VDI – Virtualized Geek

The good and the bad of Citrix XenDesktop

March 13, 2013 By Keith Townsend 3 Comments

I got into a spirited debate on twitter with a buddy regarding XenDesktop vs. VMware Horizon Suite. I’m beginning to educate myself on the entire Horizon Suite but the last time I did a trade study between the two, XenDesktop handily beat out View when it was a standalone product. I plan on during a full comparison of View and XenDesktop. But, before I do a comparison I thought I’d share what I like and don’t like about XenDesktop.

What I like

Client support – I’d be more surprised if you can find a platform XenDesktop isn’t supported on. XenApp/XenDesktop uses the Citrix ICA protocol and therefore the Citrix Receiver. There’s client’s for Blackberry, Windows 8, iOS, Linux and Android just to name a few.
Integration with XenApp – A VDI solutions is not just about virtualizing the desktop but also about providing access to applications. XenDesktop shares a lot of common backend infrastructure and features with XenApp. You can use the same web portal for both your applications and desktops.
Multi-Hypervisor support – Of course Citrix would like for you to use XenServer but you can also use vSphere and Hyper-V for you underlying VDI hypervisor.
Flexibility – Citrix has integrated a great provisioning server into its offering. The solution is designed to provide desktop sessions regardless of the underlying desktop technology. You have a need to provide pooled physical desktops to a subset of users then no problem. Just as long as you can install the client agent on the VM or Physical PC then you can use XenDesktop.
Graphics Support – ICA is a very mature protocol. Citrix has long given you the ability to run graphics intense application such as AutoCAD within a VDI session. During HD video within a Citrix client is no big deal.
Printing – Printing used to be one of the things I hated most about Citrix. You can now reliably use most off the shelf printers within you VDI environment.

What I don’t like

Troubleshooting – When Citrix breaks, it breaks hard. Living without a support contract with Citrix is like walking without a net. When I need to call them it’s usually not anything simple.
Complexity – With flexibility normally come complexity. XenDesktop is no different. You have a ton of options for provisioning desktops, broker configuration, web portal options and etc. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish it’s easy to overcomplicate your design.
Lack of offline mode – Citrix ICA is a streaming protocol meant to be used with thin clients. If you don’t have an Internet connection then you don’t have access to your desktops. This should be a major part of you decision making process when considering VDI solutions in general as there’s really no ideal option for offline access.
Management interface – There are simply some basic things you can’t do from the management GUI. This makes the learning curve for the application steep as not everything is well documented.
Talent availability – If you know Citrix you already know how high demand your skill is in the market place. Because it’s good, because it’s complex and because there’s not a ton of 3^rd party documentation it can be really difficult to find talented Citrix administrators. This can really be an major issue based on geography.

Once you decide that VDI is the right solution for your specific business challenge, I believe the good outweighs the bad in the XenDesktop universe. I expect to come up to speed with View and do a comparison between the two solutions. What’s your take on the good and bad of XenDesktop or VDI solutions in general?

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: Citrix, VDI, XenDesktop

2013 may FINALLY be the year of VDI and BYOD

January 14, 2013 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

I am thinking that maybe 2013 will finally be the year of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) enabled BYOD. This is not because of some fancy new feature in VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop but due to a new feature of Windows 8. I said a LONG TIME ago that Windows 8 should be a hypervisor based OS. I was close in my prediction. One of the great features of Windows 8 that hasn’t gotten much attention has been that it’s a Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor. This means that basically, just like Hyper-V the hypervisor is native to the operating system. You can think VMware vSphere but with a GUI. A better comparison would be with XenClient which I wrote about here.

One of the major flaws in VDI has been its lack of support for offline support. The foundation of the traditional VDI solutions has been based on screen streaming technology which requires an always on network connection. This has limited the usefulness of the technology for mobile technologies such as laptops. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of laptops are sold into the enterprise. VMware and Citrix try to address the issue using two different approaches.

VMware adds what’s basically VMware player as part of the View Client. This allows a user to checkout an offline version of the virtual desktop. Citrix released a different type of VDI client called XenClient. XenClient is actually a bare metal hypervisor which also allows the user to check out a virtual desktop. View is actually a pretty decent solution but I haven’t performed much research on the success or failure with offline desktops in View. The largest drawback for XenClient has been its lacklustre hardware support. Not many software companies have the ability to rollout a general perpose desktop OS that can support virtually every laptop on the market.

This is where the fortunes of BYOD, Windows 8, VMware/Citrix can meet. Microsoft has done general purpose operating systems well, forever. With a built-in hypervisor, users and organizations can purchase virtually any Windows 8 Pro based laptop and have the native capability of supporting the enterprises VDI solution. The VDI vendors have the opportunity to add the much needed value add management layer and integrate their streaming solutions.

This could be a boon for BYOD. End users can just bring in their Windows 8 laptops to work, have a certificate installed, download their VDI image and their off in running. Administrators would have a wide range of options for providing the VDI instances. For thin clients the VDI session can run on the backend servers. For workstations and laptops that processing can be done at the local machine. This could strike a balance between performance/cost for hosting VDI sessions on expensive infrastructure such as enterprise class disk and server load. The management software could have checkpoints for the certificates so organizations can revoke rights to enterprise data when an employee is terminated.

I’m probably getting excited over nothing. 2013 will more than likely be another year where VDI is just around the corner. Or maybe ……

Filed Under: PC & Server Hardware, Virtualization Tagged With: BYOD, Citrx, VDI, VMWare, XenClient

VMWorld Session Review – EUC1305 What’s New and What’s Next for VMware View

August 30, 2012 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

If you do VDI this is a must see video. I don’t believe VDI is the future of BYOD but there are very strong arguments for VDI in the enterprise especially as organizations migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you are in a large enterprise and have to make a decision if to spend several million of dollars deploying Windows 7 versus a similar investment in VDI, the argument for VDI is strong indeed. This video had a lot of practical information on the improvements of View 5.1 over View 5.0. One of the improvements I’ve wondered why VMware hasn’t provided seems like a simple one – an End user Web Portal. This is something Citrix has had available since Metaframe XP. The other demonstrated the tight integration between View and vSphere. The ability to cache in the memory of an ESXi server the common reads of the Windows boot session yield a 80% decrease in disk I/O. That can save a great deal of money and pain in any VDI implementation.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: VDI, VMWare, vmworld

VDI-In-a-Box Running inside of VMware Workstation 8 – Video

July 14, 2012 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

As a follow up to what has already turned out to be a pretty popular blog post I’ve created a YouTube video for the my lab on how to run Citrix VDI-In-a-Box inside of VMware Workstation 8. Not a bad post for the 100th virtualizedgeek.com blog post. Thanks for reading and watching.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: VDI, Video

Installing Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMWare Workstation 8

July 11, 2012 By Keith Townsend 6 Comments

I posted an earlier lab on installing XenDesktop 5 within VMware Workstation 8. But the number 1 search term that comes up for this post is “How to install Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMware Workstation.” I kind of take it for granted that if XenDesktop will run in VMware Workstation then the lighter VDI-in-a-Box should be a shoe in. But, since the question gets raised and I’ve never deployed the lighter VDI solution this a good source for a lab and post.

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VDI in a Box is a much simpler solution than XenDesktop. In order to Run XenDesktop 5 Quick Deploy in a vSphere environment you need at least 4 Windows servers. In VDI in a Box you only need your ESXi server, the Citrix vdiManager appliance and your client image (Windows XP or 7) to have a complete solution. My laptop is pretty robust. I have 16GB of Ram and a quad core i7 processor. But my guess was that you could probably do this lab on a workstation with only 8GB. Also, the vdiManager is 32-bit so Intel-VT shouldn’t be needed. The instructions for installing VDI-in-a-Box can be found here on the Citrix website.

I went a very simple route for the design of this lab. I created an ESXi server with 4 CPU’s and 4GB of RAM. I bridged the network work adapter so I could access the VDI environment from any machine in my lab. The below snapshot are the VM settings for my ESXi server.

Figure 1 ESXi Virtual Machine Settings

After importing the vdiManager OVA my virtualized ESXi server should memory utilization at 1.2GB which is kind of high and is more than likely a result of VMware tools not being installed on the Linux appliance. I choose to use an XP image because I had one handy to import. This is where I enjoy the features of Workstation 8. I just added the virtualized ESXi to my list of managed hosts in Workstation and I was able to just upload the image directly from VMware Workstation.

The installation of VDI-in-a-Box is much simpler than the installation of XenDesktop. Using an OVA appliance and just a configuration screen makes it a no brainer installed in comparison. The setup for configuring the image and setup are guided and worked well. I configured a pool of 10 potential desktop with 1 desktop powered on. I went low for memory requirements at 512MB per VDI session.

Here’s a sample of the guest settings for the first VDI session Citrix configured after completion of the image deployment.

Figure 2 VDI Workstation in ESXi

This lab was fast, easy and not very intensive. If you have a system with 8GB of RAM it should work well. The one problem you may run into performance wise would be running more than one VDI session. My system capped out at 9GB of used RAM during this lab but keep in mind I had all of my regular productivity applications opened and created this post as well while preforming the lab. Here’s a snapshot of my virtual ESXi server summary while running the lab with two VDI images running along with the vdiManager.

I love to answer any questions on this lab or take comments.

Update 07/14/12: I recorded a video for the lab that can be found you YouTube

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: Citrix, VDI, VMWare Workstation, vSphere

Run XenDesktop in AWS

June 28, 2012 By Keith Townsend 2 Comments

I’ve often toyed with the concept of running XenDesktop in the Cloud and specifically, running VDI within Amazon cloud service AWS. The Citrix Blog has a great post on running XenDesktop within AWS. It’s actually a novel idea that may have merit. One of the challenges with providing virtual desktops is the spikey nature of the service. All of the desktops tend to have very similar usage patterns that require you to over engineer the environment to avoid over subscribing your virtual infrastructure. Boot storms are a perfect example of having to engineer for peak demand which is normally only 5% of the system uptime. One of AWS’ main selling points is allowing organizations to expand to the public cloud when demand requires greater resources. Desktops are unlike other enterprise workloads that need to be running 24/7. Desktops are normally only used during business hours. Using AWS for your compute would allow you to offload the computing resources for desktops to AWS while potentially reducing the costs as desktops are on demand and you only pay for what you consume. The added benefit is that you free up precious infrastructure resources for other critical enterprise services.

This isn’t all sunshine and roses. Some of the challenges will be data and performance of applications. The Citrix solution suggests a VPC as represented above. This would allow secure access to your desktop environment from your enterprise location however, I suspect network performance could be an issue. Network performance may indeed be the sticking point. Citrix would probably tell you to utilize both XenDesktop and XenApp to provide the best user experience. But I’d suspect that this isn’t as straight forward as you’d like. Having a using connect to a VDI session held in AWS which has a XenApp session back to your data center is ripe for finger pointing between the server and network guys when performance isn’t what’s expected. I haven’t even thought about the applications group.

Another issue is that a traditional complaint about AWS is uneven performance. I’ve heard that you can’t always depend on a consistent performance baseline for a given server configuration. This is indeed a hard nut for Cloud providers to crack. The very nature of cloud infrastructures makes performance pools very difficult to manage. Potentially you could have one desktop user with excellent performance and response time and another with less than desirable performance and with no insight into AWS’ infrastructure determining where the problem lies could be an issue.

Even with the potential performance challenges, I’m more than intrigued about this approach and not just from a cool technology perspective. This has the potential to really reduce the foot print of the data center and provide enhanced service for end user computing. Would you consider AWS hosted XenDesktop or VDI in general?

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Virtualization Tagged With: VDI, XenDesktop

Will Microsoft let Onlive’s Windows Desktop service survive?

June 27, 2012 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

I’ve tried Onlive’s Windows Desktop service and I have to say it is pretty slick, maybe too slick. The service is aimed at iPad tablet users who wish to have a full Windows Desktop on their iPad. It specifically solves the challenge of providing applications that are not available on the iPad such as Office and Adobe Flash. It is very similar to Citrix’ XenDesktop solution. In my experience the ability to present multimedia content to the iPad via the streaming desktop is comparable to Citrix HDX protocol. Onlive’s main business after all is streaming games to PC’s and now their TV appliance. It seems like something that Microsoft would like. After all you get Windows and Office in more users hands especially consumers who may not normally splurge on the latest copy of Windows or Office. However, that’s not the case. Microsoft has a beef with how Onlive is providing the service.

You see Microsoft never envisioned streaming desktop as a service to consumers. Their licensing model isn’t very friendly to the non-enterprise. An enterprise must purchase a VDI client licensing for every device that will access the streaming desktop. This way Microsoft gets to capture licensing costs for the physical device and the virtual desktop. More importantly one of the advantages of application and desktop virtualization is that you get to save on software licensing costs. One of the synergies of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) is that organizations can “pool” desktops and application licenses. Most application licenses are for concurrent use meaning, you only have to pay for the number of active users of the application. So, if you have a thousand users that need to use Microsoft Project but only 100 people use the application at any given time then you only purchase 100 licenses and install it on a VDI service like Onlive or Citrix.

What does this all have to do with Onlive Windows service for consumers? Why does Microsoft care if Onlive is paying for all the client licenses for users to connect? What if Onlive decided to make this service available to users of their new TV Appliance? Add a keyboard and mouse and consumers who purchase this $99 device never have to buy a full desktop PC again. And remember this is pooled licensing. Onlive may have 100,000 users but only 10,000 concurrent users at any time. That means Microsoft just missed out on 90,000 Windows and Office licenses.

Onlive is an example of a great idea that I don’t believe Microsoft will let survive for a long time. Especially, since it may compete directly with its Surface Tablet strategy. Do you think Microsoft will work out a licensing deal with Onlive?

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, PC & Server Hardware, Virtualization Tagged With: Cloud, VDI

XenDesktop 5 inside of VMware Workstation 8 – First attempt

May 23, 2012 By Keith Townsend 3 Comments

Installing XenDesktop is a pretty frustrating experience. I believe that’s why Citrix came out with VDI-in-a-Box to help those interested in a POC build a quick environment. I haven’t looked at the VDI in a Box solution as I’m more interested in mimicking a production environment. I posted an earlier teaser in which I proposed using a provisioning server opposed to a Desktop Studio provisioned VM on a hypervisor. This gives you the advantage of being able to create this lab running VMWare Workstation on a CPU that doesn’t support nested VM’s inside of a guest vSphere instance.

I approached this lab in a couple of different ways. I wanted to have what I believed is a best of breed deployment where I’d have XenDesktop as the broker and vSphere as the hypervisor. I was hoping to get away with building just one beefy Windows server to support this environment. I was rudely reminded that you still need a minimum of 3 Windows servers to support this architecture. Because XenDesktop requires a domain controller and neither vCenter nor XenDesktop Studio can be installed on a domain controller. Why not just install vCenter and XenDesktop Studio on the same virtual machine? Installing XenDesktop can be a chore in itself and trying to change around default ports that in conflict with vCenter is not something I wanted tackle as part of this lab. I also discovered reduces this lab by one Windows server didn’t have a large impact of performance.

The big challenge with this approach was finding the right balance of resources dedicated to the infrastructure but leaves me enough resources to actually launch a VDI session and use it. What’s the point of creating a lab that can’t be used? My lab machine is a Dell XPS 15 laptop with 8GB of RAM and an i7 processor. You can get more details about my lab set up here.

So, I ended up with a total of 4 Infrastructure machines.

Domain Controller (1GB, 1 CPU)
vCenter (1.5 GB, 2 CPU’s)
XenDesktop Studio (1GB, 2 CPU’s)
ESXi (2GB, 2 CPU’s)
1. Nested Windows XP VDI hosts (1GB 2 CPU)

I assigned a NAT’d IP to all of the infrastructure machines included the production VM NIC for my lone ESXi server. This allows the guest running on my ESXi host to communicate with all the infrastructure machines and my XPS. My XPS served as my VDI client. The below is the network picture for this lab.

Network Laydown

I don’t think I have to tell you that this lab bogged down my pretty beefy laptop. This is a situation where the general rule of virtualization resources come into play – “Buy as much RAM as you can afford and then ask for more money for more RAM”. My CPU utilization even with the nested VDI host running didn’t really take a big hit. Memory was just about maxed out when I had all of my infrastructure components running.

The bottom line is that this lab failed. Too many VM’s for my configuration. I’m fairly certain this lab would have worked if I had 16GB of RAM but 8GB is not enough. My next step is to try and run this lab on a ESXi host with 8GB of RAM. The two GB freed up from the overhead of the Windows 7 host may be enough. I also have the option of using the ESXi host as my VDI hypervisor.

Better luck next time.

XenDesktop in VMWare Workstation 8 teaser

Configuring VMWare Workstation networking for nested VM’s

Running nested Windows 8 in Hyper-V in VMware Workstation 8

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: VDI, virtualization, VMWare Workstation, XENDesktop 5

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure missed the boat on mobile Bring Your Own Device

May 19, 2012 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

iPad’s Running Windows?

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a great technology. But great technologies don’t always become great solutions. Barb Darrow over at GigaOM post titled “Is this the year of desktop virtualization yet?” It would seem the year of desktop virtualization has indeed been coming for the last 5 years. VDI is a wonderful solution for the right use case. The successful cases I’ve seen include, Remote Access and certain verticals such as health, education and manufacturing. However, recently I’ve seen vendors such as Cisco trying to make a case for mobile Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). I’ve posted earlier on how I believe BYOD is not a great use case for VDI. Here’s a snapshot of my major concerns when it comes to VDI and BYOD.

Offline Access

The two major vendors in VDI, Citrix and VMWare have similar approaches to solve this problem. They both involve running client side Hypervisors. Citrix’ solution XenClient has a very limited range of hardware that will it supports. VMWare leverages its leadership in client side Hypvervisors to allow offline usage with VMWare Workstation like features in VMWare View.

When designing a solution with this approach here are major issues to overcome.

Clients have to be fairly robust to run a hypervisor not to mention someone has to support these machines.
Bandwidth required to synchronize the datacenter based VDI and the remote client.
No offline option for ARM based tablets. This may change with Windows 8 and Intel based tablets.

User Experience

User experience is great in today’s modern VDI solutions, when using VDI for its original use case – Thin Client Computing. However, the workforce and work environment are changing. IT is becoming a commodity in both the workplace and in the home. Products like Windows Home Server, Dropbox, and Google Apps have created a second market for collaboration that is out of the control of corporate IT. End users have found ways to be collaborative in the way that they desire collaboration.

So, while VDI allows you to present Windows based enterprise applications to non-Windows smartphones and tablets it doesn’t allow for the fluid user experience that end users are now getting from readily available services. I’ve used windows applications on my iPad and while it works the experience leaves a lot to be desired.

I think this speaks to the change in what consumers consider as personal computing solutions. When we first started talking BYOD 5 years ago, Windows dominated not only the enterprise but the consumer markets. This is no longer the case today. Consumers have a large section of operating systems and form factors from which to choose. And they conflict with the primary choice for VDI workstation environments Windows. Microsoft has already spent at least 10 years proving that end users don’t want mobile devices running Windows. So, why are we trying to still deploy it as a solution via VDI?

I’m a fan of VDI. Solutions like XenApp and XenDesktop enable companies to pool special use software licenses, centralize desktop support and simplify software deployment among many other attributes. But, VDI is not the long term solution for BYOD from both a mobile and desktop experience.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on VDI as a BYOD solution. What’s your organization’s approach to BYOD and enabling enterprise applications and collaboration?

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: BYOD, Citrix, VDI, VMWare, XENDesktop 5

BYOD is unstoppable. Smart companies must build apps

April 8, 2012 By Keith Townsend Leave a Comment

Reblogged from GigaOM:

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement has gained unstoppable momentum. And thanks to the burgeoning mobile app market, employees have high expectations for these tools. They want an attractive user experience tailored to their devices. In other words, companies need to invest in building apps, period.

During my two decades of working in enterprise IT, I’ve observed the client-server revolution, the internet explosion and the service-oriented architecture (SOA) boom.

The good and the bad of Citrix XenDesktop

2013 may FINALLY be the year of VDI and BYOD

VMWorld Session Review – EUC1305 What’s New and What’s Next for VMware View

VDI-In-a-Box Running inside of VMware Workstation 8 – Video

Installing Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMWare Workstation 8

Run XenDesktop in AWS

XenDesktop 5 inside of VMware Workstation 8 – First attempt

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure missed the boat on mobile Bring Your Own Device

BYOD is unstoppable. Smart companies must build apps

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