After VMWare’s announcements about them raising the prices Citrix was to be expected to do the same.

Today I got an e-mail from our Citrix distributor CDG that pricing of the entire Citrix portfolio will go up with 10% starting the 1st of September 2008. This only counts for Read the rest of this entry »

You might have read about the news that Marathon Technologies recently launched a new product called EverRun VM. This comes as an add-on for Citrix Xenserver and it can protect virtual machines from hardware failures. There are 3 levels of protection, and one of them will come for free with Xenserver 4.2!

Read the rest of this entry »

Verron Martina from VMware dropped me an e-mail with a lot of recommendations for running Citrix in a VI3.x environment. These recommendations come from other system engineers from VMware working in the field. Thanks Verron, for sharing this. Read the rest of this entry »

After reviewing VMware’s ThinApp I thought to myself:
How about the other application virtualization solution’s features? I know a couple of application virtualization products, but I don’t know exactly what the differences are.

OK, let’s google for an Application virtualization comparison chart… mmm, not there. Why not make one?
So we did. My colleague Matthijs Haverink and I have written a comparison chart with the following products:

• Microsoft Softgrid *
• VMware ThinApp
• Installfree Bridge
• Citrix Application streaming
• Symantec Appstream
• Xenocode Virtual Application Studio

* This is Softgrid 4.2. From version 4.5 it’s called App-V. When App-V is released, this chart will be updated.

This comparison chart will be expanded with other solutions in the near future, but this is a good start.
Over the next few weeks, we will publish a review of all products in the chart, starting with Installfree by Matthijs.

Feel free to comment on this chart and when neccesary, we will correct the chart.

Download the Application virtualization comparison chart. (pdf)

Update September 9th 2008: Download the updated chart.

The Channel Insider has a nice article with several VARs in the US and their opinion on which side to choose, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft or even Virtual Iron. It seems that VMware is still the organization to beat but Citix and Microsoft are both strong competitors with a very long breath.

The latest war in virtualization seems to be about VDI: a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Just after the release of Citrix Xendesktop, VMware send a letter to its partner stating that the product is build on a platform with an uncertain future. Virtualization.info wrote an article about this.

This is a way of putting your product on the market: just tell everyone that other products are bad. But I prefer a comparison between different solutions, like Quest software did. Quest software, who bought their own desktop broker made a comparison where Citrix Xendesktop and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager are compared next to the Quest Software Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite (kind of a long name, don’t you think?). And of course, in this comparison the Quest solution comes out as the ‘winner’. But it is fair to say that in this comparison there are a lot of features marked as YES for the Virtual Access Suite, while these features are not yet available in their current release. And future features of VMware VDM and Citrix XenDesktop were not taken into consideration.