Monday, January 12, 2009

Vmware VDI vs Citrix Xendesktop

Few months ago we did a bakeoff between Vmware VDI and Citrix Xendesktop solution.
Few things that are worth a mention for differences between these:
1. Citrix ICA protocol for remote desktop connectivity is better with multimedia apps than RDP 5.x.
2. Both RDP and ICA are bandwidth hogs, ICA might be slightly better over low latency link. Average bandwidth usage over WAN without any policing/acceleration technology was 300kbps with both ICA and RDP.
3. Citrix Presentation server has a great option of saving the disk space for multiple cloned desktops and also upgrading/patching only one master image and refreshing all desktops from it.
4. Citrix Access gateway for secure connectivity from outside seems like a separate purchase.(didn’t test it)

We didn't go ahead with the whole project at that time.
Now Vmware has announced availability for VMware view that addresses point # 1,3 and 4 above. We are currently doing a bake off of vmware view and I will soon post how it went.

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