I’ve heard lots of comments about how complex a XenDesktop deployment is – mostly from Citrix’s competitors. And, yes, it can get complex if you want to deliver the full suite of functionality, including provisioning from a common image, application streaming, applications executed on XenApp servers instead of (or in addition to) on the desktop OS, SmartAccess, etc. However, the complexity of a XenDesktop solution is in direct proportion to its functionality. You can deliver basic VDI with just the components outlined in my first bullet list above – and that isn’t a particularly complex deployment.

So my suggestion to anyone who is looking at cost and complexity is to make sure that they’re really doing an “apples-to-apples” comparison in terms of functionality.

The complexity of the Citrix architecture is one of the most important reasons for my different choise: the Virtual Bridges proposition (vbridges.com).

It is: simple, rapid to implement(deploy), not expensive, and, overall, you haven’t any technologic lock-in by a specific provider, because it uses the KVM project.

Ciao.

Thanks for that. You’ve hit the nail on the head with your summary of what we want to achieve. We’ll start investigating the Smart Access option a little more.

Thanks for you help

Cheers

Thanks for your comment. Perhaps I should have been more clear, but in XenDesktop, desktop assignments are based on the user ID, not the client ID. Somewhere along the way, we’re going to need to capture the user’s login credentials. At that point, if you have given that user the ability to choose between multiple desktops, we’re going to take the user to an interface where s/he can choose the desired desktop. If, on the other hand, you have restricted the user to only one desktop, the user should be immediately connected to that desktop as soon as the user’s credentials are validated.

What I think you’re asking for is the ability to grant a given user the rights to several different desktops, but then to dynamically restrict those rights (perhaps to a single desktop) depending on the client device.

If that’s correct, then I believe you could accomplish that with the Citrix “SmartAccess” (a.k.a. “Advanced Access Control”) functionality, which is implemented using one of the Access Gateway Enterprise Appliances together with the appropriate client licenses (which are included with XenDesktop Platinum Edition, or which can be purchased separately). The whole point of SmartAccess is to build policies that will dynamically change what a user can and cannot do based on the access scenario, and the policy can incorporate such factors as the client device name and/or IP address range.

SmartAccess can also grant or restrict access to specific applications, shared files & folders, internal URLs, etc.

EDIT, 3-15-10: Note that the new Access Gateway VPX (Virtual Appliance) fully supports SmartAccess, which can considerably lower the cost of this solution. For more on this, see “Citrix Continues to Virtualize Appliances.”

Great article but a little late for us as we are in the late stages of go live. You mention that it is possible to configure a client such that it will immediately connect to a designated virtual desktop without requiring the user to click on an icon. Do you have details on how to achieve this? We have looked into this and it looks easy to do on VMWare but we can’t see a way to do it on XenDesktop.

What we are after is to present users with a number of desktops but ensure that a client device always connects to a specific virtual desktop.

I spoke to someone at Citrix and the only way they thought it could be achieved was by using Access gateway.

Any ideas would be a great help.