Citrix, possibly the most damaged company from the new VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) initiative, decided to enter the new market instead of competing with it and will launch a new product called Desktop Broker, as already known since August.
Credit Suisse published an interesting 21-pages analysis of this solution:
…
As a first step to begin to address the concept of a Virtual Desktop Utility, we have learned that Citrix Systems will release a new solution, dubbed Remote Desktop Broker (RDB), within the next few weeks. The Remote Desktop Broker application provides a mechanism to manage connections to Windows desktop images on virtual machines or PC blades and feeds parameters into Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client, which is installed on Presentation Server.Remote Desktop Broker combines Citrix Systems’ existing technologies (e.g., Presentation Server, Web Interface, and Citrix Access Gateway) with partner solutions (e.g., Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware ESX, etc.)-enabling two of the three virtualization technologies that we presented in the previous section (i.e., operating system virtualization and user interface virtualization) to provide a centrally-managed, virtual desktop image to end users.
The ability to pool desktop computing resources to eliminate the one user per Windows image paradigm represents one of Remote Desktop Broker’s key differentiators.
Decoupling the user from a specific desktop environment requires the infrastructure to figure out which VM server has capacity for a new end user attempting to log in; discover the user’s virtual disk files; start up a VM using those files; and then connect the user to that VM desktop image…
Read the whole paper at source.
ZDNet now reports Citrix will unveil Remote Desktop Broker (or Desktop Broker) on its annual conference, the iForum Global, on October 22th.
Citrix is the last company announcing a VDI solution and will join an already numerous group where appear Provision Networks, 2X, Leostream, Dunes and others.
Update: Citrix published the Desktop Broker Administration Guide. Read it here.
Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.