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We are pleased to announce that Citrix XenDesktop and HDX technology is powering the new Smart Business Desktop on the IBM cloud, a public cloud service that delivers desktops for office based workers. This new service enables small to medium businesses to be able to virtualize desktop computing resources, and provide a logical, rather than a physical method of access to the entire Windows desktop experience, including OS, apps, and data - with all the storage and computing services hosted in the public cloud. The service requires no up-front capital making it easier for small to mid-size businesses to adopt virtual desktops.
One of the keys to successfully deliver virtual desktops from a public cloud is to ensure that the experience for end users remains unchanged or is better than their physical PCs. Remember, all users in this environment will be accessing their desktop over WAN. This is where Citrix's HDX technologies come into play for IBM Cloud. HDX includes a set of technologies designed to enable a high definition user experience for virtual desktops, and is a key component for IBM public cloud services for virtual desktops. Virtual desktop users from IBM cloud services will now be able to access their desktop from any device in any location and still get uncompromised experience with any kind of content, including rich media. Learn more about Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix HDX.
Citrix and IBM Global Technology Services have worked closely together for many years. IBM has been successfully managing XenApp implementation for delivering apps to hundreds of thousands of users for customers worldwide. Centralization and optimization have been the joint focus for Citrix and IBM and we have hundreds of successful customer implementations (see a great example on ATU in Germany through the video at www.citrix.com/ibm). Citrix XenDesktop and HDX technology will continue to be key parts of IBM Global Technology Services offerings for private clouds within larger enterprise customers. The private cloud offerings now include the entire Citrix desktop virtualization product portfolio - i.e. XenDesktop, XenApp, Netscaler, Branch Repeater and the Citrix Access Gateway.
IBM has developed hundreds of consultants with skills that span the entire Citrix desktop virtualization portfolio, making it easier for both large and small businesses to adopt Citrix XenDesktop and HDX technology for delivering virtual desktops to their users anywhere.
For more information about IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud, visit http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/bcrs/a1026737.
Raj Dhingra
General Manager, XenDesktop Product Group
Comments (10)
Sep 01
Anonymous says:
You mentioned that Citrix XenDesktop with HDX will continue to be key parts of I...You mentioned that Citrix XenDesktop with HDX will continue to be key parts of IBM Global Technology Services offerings for private clouds within larger enterprise customers. Can you share with us any of those customers or actual use cases?
Sep 02
Anonymous says:
That's probably a question for IBM ... have a look on their website?That's probably a question for IBM ... have a look on their website?
Sep 02
Anonymous says:
How does IBM deal with scale? XenDesktop can't scale to IBM numbers, or is this ...How does IBM deal with scale? XenDesktop can't scale to IBM numbers, or is this just a gimmick announcement?
Sep 02
Anonymous says:
Citrix is NOT an exclusive partner in this initiative. IBM will also be offering...Citrix is NOT an exclusive partner in this initiative. IBM will also be offering virtualized desktops based on VMWare View.
Sep 02
Anonymous says:
That's interesting. So how will View scale, because that scales even worse, and ...That's interesting. So how will View scale, because that scales even worse, and offers the worst user experience due to useless protocols. PCoIP hype today is a great example of much ado about nothing.
Sep 04
Anonymous says:
Xendesktop does not scale,it's horrible at scale. The teams at Citrix will try t...Xendesktop does not scale,it's horrible at scale. The teams at Citrix will try to fool you on scalability of Xendesktop and so will VMware. If they try to fool you, have them have you speak to a customer who actually has implemented this stuff, and they will dance around the issue. Nobody has that I can find or Citrix is willing to share. IBM is surely not using their technology to scale, especially if both Citrix and VMware are options.
Sep 04
Anonymous says:
I am also disappointed in the scalability of XenDesktop, but you can still ...I am also disappointed in the scalability of XenDesktop, but you can still be creative in deployments of more than a few thousands users. You will just need to have several XenDesktop farms and aggregate them using web interface. As long as you do not have a desktop group over a couple thousand users you should be ok. Again it is not ideal as you really need a dedicated physical server for the DDC for each XenDesktop farm, but it will work.
While other brokers can scale and are nicely integrated into just one or two consoles, they still lack the full feature set of XenDesktop. For me ICA performance over the WAN, flash redirection, range of Citrix clients available, and XenApp application delivery convinced me to choose XenDesktop and live with all the scalability issues and lack of component integration.
Sep 04
Anonymous says:
Hacking the crap out of it won't fly. It just doesn't scale, so no point compli...Hacking the crap out of it won't fly. It just doesn't scale, so no point
complicating it. I'm better off using XenApp desktops, for marginal use cases that
limited scale for XD would get into my user population. At least XenApp is mature.
Nov 10
Anonymous says:
As well as Virtual Bridges. VERDE was adopted along with Citrix and VMware as th...As well as Virtual Bridges. VERDE was adopted along with Citrix and VMware as the third official VIA offering, now known as SMART desktop as part of SMART Cloud
Sep 14
Simon Bramfitt says:
It would be wrong to think of the IBM Smart Business Desktop as a solution that ...It would be wrong to think of the IBM Smart Business Desktop as a solution that is only available to large enterprises. The IBM solution is equally well suited to small and medium businesses as it is the the largest enterprise. If anything this service may be of greatest benefit to smaller businesses in that it provides access to services that were until now beyond the reach of these organisations.
Having said that though the majority of comments here appear to be focuses on concerns that XenDesktop does not scale. I previously designed a large XenApp environment that is today supporting about 80,000 concurrent users (incidentially this system is now managed by IBM Global Technical Services). While working on a system of this size was not without challenges, I think I can say with some confidence that it is today viewed in a very positive light by its users. Without delving into the details of how to design systems of this size I will say that the key lesson learned is that scalability is best achieved by a full understanding of the product married to a system architecture that ensures that component (single server) level scalability limits are not exceeded. Suffice to say that through segmention, isolation and re-aggregation of components and services it is possible to build XenApp environments significantly larger than the largest that have been implemented to date. This approach isn't 'hacking the crap out of it' it's designing solutions with full awareness of the characteristics of the product you are using.
Most importantly, while these guidelines were developed for XenApp they are fully transferable to XenDesktop (and probably View as well, although I'm not yet familiar enough with View to offer a qualified opinion here), as such I don't see any problems delivering XenDesktop solutions of the same order of magnitude as can be done with XenApp.
Update
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It looks like Dan Feller shares the same opinion about XenDesktop scalability
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Regards
Simon Bramfitt
IBM Global Technical Services
Obligatory Disclaimer
Any thoughts, concepts or ideas expressed in this here are my own personal opinions and not those of my employer or any other individual or organisation.
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