Xen master

It’s shaping up to be a critical summer for Citrix Systems Inc., the 26-year-old company that has reinvented itself at least twice, suffered at least two near-death experiences and now sees untold opportunity before it. The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company, which built its business on solutions that help extend the Windows server platform, is riding a wave of virtualisation success that’s building throughout the IT industry. Citrix is doing so well now that rumours have begun to pop up that the likes of an IBM Corp. or a Cisco Systems Inc. may be about to make a move and acquire the company. (Citrix executives, for their part, won’t even talk about such speculation.)

“Channel metrics are solid, early customer wins are beginning and we are on track,” Citrix CEO Mark Templeton told financial analysts in April, talking about his company’s earnings and future plans. Citrix is pushing its virtualisation solutions harder than ever. With the just-released XenDesktop beta, the imminent release of the revamped XenApp, new partnerships with computer makers Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Corp., Templeton may be holding a strong hand of cards.

But the very solution providers Citrix needs to recruit to compete with powerhouses such as Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc. say the company has very specific and necessary tasks to accomplish to win them over. Some of those are in Citrix’s control, others, however, may not be.

Many of the more than 24,000 Citrix VARs appear to be solidly behind their vendor partner.

“I think Citrix has been very strong in terms of working with the channel and keeping the channel going,” said Myron Bari, president and CEO of IPM, a New York-based Citrix Platinum partner. “We’re both learning from each other. The most important thing is that it’s always been a channel company. If they continue, I think the resellers of the world will migrate to it.”

Those other VARs that Citrix wants to recruit for its mission may not be as convinced that the vendor has both the needed technology and channel commitment to put it all together.

“Two things hold us back from partnering with Citrix,” said Ken Smith, president of Software Technology Concepts. “One: The guts of my (customers’) businesses revolve around ERP software. And they use the VMware platform in a lot of cases for what they are doing. The Microsoft virtual machine is now going to be part of the (Server 2008) operating system, so that makes it a big challenge.”

To overcome the obstacle of stiff competition, Smith said, Citrix needs to hit a home run on the second task: Bring to market game-changing technology. “Unless they come up with a paradigm shift, it’s going to be tough for us to align with them as vendors,” Smith said.

Citrix executives, though, exude confidence that they are doing exactly that. So the CRN Test Center decided to examine some of the new Citrix technology up close. What we found is some real promise, but also potential pitfalls.

Pieces of the puzzle

XENDESKTOP: The Test Center reviewed the XenDesktop. It’s bundled with XenServer, Provisioning Server and Xen Desktop Delivery Controller. The setup consists of deploying two physical servers. Server No. 1 runs the Infrastructure: XenServer with three virtual machines – a domain controller, the Xen Desktop Delivery Controller and the Provisioning Server. Server No. 2 also runs XenServer and stores the OS virtual machines to be streamed.

Provisioning Server provides the streaming of the OS to clients. Performance is enhanced with the ICA protocol – a thin, remote viewing protocol that allows for SpeedScreen Progressive Display, which makes fast screen rendering.

The total cost of ownership potential with XenDesktop could be huge; “greater user density per hardware platform” is how one Citrix executive phrased it. It could be a compelling discussion between a VAR and a customer.

Deployment of XenDesktop is quite straightforward. Requirements include a minimum of 8 GB of memory and a virtualisation-capable processor such as AMD-V or Intel VT.

It’s not yet plug-and-play on all hardware, though. Test Center reviewers attempted to install XenDesktop beta on a Dell PowerEdge T105 with a dual-core Opteron and 8 GB of memory. During installation of the XenServer portion, the install process stalled out, unable to continue reading off the optical drive.

Citrix reviewers confirmed they were aware of this issue regarding this specific Dell server and the beta release of XenDesktop, and that it will be addressed with the upcoming RC release of XenDesktop, they said.

XenDesktop integrates with Active Directory. From AD, an administrator can control what applications a user can run on a VM, and can define user permissions.

The fact that a user is connected virtually is undetectable by the user. The virtualised OS has a “disconnect” button that will keep the desktop environment in the same state when the user reconnects. If a user has a spreadsheet open, for example, that file will remain open upon reconnection when the disconnect button is used. This version of XenDesktop also supports thumb drives, which appear as network drives. For printing, the VM uses the printer driver of a locally defined system; if that driver is not available, then the system will use a universal printer driver.