Thomas James (Intel) and I did a great podcast with Douglas Brown discussing how Citrix and Intel are working closely together to deliver Citrix XenClient the innovative Bare Metal Local Virtual Desktop platform. During this podcast we shared lots of great detail on the software and hardware technology behind XenClient and why people are so excited about this new Virtual Desktop technology. You can hear all about the collaboration with Intel and the Intel vPro technologies we are leveraging in the forthcoming product.

You can access the podcast on the DABCC site here.

Also you can always get the latest news on XenClient on our XenClient Central Community site.

The following is an interview on the recent announcement of a joint collaboration project between Citrix and Intel on bare metal client virtualization technologies. This interview was conducted with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Virtualization and Management Division and Fernando Martins, Director of Intel Virtualization Strategies.

Interviewer: What did Citrix and Intel announce?

SC: Citrix is working with Intel on a joint collaboration called Project Independence. We announced a partnership under which we will be developing client side virtualization technologies based on the Xen hypervisor. The technology aims to enable a whole new set of use cases for rich client execution with all of the benefits of centralized management and delivery of executables - desktop workloads and applications to end users to leverage client side virtualization.

FM: The solution relies on several Intel technologies featured in Intel® vPRO™  platforms . So we are quite excited about this joint announcement.

Interviewer: What is Project Independence?

SC: Together, we are building a Type-1 hypervisor based on the Xen open source hypervisor. It's tiny, tiny as in just a few MB of flash memory associated with the platform, so small enough to be a bios extension. It owns all hardware including trusted platform modules and has full control over devises, but more than that, it can actually decide which platform it hands through to different guests.

For example, for trusted delivery of enterprise workloads, you can ensure that no USB device is ever passed through to a corporate workload so that nobody can ever copy the data taken outside of the corporation.

Interviewer: What is the difference between Type-1 and Type-2 client hypervisors?

SC: As mentioned earlier, what Citrix and Intel are developing is a Type-1 bare metal client hypervisor.

I've often heard debate in the industry around Type-1 and Type-2 virtualization, in short it relates to the type of technology deployed. In Type-2 there is a base operating system installed on your hardware and then on top of that is a layer of virtualization technology which allows you to host one or more additional guest virtual machines.

Type-1 is different because there is no base OS installed instead there is just a very thin layer of virtualization right on top of the hardware...a hypervisor which owns the hardware itself. The key difference is that in Type-2 if the base OS is compromised, the base OS itself is subject to threat. In Type-1 you can build a secure hypervisor which owns all of the hardware, providing a fundamentally trusted platform from which can then build multiple virtual machines, each of which having different levels of privilege and trust.

In short, Type-1 gives you greater control of security and finer degree of arbitration over system resources.

Interviewer: How are Intel Virtualization Technologies leveraged in Project Independence?

FM: Project Independence leverages a wide portfolio of Intel® vPro™ technologies.

The solution derives from the Xen hypervisor and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) is a key underpinning of Xen.  

Two distinct Intel Virtualization Technologies play a role in this solution: our VT-x technology which provides CPU virtualization support and is required by Xen and VT-d  which is a technology that allows for direct assignment of devices to virtual machines therefore reducing overhead and increasing the overall reliability of the platform.

Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) allows the hypervisor to become part of the trusted compute base such that you can ensure that the hypervisor that is running is the one that is supposed to be running.

Project Independence uses Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), for out-of-band updates and access to the client.

So as you can see we have a fairly large portfolio of Intel technologies being leveraged by Project Independence and we're quite excited about that.

SC: And it's fair to say that there is no other client platform that can do this. The portfolio of technologies is unique to vPRO™ - and all of those technologies are required to meet the enterprise use cases that we're addressing with Project Independence.

Interviewer: Why is this project important?
 
FM: The project definitely addresses unmet user needs. Today's solutions are either 100% server-based and limited by central execution or client-based where you have the burden of local management.

SC: Until now, the preferred use case of the average user toting around a laptop is rich client execution. But with this scenario, the enterprise is facing the bill for managing this device through its lifecycle. In addition, there are other issues around security and new use cases that just cannot be enabled without this change. So what Project Independence does is tie together the best of two worlds, providing centralized management and delivery of the workload or applications to the end user with rich client execution where you can guarantee the fidelity, trust and protection of the workload...even in cases where you don't trust other components of the local system. So it enables a broad set of rich, mobile, offline use cases in which enterprises can deliver their users, their contractors and even home employees, trusted corporate workloads in a protected fashion that they could never do before.

Interviewer: In an economic environment like we have today, what will this solution enable that will make it worthwhile to invest in?

FM: The combination of central management and local execution is all about cost reduction. So with central management you can actually have your images managed by a smaller staff and a more structured mechanism for general management of those images. This is an innovation in management toward cost reduction.

Interviewer: Do you have anything else to add?

SC: Stay tuned - it's going to get even better!

Special note to the readers, if you're interested in staying up-to-date on the latest news, discussions and information on this joint development project, visit the Project Independence showcase.

A pivotal part of Project Independence is the technology at its core.  An obvious choice for Citrix, and many other virtualization companies, is to select the Xen open-source technology as the basis for a bare-metal hypervisor.  The wonderful thing about having Xen at the core of the hypervisor is that Citrix,  undeniably the experts in Xen, has teamed with Intel, undeniably the experts in hardware virtualization, to build the core client hypervisor.  This is the best recipe for success that I've ever seen.

The Intel and Citrix collaboration, known as Thunder Lake, is  a joint program intended to bring many proven server based virtualization technologies to Intel vPro client desktops and laptops.  At the heart of the Citrix client hypervisor is open source Xen with its architecture that is uniquely designed to ensure strong isolation between VMs running on a single device.  Several key Intel technologies like VTx, VTd, TXT, and TPM will be leveraged by the Xen hypervisor such that Citrix products and technologies can bring features previously found only on server based solutions to the client platform with full local execution.  For example, since Xen is the most up to date technology using Intel's VTd hardware, it is well suited to pass through device control directly to the client in a way that doesn't impact security.  Hypervisor features like Xen's support for VTd will solve some very tough problems for client virtualization.

A key requirement for a client hypervisor is a seamless user experience.  This is one of the main differences from a server-based hypervisor.  To accomplish this, hardware devices like Graphics and USB perform just like they do today but now on a platform running multiple VMs - all this without compromising security.  On the Xen client hypervisor you will get full 3D graphics, including Vista Aero, all the while maintaining full isolation between VM's.  This ensures that the corporate applications and desktops are safe from vulnerabilities that could copy your display and keystrokes.      

Today, Xen offers excellent isolation between VMs.  With our new client hypervisor, security will be enhanced even beyond today's standards.  By incorporating encryption and support for Intel's TXT technologies the Citrix client hypervisor will check and measure the boot process.  Now data and OS are safe even if client platform has been compromised by removing the disk.

The exciting thing for us at Citrix is that Project Independence along with the Intel joint collaboration project will bring leading edge hardware and software technologies together for the distinct purpose of providing a better end user experience and better security.  For years it seems an improvement in security meant a decrease in user experience or performance.  More than ever most of us are PC users and soon we will be able to own and control our Desktop and therefore be in control of our experience and productivity.

 Matt

I think that being in the tech industry for so long has started to make me a little jaded to new technology. But once and a while some new project comes along and I think it's just the coolest thing since sliced bread! Recently I've been lucky to be involved with a new technology we are working on here at Citrix and it's got me and anyone I show it to saying the same thing, "That's fricken cool, how can I get it on my system". It's our new bare metal client hypervisor we just announced based on Xen virtualization technology codenamed Project Independence.

I've been working with the Xen products both open source and commercial for over three years now and even in the very beginning I had people ask if they could run this stuff on their laptop. And at the time the story was yeah but it's not going to work the way you want. You see initially we were really focused on making a world class server virtualization platform so the focus was making everything work great for server virtualization. We were focused on making network and storage I/O fast and keeping the CPU overhead really low for server apps. This was all needed and it actually laid a lot of the ground work for what we are building now.

But running this stuff on a laptop opens up a whole new set of challenges. Building a client hypervisor requires supporting really fast 3D/2D graphics, you have to get sound in and out of the system, allow people to plug in USB webcams and printers, burn DVD's, plus you have to deal with undocking, power optimization, getting battery information from the hardware, I could keep going. It's a lot of work, but lucky for us we are not building it alone. Intel and others in the Xen community are all helping build an awesome client hypervisor. The goal in the end is that the user should not have to give up anything they do today with their laptop computing experience just gain flexibility.

Sure there are products on the market today that let you run a second OS on your laptop but guess what they are all applications that run on top of your existing OS. So you startup Vista or XP and then you launch an application to boot up a second virtual machine. And then it's slow, not everything works quite right, and it relies on your first OS working right. It's not the best user experience.

So here is the user experience with the Citrix client hypervisor. You hit the power button on your laptop and it boots up into Vista, XP or whatever you choose as your personal computing environment. What you don't see is that the Xen hypervisor actually came up first and then started up a primary virtual machine plus while you are watching Vista boot it's also booting up a second VM in the background. Once you load up in your personal environment everything just works same as usual on a personal laptop. You have your own apps, your own files (lots of music and movies for me), and I can do anything I want. But here is the cool part you hit a few keys on the keyboard and bam you're in a totally separate virtual machine running all your work applications. It's totally isolated from your personal setup. IT gets to lockdown the corporate setup and keeps everything nice and clean, and I get to have my own personal environment where I can do whatever I want.

I can tell you right now on my standard corporate laptop it's a nasty mix of my personal stuff and corporate stuff. Alongside Office I have iTunes and all my personal and business files are mixed in My Documents. It's not pretty, it's not safe, it's hard to manage, and there is a better way. And it's coming soon to a laptop near you.

You can check out this demo I made if you want to get a feel for what the user experience is like.

At last! A long time in the making and a long time in waiting silently, but now we can finally talk about Project Independence (be sure to watch the cool demo at the bottom of the page). As Brian Madden mentions, this is something that has been brewing for a while. Partnerships like this with Intel don't just happen overnight, you know!

This is really exciting for us to be working on, and I look forward to extending our solutions for dynamic, real-time desktop assembly all the way to offline mobile use cases. I think what's also great is that you are getting more insight, earlier, into where Citrix is headed and what the product teams are looking at. The 5 predictionsthat we made today in conjunction with the announcement - while somewhat tongue-in-cheek how they are phrased - have some real powerful ideas and commitments behind them. I mean, of course users will still ask for a better PC - but for different reasons perhaps than they used to. For example, I know that my wife - a college professor, well educated, and generally computer literate - has this knee-jerk reaction to any issue with her PC: wireless flaky? I need a new PC! Email virus? I need a new PC! App update kill another app? I need a new PC! Or my favorite - OS automatic update slowing down performance? I need a new PC!  The more we can protect and isolate hardware from OS and OS from apps and apps from personalization, the more we can stop these types of issues from creating the wrong sort of end-user reaction.

We've made a pretty big statement so far this year, and it's not even the end of January yet! As the year goes on, we plan to continue to share more about our roadmap, sometimes specific technologies like the client hypervisor, and sometimes more directional goals, like the 5 predictions.

  

2008 ended with a resounding call for change. It became the slogan as we entered 2009 and continues to hold true across political, social, and technological themes.  

Over the past few months since my last post, I'm beginning to see more and more change occurring; customers adopting virtual desktop technology as they look to really drive down the cost of desktop ownership associated with users. 

But let's be honest, isn't the utopia for companies to deploy technologies that can reduce costs and still provide flexibility and business agility anyway? And, corporate desktop has overtime become the biggest culprit – expensive, slow, & rigid.

In September 2008, I posted "Virtual Desktops, Mobile VDI and Client Hypervisors - Oh My!".   As I reread that earlier post, I may have accidently over-polished my crystal ball back then.  This week saw us release two very strategic announcements that I'd like to share a few of my own personal thoughts – very similar to my predictions in September, don't you think?

Here's a link to the two announcements on Citrix.com in case you hadn't seen them: Citrix Collaborating with Intel to Deliver Xen-based Client Virtualization Solutions, Citrix Unveils Vision to Transform Desktop Computing with Project Independence.

I may not be the next Nostradamus, but in this post, I'll give my take on what I believe will change fundamentally in desktop computing - something that is over-due.  At Citrix, we are hard at work at enabling this change.  I believe that Citrix Delivery Center and now Project Independence will become the catalyst for this change.

Change #1 - Your company will no longer own your laptop.  

Finally, as a user I can buy the machine I want, not just assigned by corporate!   Whether it's a 12" mini or a gaming powerhouse, I get to pick and choose based on my personal tastes and needs. 

At Citrix we implemented a BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) program and we are on track to have 20% of our laptop users on the program in the next 12 months.  Sure, as a user I'm happy but our CFO and CIO are ecstatic – instead of dealing with constant capital expenditure we can have predictable expense on our income statement just like any other service or employee benefit on a regular basis.  

We are marching forward with this but our goal is to broaden this with our leading customers.  The client hypervisor developed in collaboration with Intel will become the foundation of our solution.

Change #2 - Your company will spend more on coffee and office supplies than they do on desktop management.

Companies have been talking about reducing IT support and management costs since the days of the first networked PC.  Today's desktop management is like creating a house of cards and giving one to every employee everywhere. To make any change is like moving a wall in thousands of these houses of cards distributed everywhere.  Citrix's approach to enable IT to manage OS, apps and user data/settings separately and centrally changes the economics entirely.  

We've already seen customers reduce total cost of ownerships in early XenDesktop implementations for office-based workers, specifically around the areas of IT helpdesk costs, updates/refreshes, and administration.  

Project Independence gives IT the flexibility for mobile workers.  Add/move/remove become mundane, updates & rollbacks can be done by anyone centrally and packaging/compatibility testing can finally scale.  Not to forget many tasks such as data backup/recovery and PC inventory management are entirely eliminated.

In this independent world, cost of desktop management will be similar to any other expense that a company makes for serving an employee – such as coffee or office supplies.

Change # 3 - You will access your corporate desktop from whatever device is most convenient at the time.   

I truly enjoy the opportunity to travel around the world to meet customers and partners and talk about Citrix's vision around both application and desktop delivery.  During these trips, I get to test our technology from all locations, various connection bandwidths, and increasingly across multiple devices.  With hosted virtual desktops, I'm able to securely access my corporate desktop on any Internet connected device – whether it's my own laptop, an Internet kiosk, or a mobile device (click here to view iPhone demo.) 

Project Independence extends this so an employee can access their personalized desktop from any device, online or offline. And if their personal laptop is unavailable for any reason then they can use whatever PC/Mac/iPhone they may have access to and still get their personalized desktop deliver to them instantly.

Gone will be the days when we still think that we can get our personalized desktop from only one laptop that we were given from our company.

Change #4 - You will switch back-and-forth between work and personal desktops on the same device without thinking twice. 

I was just thinking about how only a few years ago, corporate and commercial users were waiting for an all in one device that delivered on email, phone, music, photos, etc with simplicity.  A device that enabled me to unify work and personal items together to make life easier. From Blackberry devices to the iPhone, manufacturers delivered. 

I see a similar convergence of my personal and corporate desktop as well.  If I'm buying my own PC for work and personal use, I would expect access to both desktops to be seamless and still deliver on computing flexibility and usability.  I have read that 75% of users use their corporate machine for personal use (OK, so we all have iTunes install and aren't comply with corporate policies... let's keep it our little secret).

The current environment is not just rigid but also hard to enforce and insecure. Project Independence will address this – you could be working on your own media gallery during the weekend and switch to quickly refer to their customer information excel worksheet with a single click to respond to a quick business call. 

Change #5 - You will never complain about your PC being too slow again. 

I can't remember the last time I had to call IT because my machine was running slow, since running on a virtual desktop – I love the smell of a fresh machine in the morning.   It's great to get a nice clean, fast image running knowing that I can't really get myself into trouble.

That's the experience any user should expect from any virtual desktop solution whether it's local or hosted. Project Independence will free those laptops with all the gunkware – all the mish-mash of OS, apps and personal data/downloads that makes the PCs slower within few months.

IT is under a lot of pressure – budgetary, user satisfaction and new technology adoption.  Virtualization has helped IT in the data center already – it is time to give IT some freedom for desktop computing.  Project Independence is not just about giving IT freedom to centrally manage desktops with a single instance, but it will liberate businesses from huge capital expenses on their balance sheets, and give employee the flexibility of picking the best devices possible.

I can't wait for the Independence Day – I know it is coming,  2H'09...

Cheers,

Gordon