If you ever thought of getting exposed to Citrix Virtualization solutions & VDI

Many of you might have worked on Vmware and Hyper-V virtualization solutions but if you have not tried Citrix Xen Virtualization stack you are missing some fun especially as i found Citrix Xen as an economical product giving lot of features in free edition as compared to Vmware, which can be leveraged by SMB customers.

You can very well see that it comes with FREE Live migration, Xencenter management, Convert features. [ofcourse you can also use Hyper-V 2008 R2 server with SCVMM workstation edition [to manage 3 Hyper-V hosts only] again free of cost which comes with Live migration and High availability ] Below you can see a quick comparison of Free edition from Vmware ESXi and Citrix Xenserver

Enough of comparison, Citrix is Pioneer in virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI] and the purpose of writing this blog was to share some information on Citrix Xen Desktop Lab which i came across last month and found useful as it gives you easy exposure to Citrix based VDI solution and that too in a virtual self paced lab provided here along with very nice product Introduction documentation here and if you want to see detailed architecture please check here

Citrix XenApp can be used in conjunction with Xen server and Xen desktop and gives you a complete Virtualized environment. Microsoft is collaborating with Citrix and recognizes their HDX technology which provides rich user experience along with plug and play usb and monitor support and at same time Microsoft is also coming up with their RemoteFX technology to be used in VDI solutions. And if this was not sufficient to excite you, recently Xen 4.0 hypervisor was launched with nice features like Fault Tolerance - Xen 4.0 now supports live transactional synchronization of VM states between physical servers as a basic component, enabling administrators to guarantee a high degree of service reliability without requiring additional software solutions. [Pretty similar to Vmware fault tolerance feature in Vsphere] and Memory Enhancements - New algorithms, such as Transcendent Memory [very similar to Vmware balloning but claims to be better than it as it covers its shortcomings] [and in contrast with Microsoft Dynamic memory as mentioned in my previous blog too] have been introduced in Xen 4.0 to enhance the performance and capabilities of the hypervisor memory operations.

A free self paced training covering Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5.5 is available here and Citrix Xen Desktop technology overview can be accessed here. Hope you find that Lab and training links interesting and this helped you in learning Citrix Virtualization poducts.

GAURAV ANAND