4 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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4 reasons to go beyond VMware View with Citrix XenDesktopAchieve true mobility for users and efficiency for IT without compromise.

24 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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True mobility means empowering people to work on the best device for their needs, from wherever they may be, with convenient, high-performance access to the apps their productivity depends on. While many organizations turn to VDI to support initiatives for mobility and bring-your-own device (BYOD), or simply to improve IT efficiency, products like VMware Horizon View address these objectives too narrowly to offer a complete solution. Only a user-centric approach that goes beyond VDI can meet the needs of both employees and IT.

VDI can seem like an obvious option for supporting BYOD, enabling secure remote access, or transforming an organization’s PC refresh strategy. This is especially true for organizations using VMware vSphere for server virtualization, who may turn to VMware View as part of a single-vendor strategy. This approach often backfires, though, as View’s one-size-fits-all approach to VDI limits its utility, drives up costs and impairs user experience. Key enterprise needs remain unaddressed, such as optimized access to apps on any device, self service for mobile workers, and secure desktop delivery to laptops.

Citrix takes a user-centric approach to computing, designing solutions that aim to empower people, not simply extend virtual infrastructure for its own sake. By focusing on providing access to apps and data from any device, anywhere, and leveraging a range of technologies well beyond the hypervisor, we improve the way people work—and the way IT supports them.

This paper explores four reasons to go beyond the limitations of View with solutions powered by Citrix XenDesktop. These include:

• Taking Microsoft Windows apps beyond the desktop for true mobility

• Empowering users with seamless access and self-service from anywhere with integrated networking

• Taking desktop delivery beyond VDI to address each use case the right way

• Delivering the operational tools you need—built in

Requirements checklists in each of these areas offer essential points for you to address in your discussions with any virtualization vendor.

34 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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1. Seamless Windows mobility doesn’t end at the desktopYour IT strategy needs to reflect the actual needs and expectations of users—not a vendor’s narrow vision. While hosted desktops allow people to move from their corporate PC to BYO laptops and home PCs with consistent access to their familiar Windows environment, and simplify the replacement of enterprise PCs, they fail to take into account the diversity of form factors now in the enterprise. People today expect to be able to work productively on any type of device. A traditional Windows desktop experience assumes a large screen with a keyboard and mouse, making it hard to be fully productive on devices that don’t match these specs. To enable an optimized user experience that moves seamlessly from full desktops to mobile devices, you need to make individual Windows apps available and fully usable beyond the context of a Windows desktop.

XenDesktop is uniquely designed to deliver the right experience on any device people use. This encompasses not only virtual desktop delivery, but also the application hosting and capabilities critical for mobilizing Windows apps. To ensure an optimized experience for Windows apps on mobile devices, Citrix HDX mobile technologies and the Citrix Mobile SDK for Windows Apps let you touch-enable Windows apps with seamless navigation, multi-touch gestures and natural scrolling. XenDesktop also optimizes app delivery for wireless networks, leverages H.264-based compression for a superior experience from mobile devices, and extends battery life through hardware acceleration.

The ability to host apps independently from the desktop has always been a critical part of any virtual architecture and a central element of the technology DNA of Citrix. This separation allows apps to be hosted close to the app server and database for best performance, while desktops can be hosted closer to the user to limit the effects of latency. App hosting can also allow an extra layer of access security to isolate the app and support additional access policies and controls.

Where View falls short

Limited to virtual desktop delivery, View is not designed to deliver the high-performance app experience on mobile devices critical for BYOD and mobile use cases. While people may be able to access their Windows apps within virtual desktops delivered to smartphones or tablets, the lack of support for their device’s form factor will make for a frustrating and unproductive experience. Meanwhile, because app delivery is tied to the desktop image, IT has to choose between running the desktop close to the app, or close to the user, in either case compromising performance.

What to ask

To enable true enterprise mobility across devices, make sure the solution you implement provides:

• The ability to host apps independently from the desktop

• App hosting on Windows Server for optimal resource utilization

• Dynamic optimization of Windows apps for a high-quality experience on mobile devices

• An SDK to customize Windows apps for a fully optimized mobile experience

44 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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2. Only Citrix offers integrated networking for superior security and end-user experienceThe Citrix user-centric approach to design begins with several assumptions about the workforce. First, people need to be able to work from anywhere. They likely carry more than three devices and expect to be productive with any of them. Their apps and services can come from anywhere—not just IT—so security must go beyond the corporate network to account for cloud-based apps and data as well. With the power at their fingertips to choose among thousands of apps, they expect a similar level of choice and immediate, self-service access from IT for the tools they need to work. The experience IT provides must be as simple and seamless as any consumer experience to truly empower people to generate value for the business—not slow it down.

Citrix solutions draw on decades of experience delivering secure remote access to meet the needs of enterprise IT. Tight integration of XenDesktop with Citrix NetScaler Gateway and Citrix StoreFront creates the industry’s most seamless and unified experience from any location. An integrated, self-service enterprise app store lets people download the tools they need for their work with the convenience of any consumer app store. People can access their desktops and apps the same simple way whether inside or outside the corporate network, without requiring separate VPN logins or complex configuration instructions. User setup is simple. First, employees download the client from their favorite app store. Then, they enter their work email address and the system will automatically configure the client for seamless, secure remote access. This simple process exposes an enterprise app store to the user containing XenDesktop-powered apps, secure data sharing and synchronization (cloud or on-premise), native mobile apps, secure email, and secure web and SaaS app access. Integrated networking, load balancing and traffic monitoring ensure optimal performance without the need for third-party components. CloudBridge provides integrated WAN optimization technologies to bring the benefits of centralized virtual desktop and app delivery to branch or remote offices with limited bandwidth connections.

Where View falls short

Lacking strong, integrated remote access, View requires you to purchase and integrate third-party products to complete the solution, increasing complexity and delivering a less-than-seamless user experience. View also fails to provide network integration, leaving customers to depend on third-party add-ons not designed for app or desktop virtualization. Finally, the View PCoIP protocol is UDP based which doesn’t lend itself to WAN optimization, so while third-party WAN optimization solutions may be used, they won’t provide the performance increase enabled through the TCP/IP-based Citrix HDX protocol.

What to ask

To ensure a seamless user experience while maintaining security and access control, make sure the solution you implement provides:

• Integrated networking to allow simple access from any location

• Zero-configuration setup to enable access quickly and easily on any device

54 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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• Customized, granular access policies to allow full control and security for IT

• An integrated enterprise app store to empower people with self-service access to the tools their work requires

• Included WAN optimization that can leverage video caching reducing the heaviest network loads

• Multi-media redirection technologies that enable HD local device playback

3. Citrix delivers more virtual desktops than any other vendor for a reasonVDI can play a valuable role in any organization, enabling instant and seamless access to persistent, customized desktops across multiple devices—but it’s only one of many forms of virtual desktop delivery. Other use cases call for different delivery options. For example:

• For locked-down or non-persistent desktops, hosted shared desktops deliver better value than VDI, requiring a fraction of the number of virtual machines for better resource utilization, scale and management

• For corporate laptop fleets, local virtual desktops combine the efficiency of centralized management with the ability of users to remain productive even while disconnected from the network

• For remote access alone, remote PC access technology can leverage existing virtual delivery infrastructure for secure, high performance connections to the domain-joined computers under employees’ desks

With XenDesktop, organizations can deploy the industry’s best VDI solution while gaining the ability to leverage the right virtual desktop delivery model for each use case in the enterprise. Only XenDesktop provides:

• Integrated thin provisioning for easy scale and management of virtual desktop environments.

• Personal vDisk technology that enables persistence for user-installed apps and personalization while still allowing single-image management and centralized patching and updates for IT.

• Unique support for shared hardware GPU acceleration that makes it possible to leverage native graphics drivers for any OpenGL or DirectX app.

• Citrix XenClient local hypervisor technology that extends the benefits of centralized management and virtual desktop delivery to users disconnected from the network.

• Remote PC access technology that enables efficient, high-performance remote access to existing corporate PCs leveraging the full HDX user experience.

To manage apps within the XenDesktop environment, Citrix integrates closely with Microsoft App-V and System Center, the leading app virtualization and packaging solution for delivering app packages into a virtual desktop or app hosting environment.

64 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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Only Citrix provides an optimized, Microsoft Server, session-based solution for virtual desktop delivery. XenDesktop permits many users to share a single instance of a server OS at once, while providing an out-of-the-box experience that makes a server session nearly identical to a desktop OS. HDX technologies ensure the same high-definition user experience on any device people use. This approach can lower costs by as much as 60 percent compared to a traditional VDI desktop.

Where View falls short

As a primarily VDI-only solution, View limits customers to the characteristics—and economics—of a single delivery model. Running and managing a VM for every desktop is often overkill, especially for delivering locked-down, pooled desktop environments. In fact, VDI increases the number of VMs for virtual desktops by a factor of 20 – 50 compared with server-based sessions. VMware’s attempts to address the limitations of View’s narrow functionality have failed to make a meaningful difference. While View Composer promises to improve the cost efficiency and manageability of View VDI environments, customers have found the product’s linked clone technology to be complicated to use and limited in scale. Similarly, while View can integrate with VMware ThinApp for app virtualization, ThinApp apps still run in the virtual desktop VM, not near the app server or database, slowing transactional performance.

What to ask

To provide optimal support for the business while controlling costs, make sure the solution you implement provides:

• App and desktop delivery technologies flexible enough to deliver the right virtual desktop for each use case in your organization

• The ability to deliver both client and server-based desktops to optimize for personalization, customization and cost

• Integrated thin provisioning built into the broker

• Personal vDisk technology that allows users to install their own apps into a persistent layer from a pooled, thin provisioned desktop while maintaining patches in the base image

4. Only Citrix delivers the operational tools you need – built inIn the end, no virtualization technology can deliver its promised benefits if it can’t be easily managed. With decades of experience deploying the world’s largest app and desktop virtual infrastructures, Citrix focuses on a pragmatic approach to the design of service delivery solutions. Our technology-agnostic position includes both the complete range of app and desktop delivery models discussed above, and freedom of choice for the related technologies completing the environment. Our solutions support all major hypervisors and virtualization management technologies, including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer, as well as cloud services including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

74 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

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XenDesktop is built to enable the delivery of virtual apps and desktops with centralized, single-image management from a simple-to-deploy and manage platform. Citrix Desktop Director and Citrix EdgeSight provide integrated tools to enable key management capabilities with no need for additional complex infrastructure or setup. Desktop Director powers a helpdesk console with complete visibility to troubleshoot and resolve service delivery issues. EdgeSight provides built-in analytics for SLA management, and leverages NetScaler for agentless user experience monitoring. Integration with Microsoft System Center provides a single pane of glass to efficiently manage physical, virtual and mobile clients. As a result, IT can ensure a high-quality experience for users while ensuring the overall manageability of the environment.

Where View falls short

View offers only management tools designed for the administration of virtual infrastructure, not for monitoring the user experience and taking corrective action. These tools also require an entirely separate infrastructure to be installed, configured and maintained to achieve visibility. Operations teams lack the helpdesk integration, troubleshooting and analytics they need to ensure an optimal experience for users, degrading the value of the solution and making it more difficult for people to maintain high productivity.

What to ask

To ensure manageable service delivery and an optimal user experience, make sure the solution you implement provides:

• Support for both app and desktop delivery

• Interoperability with any hypervisor, network or storage virtualization solution as well as third-party cloud infrastructure

• Full, lifecycle management for desktops

• Complete helpdesk tools empowering level 1 resolution of common desktop/app issues

• Integrated user performance monitoring and analytics

• Powerful performance graphing that correlates configuration changes

• Auto-base lining to quickly assess performance trends—before your users do

About CitrixCitrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the cloud company that enables mobile workstyles—empowering people to work and collaborate from anywhere, easily and securely. With market-leading solutions for mobility, desktop virtualization, cloud networking, cloud platforms, collaboration and data sharing, Citrix helps organizations achieve the speed and agility necessary to succeed in a mobile and dynamic world. Citrix products are in use at more than 260,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Annual revenue in 2012 was $2.59 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

Copyright © 2013 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. XenDesktop, HDX, NetScaler, NetScaler Gateway, Citrix StoreFront, CloudBridge, XenClient, XenServer, XenMobile, EdgeSight and ShareFile are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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4 reasons to go beyond VMware View White Paper

ConclusionWhile VDI can play an important role in the transformation of IT, it is only part of the solution IT needs to meet the needs of users and the business. VMware View’s narrow focus on VDI fails to address the need to deliver the right kind of virtual desktop for each use case—or to deliver virtualized Windows apps to mobile devices ill-suited because of form factor and touch interface to run complete Windows desktops. Only Citrix XenDesktop lets you choose the ideal way to support each individual in the organization, and provide the convenient, self-service and high-definition experience over any network that today’s users expect. A technology-agnostic design with integrated management and monitoring tools provides a simple yet powerful way for IT to meet users’ needs. Beyond app and desktop virtualization, Citrix also provides complementary technologies to support mobile workstyles, from Citrix XenMobile for complete mobile device and native mobile app and data management, to Citrix ShareFile for secure data sync and sharing service. With comprehensive, integrated technologies to empower mobile workstyles, Citrix provides the complete solution today’s organizations need to enable a new era of productivity.

Additional resources Citrix XenDesktop

Compare XenDesktop and Horizon View