Dateline Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.  Citrix Summit and Synergy, October 2011
Hi again,
Last post I said I’d get back to you to give you, at least, my opinion of why Citrix and Cisco are partnering up.  As you might have seen from the dateline above, it’s easy to find out when you get to Citrix Summit and Synergy.  It has to do with the global and ubiquitous Cisco networks deployed by organizations everywhere.  Citrix is doing great with XenApp (last I heard, well over 50,000,000 licenses) and is poised to do even better with XenDesktop.

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Tags: citrix, desktop virtualization, ICA, ISR, NME-WAE, PCOIP, QoS, RDP, SRE, View, Virtual Experience Client, VMware, vxc, vxi, waas, WAN Optimization, XenApp, xendesktop

As if desktop virtualization wasn’t complicated enough… let’s throw unified communications in there, and really roll the dice (sticking with the Vegas theme) with getting your small pilot/PoC off the ground.  Right?  Well traditionally, yes, but we’ve actually seen this movie before – one that tells a very similar story of convergence at the desktop that resulted in a major transformation in how enterprises leverage the intelligence in the network to bring two previously disparate worlds together (this reads better with the voice-over guy they use in Hollywood trailers). Read More »

Tags: citrix, collaboration, thin client, unified communications, vdi, View, VMware, vxi, xendesktop, zero client

This is shaping up to be another great outing – as a number of my peers have already highlighted, there is an endless buffet-line of learning opportunities while you’re spending the week with us in Vegas.  This year marks the entrance of the Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) into the Cisco Live realm, and with it comes my favorite part – the opportunity to meet with customers from across the globe who are coming to this event, armed with the objective of getting the info they need to help get their desktop virtualization initiatives off the ground. Read More »

Tags: citrix, desktop, EMC, netapp, Vblock, VCE, vdi, View, virtualization, VMware, vxi, xendesktop

Virtual desktops are by definition, more secure than traditional desktops or laptops, right?  Read More »

Tags: desktop, RSA, security, thin client, vdi, View, virtualization, VMware, vsphere, vxi

So, like many IT organizations you may have already made the decision to deploy virtual desktops – you’re ready to move from a small pilot to full production.  But a lot of questions (and possibly some guesswork) stand in the way – what does the end state architecture need to look like?  How do you get there?  How are you going to make sure that you can move quickly and seamlessly from proof of concept to scalable production? Accounting for sufficient server capacity, network bandwidth and performance, storage IOPS, and especially quality of experience at the end-user level -- there are a lot of factors to contend with.  And how do you predict user behavior in a production environment, including the load they’ll collectively place on your infrastructure when they log into their brand-new virtual desktops on Monday morning? Read More »

Tags: CVD, desktop, EMC, netapp, thin client, vdi, View, virtualization, VMware