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The analysis firm Burton Group, recently acquired by Gartner but still operating as an independent subsidiary, recently published its Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.
The document, that has been created as a guidance for enterprise-scale VDI deployments, includes over 100 features, divided in Required (over 50%), Preferred and Optional.
Both Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 have been measured against the criteria and a couple of extremely interesting things emerged.
The first one is that XenDesktop beats View in every category, surpassing the competitor even in the Required feature-set.
The second, even more interesting thing, is that none of the two products is considered ready for large-scale VDI deployments.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst, Virtualization at Burton Group, explains on his new Gartner blog (our emphasis):
Both products do not deliver what we consider to be essential features. For example, neither product offers role based access controls (RBACs) to support the delegated administration models our clients expect. Offering only “User” and “Administrator” roles, for example, does not constitute delegated administration. In addition neither product offers complete administrative change logging, meaning that it is not possible to maintain an audit trail for all administrative actions. Now this doesn’t mean that organizations should not deploy either product. It just means that they need to set proper expectations. Both are well suited for department-level deployments or for small businesses. In addition, both Citrix and VMware have promised that their current required feature shortcomings will be addressed through product updates by the end of the year.