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Changes to the XenApp Product Lifecycle

October 30th, 2012 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | XenApp - (0 Comments)

Back in May, in our post entitled “When Is End of Life Not End of Life,” we talked about the impending “End of Life” dates for all versions of XenApp earlier than v6.5 on Server 2008 R2. Citrix has now backed off on those dates, and given us a bit more breathing room.

Note that nothing has changed for XenApp on Server 2003. If you’re still running Presentation Server v4.5 or XenApp v5.0 on Server 2003, you should be planning to upgrade as soon as possible, because we’ve already moved past the “End of Maintenance” date (which was September 30). That means that no code maintenance is being done other than for serious security vulnerabilities. “End of Life” hits next March 31, at which time there will be no support available at all from Citrix unless you want to buy “Extended Support” – and, trust me, you really don’t want to buy Extended Support.

Extended support is a cool $100,000 for six months, regardless of how many licenses you have, and that’s in addition to a Premier Support agreement, which you must also have on your XenApp licenses (at a cost of $35/year/license) before you can buy Extended Support. It is deliberately priced at such a painful level to discourage you from buying it. Citrix really, really doesn’t want to support products that are beyond their End of Life dates.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: I just discovered that I had understated the cost of Extended Support. Here are the official criteria:

  1. Customer must have a current/valid/paid Citrix Technical Support contract (that means either Premier Support, or one of the legacy incident-based support agreements.
  2. Customer must have a Citrix Technical Relationship Manager (TRM) contract, which is an additional $40,000/year.
  3. Customer mus purchase Extended Support in minimum increments of 6 months at $100,000 per 6 month increment.
  4. Should the customer require a hotfix, the cost will be $40,000 per hotfix.

So, when it comes to keeping XenApp in service beyond the End of Life date, “Just say no.”

The good news is that End of Maintenance for XenApp v5.0 on Server 2008 has now been extended to July 13, 2014, and End of Life to January 13, 2015. (Why the dates fall in the middle of the month seems puzzling, but there it is.) That’s good for customers who still need to support apps that just won’t run on a 64-bit platform – you’ve got a little more time to plan your transition.

The same dates apply to XenApp v6.0 on Server 2008 R2…but if you’re running Server 2008 R2, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be on XenApp v6.5, and we’d recommend that you go there as soon as possible.

If you want to see the full announcement with all the dates, you can find it in the Citrix Knowledge base – it’s article CTX122442.

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What Licenses Do I Need….

May 16th, 2012 | Posted by Sid Herron in Application streaming | Application Virtualization | Citrix | Licensing | Microsoft | Remote Access | VDI | Virtualization | XenApp | XenDesktop - (25 Comments)

Earlier this week, I had a long discussion with a client (you know who you are) about what licenses they would need for a deployment of “zero client” devices. We’ve written a lot about Microsoft and Citrix licensing, about XenDesktop and XenApp, about the Citrix trade-up, etc., but it occurred to me that it might be beneficial to pull all the licensing information together into one post instead of expecting you, gentle reader, to have to sort through multiple posts to pull it all together.

So, let’s discuss Citrix licensing first, then move on to the Microsoft licensing.

First of all, if all you want to do is to deploy VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), and you have a limited number of users, then you should probably purchase VDI-in-a-Box. You can read more about this in our April Moose Views article about XenDesktop vs. VDI-in-a-Box.

If you decide that VDI-in-a-Box is not the right fit foryou, the next question you need to answer is whether to use XenApp licenses or XenDesktop licenses. Beginning with the introduction of XenDesktop v4.0, Citrix concluded, reasonably enough, that an organization that was deploying VDI probably wouldn’t get much leverage from a concurrent-use licensing model, because their concurrency ratio (by which I mean the ratio of total users to concurrent users) would be pretty close to 1:1. So XenDesktop v4.0 was introduced with a per-named-user or per-device license model. These licenses were roughly half the cost of the comparable XenApp concurrent-use license: XenApp Enterprise Edition, for example, carries an MSRP of $450 per concurrent user. XenDesktop Enterprise Edition carries an MSRP of $225 per user/device.

At the same time, Citrix made the decision to include XenApp rights in the XenDesktop license. So if you buy XenApp, you get only XenApp. But if you buy XenDesktop, you get both XenDesktop and XenApp – so you can use XenApp to stream applications to your virtual desktops, or have your virtual desktops function as client devices that run published applications that execute on the XenApp servers, or simply deploy a mixture of XenDesktop and XenApp to your user community depending on what delivery method is best for a particular use case. This is what Citrix refers to as the “FlexCast” delivery model.

This created the interesting situation where, because of the difference in license cost, if your concurrency ratio was less than 2:1, you were better off financially to purchase XenDesktop licenses even if all you really wanted to run was XenApp. And, since delivering what Citrix calls “hosted shared” desktops from XenApp servers makes more efficient use of the underlying hardware and storage infrastructure, the bias should probably be toward XenApp unless there is a clear use case for why users need to connect to individual desktop OS instances rather than a shared XenApp desktop (and it isn’t just appearance, because with XenApp v6.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 we can deliver a XenApp desktop that looks and feels like a Windows 7 desktop). But, for the sake of this discussion, let’s move on down the XenDesktop trail.

Citrix has re-introduced a concurrent-use license option for XenDesktop, which is a better choice for organizations who want to deploy both XenDesktop and XenApp, but have a concurrency ratio greater than 2:1, but so far, I haven’t seen very many use cases where that license model made sense.

If you already have XenApp licenses, and want the ability to deliver VDI as well, you can take advantage of the Citrix trade-up program to transform your XenApp licenses into XenDesktop licenses. And if you trade up all of your XenApp licenses, you can get two XenDesktop user/device licenses for each XenApp license. So 250 XenApp licenses would become 500 XenDesktop user/device licenses. If you want more information on how the trade-up program works, and what your trade-up options are, check out the handy Citrix Trade-Up Calculator.

As of the release of XenDesktop v5.0 Feature Release 1, the license service got pretty smart in terms of how it managed those user/device licenses. This is good news for, say, a hospital, which may have devices that are used by multiple users and other users who use multiple devices. The license server can intelligently and dynamically reassign licenses between users and devices to make the most efficient use of the available licenses. For example, consider the following scenario for a brand-new environment where no licenses have yet been assigned:

  • User 1 logs on from client Device 1. The license server will, by default, check out a license to User 1.
  • User 1 logs off, and User 2 logs on from the same client device. The license server, now sensing that two different users have logged on from the same device, will take the license that was assigned to User 1, and reassign it to Device 1. Any subsequent users who log in from Device 1 will not cause any action by the license server, because Device 1 is already licensed.
  • If User 1 logs on again from a different client device, the license server will again check out a license to User 1 (so, at this point, two licenses are checked out: one to Device 1 and one to User 1). Since User 1 has logged on from two different devices, the license will remain assigned to User 1 unless/until manually released by an administrator (e.g., in the case of the employee leaving the organization), or unless User 1 doesn’t log on for a period of 90 days, in which case it will be automatically released due to inactivity.
  • Likewise, since two different users have logged on from Device 1, that license will remain assigned to that device unless manually released or automatically released due to 90 days of inactivity.

So…how do you know how many licenses you really need? There is actually a formula that will tell you that. You need to know how many total users you have (let’s call that number “A”), how many shared devices you have (let’s call that “B”), and how many of your users will use only shared devices (let’s call that “C”). The formula is A – C + B. So, if you have 1,000 total users, 300 shared devices, and 600 of your users will use only shared devices, you need 1,000 – 600 + 300 = 700 total licenses.

For more information on exactly how this works, see the Citrix Community Blog post by Christophe Catesson, which in turn links to a recorded session from Synergy 2011 that was a deep dive discussion of XenDesktop licensing.

Now for the Microsoft licensing component.

If you have users who will be executing applications on a XenApp server, you will need a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) CAL for that user, or for the client device that user is using. It is very difficult to manage a mixture of user CALs and device CALs in a Remote Desktop Services environment, so, in most cases, you’re going to be better off purchasing user CALs.

If you have users who will be attaching to a virtual desktop instance, the licensing requirements are different, depending on the client device. If the client device is a Windows PC whose Operation System is covered by Software Assurance, you do not have to purchase any additional Microsoft license to use that PC to connect to a virtual desktop. If the client device is not a Windows PC, or that copy of Windows is not covered by Software Assurance, you need a Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license for that client device. VDA licenses are only available under the Open Value Subscription license model at present, meaning that you will continue to pay for them every year. Forever.

But wait! That’s not all! As Gabe Knuth outlines in a recent article on Techtarget.com, there is a very strange loophole in the VDA license terms. If you have a VDA license for your primary device (or if it’s covered by Software Assurance), you have what Microsoft calls “Extended Roaming Rights,” which allow you to also use your home computer to access your virtual desktop, or use your iPad when you’re at home or traveling. But, technically, it does not entitle you to bring your iPad into the office and use it there! To solve that (using the term “solve” loosely), Microsoft recently announced something called a “Companion Device License” (CDL) which allows you to use up to four other devices (in addition to the primary licensed device) to access your virtual desktop. No word yet on what the CDL will cost.

So let’s see if we can summarize what our client would need for a deployment of “zero client” devices (like, for example, the Wyse Xenith thin client).

  • You’re going to need some kind of Citrix license, either VDI-in-a-Box, XenDesktop, or XenApp.
  • Since the thin client is not a Windows PC, and therefore cannot be covered by Software Assurance, you would need to purchase a Microsoft VDA license for it.
  • If the thin client will be used only to attach to a virtual PC desktop and execute applications within that desktop OS environment, no additional Microsoft license is needed. However, if the thin client will also be used to attach to applications that are executing on a XenApp server – either directly or indirectly by having the Citrix client baked into the virtual PC desktop – you will also need a Microsoft RDS CAL.
  • You do not need an RDS CAL if you are only using XenApp to stream packaged applications to a virtual (or physical, for that matter) desktop for execution there. Since you are not actually utilizing Remote Desktop Services by executing code remotely on a Remote Desktop Server, no RDS CAL is required.
  • If you want to institute a BYOD program, where users can bring whatever client device they wish into the office and use it to access your VDI, you’ll probably need some of the new Microsoft CDL licenses.

If I’ve overlooked anything, feel free to submit questions via comments on this post, and we’ll try to get them answered. Let the discussion begin!

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When Is “End of Life” Not “End of Life?”

May 7th, 2012 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | XenApp - (1 Comments)

Last Friday (May 4), the news broke that Citrix had made some changes in their “End of Life” (EOL) dates. Just a couple of months ago, in our March issue of the Moose Views newsletter, we told you that if you were running any version of XenApp other than XenApp v6.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2, you needed to start seriously planning for your migration, because by mid-July of next year (2013), those older versions will all hit their EOL dates.

Apparently Citrix has been feeling some heat from customers who weren’t too happy about that, so they have announced something new called “Extended Support,” that will be available after EOL for an additional fee – which was not specified. The “End of Extended Support” (EOES) dates have been aligned with the comparable Microsoft dates for the underlying server Operating System.

The odd thing about this is that the EOL dates have not changed (except for XenApp v6.0, which will now hit EOL on January 2, 2015). It’s just that EOL doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Previously, when a Citrix product hit EOL, that meant there was no support available for it whatsoever. Now, apparently, “End of Life” means “End of Life Unless You Pay Us More Money to Keep Supporting You.”

For the record, the EOES dates for the versions of XenApp that run on Server 2003 have been set to July 14, 2015, and the EOES dates for the versions that run on Server 2008 (and 2008 R2) have been set to July 10, 2018.

You can read more about this on the Citrix Product Matrix Web page.

As of now, the Extended Support program for XenDesktop is still being defined…

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The Future Is Now

March 21st, 2011 | Posted by Sid Herron in Application streaming | Application Virtualization | Best Practices | Branch Repeater | Citrix | Mobile Computing | Remote Access | VDI | Virtualization | XenApp | XenClient | XenDesktop - (0 Comments)

I recently discovered a video on “Citrix TV” that does as good a job as I’ve ever seen in presenting the big picture of desktop and application virtualization using XenApp and XenDesktop (which, as we’ve said before, includes XenApp now). The entire video is just over 17 minutes long, which is longer than most videos we’ve posted here (I prefer to keep them under 5 minutes or so), but in that 17 minutes, you’re going to see:

  • How easy it is for a user to install the Citrix Receiver
  • Self-service application delivery
  • Smooth roaming (from a PC to a MacBook)
  • Application streaming for off-line use
  • A XenDesktop virtual desktop following the user from an HP Thin Client…
    • …to an iPad…
    • …as the iPad switches to 3G operation aboard a commuter train…
    • …to a Mac in the home office…
    • …to a Windows multi-touch PC in the kitchen…
    • …to an iPhone on the golf course.
  • And a demo of XenClient to wrap things up.

I remember, a few years ago, sitting through the keynote address at a Citrix conference and watching a similar video on where the technology was headed. But this isn’t smoke and mirrors, and it isn’t a presentation of some future, yet-to-be-released technology. All of this functionality is available now, and it’s all included in a single license model. The future is here. Now.

I think you’ll find that it’s 17 minutes that are well-spent:

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Will My Application Work?

February 11th, 2011 | Posted by Sid Herron in Application Virtualization | Citrix | Microsoft | XenApp - (0 Comments)

We’ve been working with Citrix products pretty much as long as there have been Citrix products, and one of the toughest questions to answer over the years has been, “Will my application run in a Citrix environment?” Often, the answer was, “Ummm…..maybe, but we need to test it.”

Back in the bad old days of DOS and the first few revs of Windows, programmers could get away with taking shortcuts like talking directly to hardware peripherals without using the proper APIs – in fact they could make things run faster on the limited hardware of the day by doing so. But as we moved forward into NT-based execution platforms and multi-user server operating systems, those programming shortcuts played holy you-know-what with application compatibility.

As time went on, more and more of those applications either died off or got re-written to comply with the proper programming conventions. But for a long time you would still find applications that were mostly well-written…but they had shortcomings like hard-coded UNC paths. They might, for example, create some kind of temporary “scratch” file in C:\TEMP, which may be just fine on a single-user PC, but is not fine at all on a Terminal Server that’s supporting 40 or 50 concurrent users, all of whom are trying to write to that file in the C:\TEMP directory and overwriting (or corrupting) one another’s data.

Sometimes a good “Citrix mechanic” could figure out what was going wrong, and manually tweak something (often in the Windows registry, which is not for the faint of heart) that would allow the application to play nicely in a multi-user environment. Over the years, our own engineers were able to make some applications work when their own manufacturers said it couldn’t be done. More recently, application virtualization tools such as Microsoft’s App-V, or the packaging and streaming tool included with XenApp, have made it easier to do things like redirect hard-coded paths to user-specific paths.

We finally reached the point where most 32-bit Windows applications would run just fine in a Terminal Services/XenApp environment, although some manufacturers still won’t support running their applications this way, probably because they don’t want to go to the extra effort of testing and certification. (You know who you are.)

But now we have a whole new level of potential incompatibility: 64-bit execution. Windows Server 2008 R2 is 64-bit only. The latest version of XenApp, v6.0, is designed specifically for 2008 R2. It’s a safe bet that there will never be another 32-bit version of Windows Server, so this is our new reality. And we’re finding that some apps that ran fine under Windows 2003 Terminal Services, and even on 32-bit Windows 2008 platforms, won’t run on 2008 R2. (And don’t even get me started about printing – that’s a whole discussion of its own!)

The good news is that there are a couple of Web resources out there that are devoted to answering the question, “Will my application run?” The first is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Community Verified Compatibility Center. You’ll find separate sections there for Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2. The other site is the Citrix Ready Community Verified site. There you will find information on over 4,000 third-party products including both hardware and software.

Of course, I can’t guarantee that you’re going to find your app listed on either site. But the odds are a heck of a lot higher than they were a few years ago, and that’s a very good thing.

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New XenDesktop Trade-up – and a New License Model

January 17th, 2011 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | Licensing | VDI | Virtualization | XenApp | XenDesktop - (0 Comments)

Today, Citrix announced a new, permanent XenDesktop trade-Up program. (Well, mostly permanent – the special offer to users with expired Subscripion Advantage only runs through the end of 2011.) This new offer shouldn’t come as a big surprise, as all indications were that there would be some kind of upgrade path provided after the last trade-up program expired at the end of 2010. What did come as a surprise is the announcement of a concurrent-use (“CCU”) license model for XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum. The new CCU license is good news for XenDesktop v3 customers, some of whom have not upgraded to XenDektop v4 or v5 because they didn’t want to give up the CCU license model.

The new trade-up program will allow XenApp users to trade up to either the user/device-based license model or the new concurrent use license model. New concurrent use licenses cost roughly 2x the cost of a user/device license. Here are the high points of the new trade-up program:

  • As was the case with the earlier trade-up programs, XenApp users can choose a straight one-for-one deal, where they receive one user/device XenDesktop license for each XenApp license, or, if they trade up all of their XenApp licenses, they can choose a two-for-one deal, where they receive two user/device licenses for each XenApp license. It will just cost you a little more than it would have if you had done it before the end of 2010.
  • Through the end of 2011, customers with expired Subscription Advantage can trade up their licenses for the same price as customers with current Subscription Advantage – and take advantage of the two-for-one deal. After December 31, 2011, it will cost an additional $50/license if your Subscription Advantage is expired.
  • You can now choose to trade up your XenApp licenses one-for-one to XenDesktop concurrent use licenses – although it’s more expensive than trading up to user/device licenses.
  • “Trade-up PLUS” – If you trade up all of your XenApp licenses, you can purchase additional XenDesktop licenses (on the same order) for 10% off the suggested retail price. These additional licenses do not have to be the same product version as the version you’re trading up to, i.e., you could trade up to XenDesktop Platinum Edition, and purchase additional XenDesktop Enterprise licenses (although I’m not sure why you’d want to).
  • “Trade-up MAX” – If you trade up all of your XenApp licenses, and purchase additional XenDesktop licenses for all of your remaining users (on the same order), the additional licenses would be 35% off the suggested retail price. Again, the additional licenses do not have to be the same version as the trade-up licenses. The order must total a minimum of 2,500 XenDesktop licenses, including both the licenses received via the trade-up offer and the additional licenses. Citrix will accept data from Dun & Bradstreet or Hoovers.com, or the user count from an active Microsoft Enterprise Agreement as evidence of how many users you have.

Here is a summary of the new trade-up suggested retail prices:

Trade-up From Trade-up 2:1 (User/Device) Trade-up 1:1 (User/Device) Trade-up 1:1 (CCU)
XD-E XD-P XD-E XD-P XD-E XD-P
XenApp Platinum n/a $185 n/a $135 n/a $220
XenApp Enterprise $130 $275 $85 $225 $155 $330
XenApp Advanced $190 $330 $140 $280 $230 $395
XenApp Fundamentals n/a n/a $140 $280 n/a n/a

Note that if your Subscription Advantage is expired, all of the prices above will go up after December 31, 2011. Note also that if you purchased XenApp Fundamentals bundled with Microsoft Terminal Services CALs, and you want to keep those Terminal Services CALs after the trade-up, you must specify that on your trade-up order. Otherwise, the Terminal services CALs will be rescinded along with the XenApp Fundamentals licenses that you’re trading up.

Citrix has provided a new Trade-Up Calculator that makes it really easy to figure out what your trade-up cost will be. You simply enter your data – how many XenApp licenses you own, how many you’re trading up, what edition your trading up from and to, whether your Subscription Advantage is current, whether you’re trading up all of your licenses, and whether you want to purchase additional licenses along with your trade-up – and the calculator will give you the various options available to you, along with the suggested retail price of each option.

You can also download a Trade-Up Brochure, and a Trade-Up FAQ Document from the Citrix Web site.

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VM Hosted Apps – and Why You Should Care

December 27th, 2010 | Posted by Sid Herron in Application Virtualization | Citrix | Microsoft | VDI | Virtualization | Windows 7 | XenApp | XenDesktop - (4 Comments)

I’ve found that one of the least-understood features of XenApp is “VM hosted apps.” So, gentle reader, I thought it was time to try to bring some clarity to what is actually a very cool piece of technology, and may actually be the solution for how to continue to deliver IE6 for the Web apps that require it, even after you upgrade to Win7. (As you probably know, Microsoft has, so far, taken the position that packaging, streaming, or otherwise delivering IE6 by itself is a violation of their license – much to the consternation of users who have applications that depend on it.)

Why it exists
Anyone who has been around the block a few times with XenApp knows that there are some applications that just don’t play nicely in a multi-user environment. I can tell you that our own engineering team has become quite talented at making applications run in a XenApp environment even when the application vendors themselves said it couldn’t be done. And as the older DOS-based and 16-bit Windows applications gradually die of old age, things in general are getting better. Tools like application isolation and application streaming can help as well. But every now and then, you’ll run into an application that either just won’t run in a Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services) environment, or won’t play nicely with other applications, or misbehaves when more than one person at at time tries to run it.

We also occasionally run into applications that require some kind of hardware “dongle” as a license enforcement mechanism. Other applications have license mechanisms that are dependent on IP or MAC addresses, and/or save user-specific information that will require the application user to go back to the same system each time s/he wants to run the application. Finally, there may be users who need a very high-performance graphics processing unit, e.g., to run a graphics-intensive CAD program.

To help you deal with this, Citrix included a little bit of XenDesktop technology in XenApp, beginning with XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2. It’s only fair, after all, since XenApp functionality is now included in XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum Editions, but while XenDesktop 4 (and now XenDesktop 5) includes all the functionality of XenApp for delivering applications to your XenDesktop users, XenApp’s VM hosted apps feature contains just enough XenDesktop functionality to create virtual – or physical – desktop systems specifically to run individual applications. In fact, that’s all those systems do. You can’t deliver multiple VM hosted apps from a single PC Operating System (well, not very easily anyway).

How it works
First of all, you have to build out the basic components of a XenDesktop farm. Yes, it can share some components with the rest of your infrastructure, but you’re going to need to build a Desktop Delivery Controller, you’re going to need a XenDesktop farm database, you’re going to need either a virtualization host (if you’re going to use virtual PC instances) or some physical PCs or blades, and you’re going to need an Operating System image with the target application installed into it. You may also deploy Provisioning Services if you want to stream the OS image either to your virtual infrastructure or to your blade PCs. In short, you go through the same process that you would go through if you were putting together a XenDesktop infrastructure to deliver a virtual desktop…but in this case, we’re delivering an application, not a desktop.

Here’s a high-level overview of the process:

  • Create an OS image.
  • Install the XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent into the image.
  • Install the desired application. If the application needs “helper apps” (e.g., an accounting app may require Microsoft Excel to display reports), you can install them too. You can even install the Citrix Online Plugin, Offline Plugin, Single Sign-On Plugin, etc., if you want to launch those helper apps on a XenApp server or have XenApp stream them down to the desktop image for local execution.
  • Create a shortcut for your desired application. If you really need to launch multiple applications, or launch something like the Citrix Online Plugin, create a script or batch file to launch the applications you want to launch, then create a shortcut to that script or batch file instead.
  • Place that shortcut into the C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Service\SeamlessInitialProgram folder of your desktop image. NOTE: If you try to put more than one shortcut in that folder, you will get an error!
  • Using the Citrix XenDesktop tools, convert your image into a VHD if you’re going to be streaming it via Provisioning Services or deploying it in a virtual environment. Like any other XenDesktop image, it can be a private image that is either preassigned to a specific user or assigned on first logon, or it can be a public image that you use with Provisioning Services to boot and run multiple instances.
  • Publish that application. It can be displayed via the Citrix Web Interface right alongside other applications that are being delivered via XenApp.

When the user clicks the icon, the application will be launched within the desktop OS, but will run as a “seamless app,” meaning that it looks and feels to the user as though it was running locally (just as applications published from the XenApp farm do). The user will never know, or care, which apps are running on XenApp servers and which are running on desktop OS instances.

Just as you would with any other XenDesktop deployment, you can configure, via the Desktop Delivery Controller, how many OS instances you want running in an idle state at any given point in time during the day – this eliminates the need for the user to wait for the PC/OS to boot before launching the app. Remember, though, that a desktop OS is not multiuser…meaning that if you have ten people who may need to run that application at the same time, you have to provide resources for ten virtual PC instances (or ten blades, as the case may be). And if you have two different applications that need to be deployed this way, you’re probably going to need to provide separate resources for each application. (Yes, I suppose you could create a script that launched both apps – but do you really want your users to click on a single icon and launch two completely different apps? Never mind the fact that the users who need one of the apps may have no overlap with the users who need the other one.)

Here are a couple more things to remember:

  • Your users are going to be remotely interacting with a Microsoft Desktop OS. That means you’re going to have to comply with Microsoft’s VDI licensing requirements. We’ve beat that horse to death elsewhere in this blog, so we won’t go into it again here.
  • Citrix never expected that VM hosted apps would be used for more than one or two percent of all the applications you may need to deploy in a XenApp environment. But sometimes that one or two percent represent business-critical apps, even if they’re only business-critical to a handful of your users.
  • You do not need XenDesktop licenses to do this. Users who launch a VM hosted app will consume a concurrent-use license from your XenApp license server. Users who launch multiple apps, e.g., a VM hosted app and several other apps delivered via XenApp, will still consume a single license.
  • You could also use VM hosted apps to quickly deploy an application while you’re figuring out how to make that application run on XenApp. Once you’ve figured that out, just re-publish the application. The users will never know – they’ll go to the same Web Interface and click on the same icon, and the app will launch.

So – back where we started this: If you’re one of those who are struggling to figure out how you’re going to continue to support IE6 in your environment while still migrating your users off of Windows XP, this is one potential answer for you. Deploy IE6 on Windows XP using VM hosted apps. Your users will never see the XP desktop, so they’ll never know.

A very cool tool to have in your toolbox, in our opinion.

If you want to know more about VM hosted apps, here are a couple of videos from Citrix TV. The first is from the XenApp Expert Series, with our old buddy Vinny Sosa (on the left) and Modesto Tabares talking about various use cases for the feature. This one will take you about 25 minutes if you watch the whole thing:

…and here’s a more technical video from the Learning Lap series that actually takes you through the installation and configuration of VM hosted apps. This one is about 20 minutes long:

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Interview With the Wyse Guys – Part 2 of 2

October 22nd, 2010 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | Microsoft | VDI | Windows 7 | Wyse | XenApp | XenDesktop - (0 Comments)

This is the conclusion of Steve Parlee’s interview with Josh Osborn and Dave Jolley of Wyse. In Part 1, they discussed the Xenith “zero-client” terminal and the new Windows Embedded Standard 7 thin client terminal. In this concluding segment, they talk in more detail about how the Xenith gets its configuration information, as well as the reliability and power savings of Wyse terminal devices compared with desktop PCs.

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Interview With the Wyse Guys – Part 1 of 2

October 21st, 2010 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | Microsoft | VDI | Windows 7 | Wyse | XenApp | XenDesktop - (0 Comments)

Recently, our own Steve Parlee sat down with Josh Osborn, the Wyse Regional Sales Manager for the Northwest, and Dave Jolley, our local Wyse Sales Engineer, to talk about what’s new in the Wyse product line. In this video, they talk about the Xenith “zero-client” device that was introduced last quarter, and the new Windows Embedded Standard 7 device.

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The Cost of a Windows 7 Migration

September 8th, 2010 | Posted by Sid Herron in Citrix | Microsoft | VDI | Virtualization | Windows 7 | XenApp | XenClient | XenDesktop - (1 Comments)

According to an August 26 Gartner press release, your Windows 7 migration may have a painful impact on your budget. The heart of the problem is summed up in this quote from Gartner managing vice president Charles Smulders:

Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle. Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.

Because of this time crunch, Gartner says that you really have only one of three options:

  1. Accelerate your PC replacement schedule. This obviously will impact your capital budget.
  2. Upgrade some of your existing PCs. Unfortunately, not all of your PCs are likely to support Windows 7 without some upgrades. In fact, Gartner estimates that 25% of the installed base of PCs will require some kind of hardware upgrade to run Windows 7. Also, unless you’re prepared to stretch out the life of these upgraded PCs beyond your usual upgrade cycle, those users are going to end up being migrated twice, not once, during the next four years. Gartner’s estimate of the migration cost per PC, assuming a large enterprise with 10,000 PCs where all PCs are upgraded: between $1,274 and $2,069, depending on how well-managed the environment is to begin with, which, by the way, is not a heck of a lot less than their estimated migration cost if you do just replace them.
  3. Migrate some users to a “hosted virtual desktop” instead of a new PC.

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know were we stand on the “hosted virtual desktop” issue. To most people, the term “hosted virtual desktop” refers to a virtual instance of a PC OS (e.g., Windows 7) running on a virtualized infrastructure such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. However, this is only one way to deliver a virtual desktop to a user. Other ways include:

  • Delivering a shared desktop from a server using Remote Desktop Services and XenApp (we’ve been doing this for years).
  • Streaming the PC OS from a common, shared image to a physical PC across the local area network. (Note that this would still require that the hardware in the physical PC be able to support the new OS.)
  • Streaming the PC OS to a client-side hypervisor (XenClient) so the client device can be disconnected from the network and continue to operate.

We’re also of the opinion that no single one of these approaches will fit all use cases. But the nice thing about Citrix XenDesktop is that you can mix and match any and all of these use cases to the needs of your users, all under a single license model.

It still isn’t going to be inexpensive. As Gartner points out, you have to build the virtual infrastructure to deliver those desktops, which will involve both capital costs and labor costs. Anyone who tells you that VDI will save you money in immediate capital costs compared with buying new PCs is not being straight with you. But you can, according to other studies, save up to 40% in your “Total Cost of Ownership” (“TCO”).

And your other alternatives aren’t inexpensive either. So why not take advantage of this opportunity to change the way you deploy and manage PCs? Take a look at what you can do with XenDesktop today, think about how much easier and less costly your Windows 7 roll out would be if you already had XenDesktop in place, and then think about how much easier and less costly your next major PC upgrade project will be if you deploy XenDesktop now.

Windows 7 is going to impact your budget one way or another. Gartner estimates that if you just decide to accelerate your upgrade cycle, the percentage of your IT budget that you spend on PCs will need to increase somewhere between 20% and 60% in 2011 and 2012. If, as in many organizations, your PC spending accounts for 15% of your overall IT budget, that means that in 2011 and 2012 you’re going to be spending between 18% and 25% of your budget on PCs instead of 15%. And that will impact other projects.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Gartner also predicts that the demand for “highly qualified Windows 7 migration IT personnel” will exceed supply in 2011 and 2012. Remember those discussions about supply & demand back in Economics 101? Yep, that means that IT labor costs are going to go up. In fact, Gartner predicts that the labor shortage, and higher costs, will persist into 2013 as organizations realize that they’re behind in their planned migration schedule and try to figure out what to do about it.

Mr. Smulders had a recommendation on that as well: “Begin talks with suppliers now about putting in place contracts that can deliver flexible levels of resources at a fixed rate over the migration period.”

If you want to purchase a copy of the full report from Gartner, you can order one through their Web site. Or, if you just want to take Mr. Smulders’ advice, you can reach us at (206) 774-0619, or by email at sales@mooselogic.com, or by using our handy information request form. We’re here to help.

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