I recently got hold of a sales campaign email from VMware which focused around “taking out” existing XenApp customers by upselling them the VMware Horizon suite. The objective was to prevent customers from upgrading to XenDesktop. While I am all for competing with VMware and having a healthy debate on our competing strategies when it comes to Desktop Virtualization, I don’t appreciate FUD being spread that is ABSOLUTELY BASELESS. A lot of times, I walk into customers who have been completely misinformed on our solution. Below is the latest claim from VMware that I’d like to address in this post.

“Coach the customer in keeping XenApp and complimenting it with Horizon Suite for best in class virtual desktops, to manage physical desktops (this is key – Citrix is pure virtual, we on the other hand can do it all including physical via H. Mirage and virtual via H. View) “

Citrix is purely “Virtual”???? REALLY ??

Much before VMware acquired Wanova Mirage (2012), Citrix had XenClient which is a type 1 hypervisor that runs on physical endpoints and allows for centralized management of virtual desktops while providing offline access and bi directional synchronization. With XenClient 5, Citrix has further enhanced this product to integrate the personal vDisk technology thereby allowing for a single image to be shared by thousands of users while allowing customization and personal applications to be installed leveraging personal vdisk. Moreover, the users personalizations stored in the personal vDisk is available both in the hosted VDI environment and within XenClient. We’ve also extended this solution to Macs with the Desktop player for Mac which provides the same functionality via a type 2 hypervisor. XenClient is an ideal solution for physical desktops and laptops alike providing offline access, centralized management and layering of user personalization, apps and data.

Provisioning Services has been around for a long time as well as part of the Citrix XenDesktop suite which allows for streaming of images to physical endpoints, physical servers, virtual desktops and virtual servers. PVS also allows for centralized management of these images and to easily scale up/scale down capacity, rollout/pull back updates etc. Granted this solution is not an offline solution and not for mobile users, but it is a solution for physical endpoints and scales to thousands of endpoints from a single PVS server

If I were a customer, I would feel insulted with VMware’s strategy of shoving pure BS down my throat and insulting my intelligence.

 

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