VDM versus Citrix Desktop Broker

[dwchan]

I would like some quick feedback regarding to which Desktop broker is better. We are both Citrix and VMware shop, and about to start to look at the VDI space. Since Citrix also have a desktop broker for the VDI space (from what I understand, it also suppose to provision VM guest). Has anyone have experience with both products from both vendors to give their 2 cents the pros and cons? For our citrix users, they are already using the web interface for their application. Just hate to take the users if they need a VDI desktop, you need to go to another website (i.e. for citrix and than for their virtual desktop)

dwc

[rickyelqasem]

Hi

The word on the street at this mo is a combination of the 2. Citrix's Virtualisation platform Xenserver has about 2 years to catch up to with ESX in regards to functionality and perforamce but at the same time Citrix have the tools to make VDI viable. Citrix's Desktop Broker installs the ICA protocol in the desktop which out performs RDP and Citrix Provisioning Server has the ability to stream full OS to a VM. Presentation Server is more cost effective solution regards to users per box. As for connection brokers I'm a fan of Leostream for features. VMware's offering VDM2 is easy and simple to manage but isn't as scaleable as Leostream CB.

Here's a tip: All the problems you faced with Citrix -. user lockdown, printers etc still exist in the VDI world. My advice would be to think about products like Scriptlogic Desktop Authority and Appsense.

Hope this helps

Ricky El-Qasem

VCI/VCP - MCSE - RHCT

[TomHowarth]

Thread moved to the more appropiate VDI forum as it is not product specific and more a generic discusion

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[azn2kew]

You might look into licensing fees for both for both products to see which one is feasible. I've just read a thread from brianmadden.com regarding these issues and also have comparisions between the two both live video demo and experts feedback as well. Check them out should be very interesting especially rumors Cisco/IBM going to snatch Citrix and I've heard its cheaper if you dump Citrix Presentation server and use Citrix Desktop as a whole because it can be used for same purpose and cheaper.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[MainlineVCS]

Some of the drawbacks of Citrix that I've found are that if you have more than one type of user, or user classification, you can only have 1 employee classification per physical server using Citrix. Another is that there is only load balancing on initial login, not dynamic. For example, if when a user logs in and gets placed on a server that at that moment was load balanced, after the total possible users logs in, it is possible for that server to become saturated due to heavy usage, and without ending the session and logging back in, they're stuck on that server. Citrix won't dynamically balance the load, where VMware will. Another drawback can be that there is no failover capability outside of clustering available with Citrix. If you're already clustering your physical servers then that's null.

[rjb2]

Mainline, do all these comments apply to running XenDesktop against VM's on ESX, or is this under Xen?

[rickyelqasem]

Its swings and round abouts hence I say the best solution is a combination of the 2. Also you should consider applications like Appsense to tame those rouge users.

Ricky El-Qasem

VCI/VCP - MCSE - RHCT

[MainlineVCS]

This would be in a pure Xen environment. I don't have experience running XenDesktop to a VMware VM. I would say that most of my comments would not apply to a XD to VMware environment, because the limitations that I mentioned are Xen limitations, not VMware.

[admin]

There are quite a few challenges you will face.

It is clear I am a VMware Employee but here are some observations. Also note, this is based on the most recent beta I have worked with and these could change before the release but here are some high level observations

All XenDesktop Approach

- It is not as simple and easy as they are making it sound it is 10 components that are not that tightly integrated

- Of the 10 there are 9 separate management consoles or interfaces you will need to interact with

- There is a lot hype around CPS. It can reduce the amount of storage needed per VM if you use shared vDisks. We are finding that the percentage of users and applications that applies to across the enterprise is very limited

- It also requires added cost in infrastructure and more complexity if you want to ensure its HA. This will need to be duplicated several times as the number of desktops that can share and image is not infinite

- They claim being the only end to end solution but in order to leverage the full storage savings in a practical deployment you will ned to couple a third party profile management solution unless you trust roaming profiles

- If you opt not to use CPS it looks like all the VMs will need to be manually created

- You wil need to make DHCP modifications to your scopes to support CPS they use standard DHCP options to handle the PXE, TFTP etc. but it is another change management task and something to track

- Provisioning Server requires connectivity to a Licensing Server and that is another piece that will need to be HA / Redundant

- It only supports one XenCenter so if it fails that could be a problem

- Although it does not require AD Schema modification it does require OU specific additions and is more intrusive in that regard

- Pools of desktops can not be dynamically

- They do have an integrated scheduler for when desktops can be used and you get the PortICA implementation of ICA

VI3 Backend with Desktop Delivery Controller

I am not done looking at everything there but you get

- HA, DRS, Vmotion

- They only support one VC instance

- They can still do pools but not dynamically adjust all the settings as expected

- You will still get the complexity of all the management consoles and separate pieces to install and make highly available

- They do have an integrated scheduler for when desktops can be used and you get the PortICA implementation of ICA

[mittim12]

Thanks for your analysis on this subject {color:#555555}wponder{color}. I have been following this thread closely since we are currently using VDM and are also planning on evaluating Citrix's product. I enjoyed the observations and it will give me some things to look at when we do our evaluation.

[patrickrouse]

Attached is a Connection Broker Comparison document listing the features of VDM2, XenDesktop and Quest's Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite. I tried to be completely honest with this, so I've listed any features that one vendor has, that the others do not, instead od just slanting it toward our product. Please let me know if I've missed a feature in VDM2 or XenDesktop.

Patrick Rouse

Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

Sr. Sales Engineer, Western USA & Canada

Quest Software, Provision Networks Division

Virtual Client Solutions

(619) 994-5507

http://www.provisionnetworks.com

[mittim12]

Patrick, when looking at brokers I found Provision and Leostream as the more mature brokers while XenDesktop and VDM are the newer products and maybe don't offer as much functionality. It would be nice if Leostream could be added to the comparison as well so people could see them side by side.

[patrickrouse]

There are some features of more connection brokers listed here:

http://it20.info/misc/brokers.htm

The broker comparison document I posted compared the three biggest vendors, and our two biggest competitors (in the Connection Broker space, as VMware is a partner of ours as well). There are any number of small companies out there that make some cool technology, i.e. 2X, Ericom, Leostream, Qumranet... but these are not our main competition, as (in my experience) enterprise customers are looking at VMware, Citrix & Quest for Connection Brokers.

I'm always interested in other technologies, so if someone wants to send me reliable information on another connection broker, I'll consider expanding my document, or making another version that contains more vendors.

[patrickrouse]

I'll post the Connection Broker Comparison Document to our Official Provision Networks Blog, and will update the features as they change, and as I receive feedback from the community. Thanks for the feedback that I've already received.

http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision

[admin]

Patrick,

It would help to better understand the definition of some of these. We can discuss off line if needed.

For example, I would argue VDM 2 does not have a web interface application portal. Webaccess is only for launching desktops

I would argue VDM 2 does not have full Smart Card auth. We support SC auth to the Windows desktop but not to VDM itself which I think is an important part before claiming full SC support

I would say we do have Dynamic Auto Creation of VMs as well as expansion of desktop groups. With our pools if you set the Min/Max you also can set the amount to deploy and maintain. If the initial amount to deploy is exceeded the pool will dynamically expand as long as the max has not been exceeded.

I think in the database section we should be N/A we do not rely on a database for configuration storage. We use ADAM in a multimaster. Everything is automatically replicated an a sysadmin does not need to do anything. If you want to backup ADAM you can but the intention is the ADAM datastore is hands-off and un-managed. So, architecturally we are different than other solutions that use a DB that needs to be HA, backed up and managed like a DB.

There are a few others that need tweaking but I will need to get back with you next week on them.

WP

[patrickrouse]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll update the document accordingly. Below are more detailed explanations:

1. Web Portal = Any Web Page that can launch a user specific application or desktop.

2. SmartCard Support. Thanks for the clarification. With Provision Networks our clients, web portal and broker support SmartCard (and the Military CAC Specification), passthru authentication and Kerberos authentication.

3. On each Managed Desktop Group we allow the administrator to set the minimum number of desktops that must be available at all times, and the maximum number of desktops in the group. Let's say the minimum number is 5, and the maximum number is 200. I as an administrator create 25 initial desktops, so as soon as user number 21 logs on, desktop number 26 will be automatically provisioned, so there will still be 5 available. So we are dynamically creating desktops before they are needed, until the maximum number of desktops in the group is reached. We can also schedule the deletion of individual desktops, or all desktops in the group, and with the auto expansion rules, they will be recreated automatically. Actually one can schedule (one time or recurring, with the same options found in Outlook, on individual desktops, or entire Managed Desktop Groups) Delete VM, Power On, Power Off, Suspend, Resume, Restart OS, Shutdown OS, Reset VM, Logoff User, Reset Session, Deploy MSI Package, Run Script on Desktop, Copy files to desktop, Run program on desktop and Enable/Disable Desktop,,,

Perhaps you can compare/contrast what you're doing so I can appropriately update our document. The document that I will continue to update will be the version on our blog.

4. I will update the information on your use of ADAM for storage of configuration data. Our database is a normalized T-SQL Dababase and we support MSDE, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005. We also allow the administrator to target two different SQL Databases so if one DB goes offline, one can still make configuration changes. No clustering is required for this setup.

Thanks.

Patrick Rouse

Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

Sr. Sales Engineer, Western USA & Canada

Quest Software, Provision Networks Division

Virtual Client Solutions

(619) 994-5507

http://www.provisionnetworks.com

[mnasir]

I was also doing some research on connection broker, so far Leostream looks great. Also, it supports smart card authentication. I hope that VDM will support smartcard authentication soon. You can also download Leostream CB as a virtual appliance; once you import it to your esx using VC, it takes only 10 minutes to configure.

[krival96]

XenDesktop overview

http://www.vdi.co.nz/?p=46

[davlloyd]

In a fast moving arean such as VDI the big decision to make is how much dependency do you want to place on the brokering piece against the rest of the infrastruxcture. Ideally a broker should be a traffic cop that is agnostic to the hypervisor and user transport layers allowing the adoption of tecehnologies as they emerge.

it is hard not to go past VMware for the infrastructure, but PortICA is desirable for the user experience benefits, you then want to look at things such as the ability to support client connected peripherals. both VMware and Citrix have excellent offerings but this does not include there current release brokering components. What you need is someone to plug it all together and provide a scalable flexible model, you can do worse then have Leostream tak this on for you!

[dergin]

Hi,

I am currently have the same challenge as you guys Xendesktop vs Vmware. I need to do a Xendesktop vs VM View comparison and prove a case for Vmware. Does all the analysis above takes into consideration Xendesktop 3 vs View 3? I am in dept knowledge about View but not entirely sure about the capability of Xendesktop. I have gone through some presentation of xendesktop and it mainly talkes about deployment from single image and integrated application virtualisation. I am not sure if they are presenting that as the core capability or as an option like VMware Composer...

I need to provide a desktop virtualisation solution rather than a application virtualisation. Anybody has any comparison for latest version of xendesktop 3 and View 3? or summarise why one would go for View rather than xendesktop for the purpose of desktop virtualisation...

Thanks