Nasty Comment on Citrix Blog

Two days ago, David Wagner from Citrix posted an interesting article describing some features of Citrix Profile Manager. I wrote about the release of this Citrix component in my last blog post. But what I find even more interesting is what some readers of David’s post said about the Citrix product strategy. The primary question is if it is wise to provide a nice tool such as Profile Manager only to customers that purchased the top-end versions of the Citrix products? There are different answers to this rather simple question, and they show that sometimes there is a gap between a vendor’s business ambitions and their customers’ requirements.

New Products from Microsoft and Citrix

What a week! Both Microsoft and Citrix released presentation virtualization products we were waiting for since quite some time. A couple of days ago Microsoft started shipping a beta release of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), which is one of the six technologies in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. Microsoft bought an initial version of the MED-V technology when they acquired the company Kidaro in March 2008. To learn more please check out the MED-V page at microsoft.com.

After last year’s acquisition of sepagoPROFILES and almost one year of fine-tuning, Citrix finally released Citrix User Profile Manager 2.0. Download the product at www.mycitrix.com (login required). Citrix User Profile Manager is available for XenApp Enterprise and Platinum editions and XenDesktop Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum editions.

Another product Citrix released this week - after they initially announced it at Citrix Solution Summit in early 2008 - is Workflow Studio 1.0. To learn more about the product refer to the Workflow Studio page at citrix.com.

Virtual Reality Check

Ever wondered what the best virtualization platform is? Or do you want to know what additional resources are required if you want to install Terminal Servers on virtual machines if compared to installing them on bare metal? Jeroen van de Kamp from Login Consultants and Ruben Spruijt from PQR published a set of whitepapers answering these questions - and many more. They did more than 150 tests, finding out how many remote user sessions you can get on servers with VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. This is great stuff! Download it at www.virtualrealitycheck.net.

Finally I did it! Welcome to Benny’ Blog. After maintaining community websites including information about Microsoft Terminal Services and Virtualization Presentation since several years I thought it was time to start blogging. Well, here we go…