Comments on “Citrix goes whole hog with virtual Windows” • The Register

Comments on: Citrix goes whole hog with virtual Windows

Back to the article
Comments on this article are now closed

this sounds familiar...

By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 13th April 2007 17:18 GMT

This sounds strangely familiar.

Wasn't a similar thing tried in the past?

Think thin clients, Un*x, etc.

Did you miss something?

By frank denton Posted Friday 13th April 2007 18:34 GMT

Your article said "Now Citrix wants to barge into the virtual desktop game, sending out complete OS and application packages from the server room to a PC or thin terminal."

They already have, for a long time in fact. At my place of work, a large commercial organisation, we use low spec PCs and use IE browser to access all Windows XP OS and Office Apps (plus some otrhers) which are hosted by on-site Citrix Servers. Speed of response is very good unless you do serious Excel graphing at peak times. Its just like using a real PC :)

At home, I log in to work using https://... via Firefox and a downloaded Java app and have a very good response speed over my cable modem.

Did I misunderstand what is new about Citrix Desktop Server 1.0?

Missing something

By Ashlee Vance Posted Friday 13th April 2007 19:05 GMT

Hello, Frank.

I wondered the same thing and put that question to Citrix.

As they explain it, the new software is the first product that caters specifically to virtual server and blade PC types of architectures. Rather than streaming down a limited desktop or a few apps, we're talking about managing a full desktop on the server and sending that to end user systems. Citrix reckons that Presentation Server caters more to “delivering robust server-side apps” to customers.

I think the upshot is that you could do something like this before, but the performance and management should be better with the new software.

That help?

AV

http://theduckrabbit.com/

thanks Ashlee, i get it now

By frank denton Posted Friday 13th April 2007 19:18 GMT

Yes that does help Ashlee.

With hindsight, what I use is a 'portal' environment, not a full XP desktop environment. It's impressive all the same.

Thank You

FD

Blade PC's ???

By Jack Pastor Posted Monday 16th April 2007 15:28 GMT

I just wanted to make a distinction between the term "Blade PCs" and traditional Blade "Servers."

Most vendors view "Blade PC's" as a 1-1 CPU / User where the box is hidden in the data center rack, but the desktop delivered to the users' Thin Client is his/her own.

Citrix traditionally resides on "REAL" servers in the back room, where a one-to-many model leverages the power of the server (as well as HA features like RAID etc.) It is also designed for "over-subscription" assuming SOMEBODY will be out sick, so you don't need a Client License for every employee/user.

Combine Virtualization with the ridiculous compute power of modern CPU and X64 architecture in general, and you have noting but culture/inertia/licensing disrupting the status quo.