I attened the VDI vs TS presentation this afternoon presented by, the quite possibly mental, Brian Madden.  I have to say that I haven’t been to a presentation that frank in a long time, possibly even ever!

I won’t rehash everything from the presentation because you can read the crux of most of the discussions here.  However, I will say that the main points were that VDI is not ready to take on TS at the moment, but if the forthcoming promised features materialise then it soon could be.

If you don’t already subscribe to Brian’s blog you really should here.

Also keep your eyes peeled on Brian’s site as he promised to dig up an old post from Ron Oglesby that discussed VDI back in 2006.  He wanted people to check out the comments section for some wild comments on VDI from die-hard TS heads.  I think it is this post, but I might wrong so check his site anyway.

Delivered by Michel Bond & Holger Temme, who are Global Solution Consultants at VMware.

Now that 92% or customers feel confident that mission-critical apps run well on VMware, these have included some of the following in production:

• SQL Server
• Oracle
• IBM DB2
• SAP

So there is no reason not to virtualise Citrix XenApp servers.  It is very easy to virtualise everything aside from the application servers in a typical Citrix ecosystem, such as:

• License Server
• Data Collectors
• Web Interface
• Datastore Servers

What makes XenApp Servers possible virtualisation candidatres:

Most XenApp deployments still on 32bit due to compatability and vendor support, which can cause application silos to be created.  This in turn can result in under-utilised servers.  On top of this the sweet spot for number of processors is dual core. There are currently far too many issues around 64 bit Operating Systems and the apps running on them for most people to use x64 in a terminal Services environment.  So all these factors can create under utilised XenApp servers.

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VMware recently published an article on the Virtual Reality blog that raises some interesting points as to why VMware is better than Xen & Hyper-V.

Some of the areas that get particular analysis are:

• Uptime
• Direct driver model
• Memory management

More interesting still are some of the comments to post, have clearly been made by Citrix & Microsoft employees or people with a vested interest.

I find some of the points amusing, but my 2 penneth worth is thus:

• No VMotion or equivalent = not production ready

I think that this in itself is a good enough reason to use VMware over anything else.

Check out the Smart Citrix Client tool that was written by the guys at Virtual Technologies Software.

A really cool tool that allow fast and simple connection to a MetaFrame Server or a published application and to export the connection to an ICA file.

Works perfectly with lots of customisable options:

• Display Settings
• Local Devices
• ICA Cache

Brilliant and it just works. Download it here.