10, 2013 | 3 Comments
For the past few years I’ve had an idea that I’d repeat over and over to anyone that would listen to me. I’ve been given a hard time about it on twitter, have been told about every technical reason why it’s not possible but in the end I stick by this idea: I want micro servers for virtual desktop (VDI) deployments. [Read more →]
Category: SHVD VDI Tags: Catalyst-NA, micro servers, moonshot, SHVD, VDI
User Experience Comparison: Microsoft RDP8 + RemoteFX
by Gunnar Berger | February 1, 2013 | 2 Comments
I can’t believe its been over 3 months since my last blog. I’ve been busy working away on protocol papers comparing the user experience of RDP8, PCoIP, and ICA/HDX. I wrote one paper for each vendor and a fourth paper doing a side by side comparison of them. To write these papers I had to ask the vendors questions that aren’t asked very often (and therefore there wasn’t a lot of documentation around them). It surprised me how much of the information I wanted to know wasn’t easily available for all of these protocols. While these papers have yet to post on Gartner.com (should be up there shortly), I thought it’d be fun to give a sneak peak of some of the testing I did. [Read more →]
Category: SBC SHVD VDI Tags: Citrix, HDX, ICA, Microsoft, PCoIP, RDP8, RDS, RemoteApp, RemoteFX, SBC, SHVD, VDI, VMware, VMware View, Windows 8, XenApp, XenDesktop
Wanted: Client Development for Microsoft VDI
by Gunnar Berger | October 15, 2012 | 2 Comments
This has never happened to me before. I was done writing a long blog on Microsoft’s RDP8 (RemoteFX) and how I wanted two things, 1) More client support and 2) Windows 7 support for RDP8. Within an hour of writing that blog I see this on twitter: [Read more →]
Post VMworld Thoughts: Appliances vs the Rapid Desktop Program
by Gunnar Berger | September 5, 2012 | 1 Comment
I don’t hide the fact that I’m a huge fan of appliances and that I’m opposed to traditional desktop virtualization architectures. I know all about pod/block design and have designed many solutions using the pod/block principle, but just because I have to use something doesn’t mean I want to. Block designs can be used to scale to the tens of thousands but they are very expensive. The top reason I don’t like this architecture is that you are basically buying a bucket of IOPS, the larger the purchase the bigger the bucket, but no matter what that bucket will fill up, then you need to buy another big bucket. For larger systems these are seven figure purchases and I just find the entire premise complete nonsense. [Read more →]
Category: SBC SHVD VDI Tags: appliance, nutanix, pivot3, SHVD, vblock, VDI
Are SHVD (VDI) desktops more secure than physical? – In a word: “yes”
by Gunnar Berger | August 8, 2012 | 6 Comments
Recently I was reached out by a journalist whom I speak to fairly often, and this person asked me to provide some insight into Shawn Bass’s blog series on how VDI isn’t secure. It took me a long time to write the reply to this person because there was a lot to discuss, after spending all that time I actually felt my reply should go up as a blog post, so here is my reply with very little information edited. [Read more →]
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
Gartner Catalyst 2012: Is the mobile hypervisor the right BYOD approach?
by Gunnar Berger | August 7, 2012 | 31 Comments
It’s just two weeks until the Gartner’s Catalyst Conference and I’ve been busying myself with my presentation decks for my different sessions. One session that I find very interesting is a vendor debate I’m moderating between Citrix and VMware. First off I think its amazing that we could get these two vendors to be in the same room together, let alone be on stage together directly debating. My job in this debate is to generate conversation between these company’s very different approaches to this market. How different are they? Well VMware is is taking a mobile device management (MDM) approach while Citrix is taking a mobile application management (MAM) approach. [Read more →]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Catalyst-NA
Protocol Wars!
by Gunnar Berger | August 3, 2012 | 6 Comments
In my next assignment I plan on diving into all things protocol. From Citrix’s ICA protocol and the HDX wrappers that make that protocol outstanding, to the VMware/Teradici PCoIP protocol, which I have a lot of intimate experience with (full disclosure I used to work for Teradici), and I plan on covering RemoteFX and potentially Oracle’s ALP/AIP protocols. [Read more →]
Category: SBC SHVD VDI Tags: ALP, Catalyst-NA, Citrix XenDesktop, GPU, HDX, ICA, ICA/HDX, PCoIP, RemoteFX, SHVD, Slice, Terminal Services, VDI, VMware, VMware View
Windows 8 Review – Part 5: A Hybrid OS
by Gunnar Berger | July 20, 2012 | 10 Comments
Disclaimer: Gartner analysts use their blogs to share their personal views and opinions on subjects close to their hearts.
Welcome back to my final installment of my Windows 8 Review. At this point I’ve pretty much covered most everything I want to say, but I do have one last thing I’d like to talk about and it gets me a little bit excited: [Read more →]
Windows 8 Review – Part 4: A closer look at the OS
by Gunnar Berger | July 19, 2012 | 7 Comments
Disclaimer: Gartner analysts use their blogs to share their personal views and opinions on subjects close to their hearts.
Welcome back! Today is day four of my series on Windows 8. We’ve discussed Windows 8 as a business decision, what it’s like from a tablet device, and what it’s like from a desktop device; today we are going to focus on the OS itself. To start that off I want to address a question I heard the other day: ”Is Windows 8 the next Vista?” [Read more →]
