Currently I am traveling across Germany meeting with customers and partners. This morning, just after I finalized preparation for a presentation. I decided to hop over to dabcc.com for a quick peak at what is going on in the SBC and virtualization community.
The first article that caught my eye was an article from a system provider in South Africa, OAS. The OAS was offering a test drive of a VMware VDI virtual desktop, connecting through VDM 2 and a XenDesktop based desktop.
To set the stage here. When I am traveling I use a MAC. If I need to access my VMware VDI desktop I can remotely connect with it using Safari. I also have a local Windows based virtual machine I can use with Fusion if needed. Using my MAC from the meeting room, here in Germany I fired up Safari and browsed over to the the OAS site for XenDesktop access.
At first it appears XenDesktop could not detect what client I needed.
When the client detection failed I decided to try the manual client detection.
The client detection failed so I decided to go ahead and download it. It took about five minutes to download the MACICA_OSX.DMG.zip file. Once it competed, I decided to install it. At this point I got a little confused as the installer said it was installing the ICA client for Presentation Server. Am I connecting to Presentation Server or XenDesktop? I figured I would find out once the client was installed an I get the chance to connect with a desktop. Unfortunately, that did not happen though. For some reason the ICA client could not be installed?
After this, I decided to compare the out of box experience for VDM 2 delivering a desktop. First I put the VDM 2 URL in Safari. I was asked to accept a certificate from OAS as I have never been to their site before. After accepting the certificate I was presented with a login.
After entering the login info and launching the tunnel I was presented with a list of desktops I was entitled to use.
After selecting my desktop and connecting my desktop session was successfully connected.
In all fairness, MAC support for VDM 2 is only experimental. I am unsure and have not checked if XenDestkop is planning to support MAC clients once its released. It may have been unfair of me to expect XenDesktop to work from my MAC?
No, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind in this case: 1) credit goes to you for having a real product while Citrix, struggling, have just a beta out there 2) but for this very reasons it would be a little unfair to compare a released product with a beta one (although I must admit that my understanding is that the ICA client is going to be the standard client they have had for years - that's probably why it says ICA client for PS - and not being able to install it on a MAC sounds a bit worrying to me...).
Anyway ... I have had a chance to look at the early VDM2 betas .... and quite frankly they were less than optimal too ....
Massimo.