Trade in XenApp for VMware View

As a reaction on the Citrix program to trade in your VMware View licenses for XenDesktop, VMware comes with a program to trade in your XenApp licenses for VMware View.

The trade in program is quite simple: For the price of 3 years XenApp SA (€ 182,-) you will get View Premier and 3 years SnS.

VMware’s offer differs from the one from Citrix in a few way’s.

Why is the View offer so interesting:

First off all View offers 1/3 the complexity compared to XenApp / XenDesktop. Lowest solution complexity with fewer installation steps and a simple, integrated management interface.

Second View requires half the number of servers for a 10K user deployment enabling savings for both CapEx and OpEx and it provides a concurrent licensing model which provides better customer value.

View offers better integration of all the components. View 4.5 integrates virtual desktops + application virtualization and persona management Integrated VDI + client virtualization solution with single management architecture.

This all based on the best hypervisor platform there is: vSphere.

Tags: View, VMware, XenDesktop

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 08:00 and is filed under Citrix, Licensing, View, VMware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

About Alex Muetstege

Alex Muetstege works as a Solution Architect for Imtech ICT. He currently provide hosting services for VMGuru.nl. In everyday life he usually does a lot of general IT infrastructure stuff. Messaging and collaboration is his main area of expertise. He is a virtualization enthusiast/newbie/probie but not a lot more than that according to himself. In 2011 VMware awarded him the VMware vExpert status for his community efforts.

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Techboy

Never read so much horse sh!t in my life!

Citrix offer ANY amount of licences for customers to trade in. The 2 for 1 offer applies if you do all of the XA licences (which still works out cheaper!).

Pay $225 for 1 View Premier license with 3 years sns
Pay $450 for 2 View Premier licenses with 3 years sns

OR

Pay $135 for 1 XD4 Enterprise license & 2 years addon SA, $200 for XD4 Platinum license & 2 years addon SA
Pay $235 for 2 XD4 Enterprise licenses & 2 years addon SA, $335 for 2 XenDesktop Platinum licenses & 2 years addon SA

Year 2 & 3 SA for XenDesktop Enterprise is $35 vs. $50 for XenApp Enterprise SA, and XenDesktop Platinum SA is $50 vs. $75 for XenApp Platinum SA.

So onto the semi-technical points…

1/3 as complex? Lets not confuse functionality for simplicity here. Any VMware admin could get View up and running easily and any Citrix admin could get XD4 up and running quickly too. I've never EVER heard of an enterprise admin wanting click click next done for a corporate solution (gmail vs Exchange??). View is 1/3 less _functional_, has a crap method of application deployment (wait, doesnt have any deployment of apps, security of apps, only an old method of turning an app install into an .exe – great for copying games as one VMW SE told me last year) and remember the key thing about XenApp, it's traditionally about deploying…. Apps! Which is what businesses run on. Not desktop operating systems. So replace a complete app deployment suite with ThinApp. Right, makes as much sense as replacing your Ferrari with a Oldsmobile.

1/2 the cost for 10,000 desktops? First off VMW don't have 10,000 desktops (VMs, as that's all you can do) in any production environment so this is a bold claim (their $1M 'seats' are given away as part of ESX FFS and aren't production otherwise Citrix would say Password Manager is sold to all their platinum customers). Also if you tot up the storage required for 10,000 desktops, the hosts required for that many VMs and the cost of managing 10,000 desktops it is not 1/2 the cost of doing it right. Firstly it's widely known that View does not scale. Customers know this. VMware knows this. Citrix knows this. Why would you treat all your users the same and give them an expensive VM when all they need to use are apps? If you can get 100 VMs running on a VMWare host for XP then ok. If 80% of those users need a Windows desktop and corp apps you could get 1000 users running a XenApp desktop which looks exactly like Win7, works from a central image, is managed centrally and has 10 years of rock solid PRODUCTION use all over the world. If you have 20% of peplpe who DO need VDI then just give them a VM. The right desktop for the right user means the cost will be less overall. Thin clones do not scale as there is no central management – make ANY change to that initial VM you're cloning from and where do all the changes your users did go? THEY GET DELETED and no work RES does or that profile disk (which Madden talked down last year) will help at all either. So lots of annoyed users there not to mention the MASSIVE storage costs associated with thin cloning as the size of the clones will just grow and grow. Unless you mange them from a gold image right. which isn't possible. so you cant.

Full end to end? Rubbish. No enterprise application control. A protocol which cannot work for lots of users over a WAN. No endpoint security. No VPN support for their premier remote protocol. NO SUPPORT FOR WINDOWS 7. A profile management solution that NOBODY uses (appsense, even sepago is more widely used!).

I wish VMW would stop spreading all this FUD as the people who evaluate VDI will see right through this as they have half a brain and will test View, XenDesktop 4, Quest et al. Try all of them and pick the one that suits you the best.

Admins are not stupid but if you think they'll swallow this then VMW must be and it stinks of desperation.
Tony

XenDesktop SA is half the cost of XenApp SA so that SA cost isn't doubled, it's a wash….
Arjan

Dear Techboy,

Thankx for your reaction. It is a typical reaction of a “techboy”. How good your techical knowledge is the worst is your knowledge of what customers want. Of course everyone is looking for the holy grail despite in real live this doesnot exists. Complexity is not very objective measurement. What maybe complex for me wasn't for Einstein..fact is that most people in the world have brains not like Einstein !!

Try to be objective, have an open mind and give answer to the following questions..
1) How long will it take to deploy XenDesktop in my environment?

2) How many XenDesktop customers are deploying VMware ESX for the backend and why?

3) Which XenDesktop reference customers have deployed 1000+ seats in production? How long did it take and what is the TCO?

4) How do you deploy and manage different types of desktops? Can they all be managed with a single management console?

5) What is the cost per virtual desktop in a 1,000 user XenDesktop implementation?

6) What is my year 2 and 3 SA if I trade-up with Citrix?
Techboy

Hi Arjan,
Here's a few answers from your post.

Trust me, I know exactly what customers want because I listen to them and match their requirements, not one technology, to their needs if they want something that happens to lock you in and delivers a lower standard of user experience then I'll put in View (as I did once last year) but that was only because they were given it for free and couldn't leave their VMware contract for another two years.

1.) Hard to tell as you don't give much info on what users, where they are, what apps etc but I'll assume it's a fully loaded question because View is quick to setup, no doubt about it! We're both likely from the same background and likely do similar jobs but setting up xendesktop probably takes about a day, all in all, from scratch. Recently I've gone from zero setup to 450 users in a day – mainly thanks to provisioning services as that's a huge time saver – this was 100 VM Win7s (VDI) and 350 using XenApp as they only needed a desktop and apps, not a VM's isolated processing. This day setup was including building up the Windows 7 image and a XenApp image with the applications on it too. As you can use one image (properly) for the Win7 desktops and one for the XenApp ones (which looks exactly like W7 too). If we wanted to grow that to 10,000 users it could be done with a couple of clicks and all up and running in a few hours – so long as the storage and VM hosts are there in the first place, of course

2.) The split with VMware customers using ESX/vSphere in their environment is about 70% from the ones I've dealt with. They use this because they've already paid a fortune for the service and are in subs. Also they're trained in it, understand it, and since their main business servers (including XenApp servers for 99% of them!) all run on it, they find it's the easiest path to getting into VDI. Also worth noting the XenServer/HyperV split is 20/10.

However, when I've put in XD it's rarely been a case of the desktop VMs going onto ESX. In 90% of cases the customers have kept the core servers on ESX but have chosen to put the virtual desktops (and PVS in some cases) on XenServer. This is because it's FREE and if a customer decides they have a user base that requires 500 Windows & images, that's a lot of VMware hosts they'll need to buy to cope. With XenServer (and HyperV in most cases) they only have to buy the hardware. Personally I don't really care what hypervisor they use as it's whatever the customer is happiest with which is the most important thing. When the VMware subs come up then they'll no doubt want to look at more cost effective options without losing functionality. HyperV will take market share in the coming years so I don't really care about the Citrix vs VMWare stuff in server virtualisation.

3.) Since I'm not privvy to internal Citrix customers I can only go on what's on their site. The key thing to remember is that not all users in a company need an expensive VM desktop operating system. They offer a lot of power and functionality but the types of users who DO need a VM to do their job do not make up 100% of the user base. This is why Citrix has pushed their Flexcast idea. Giving the power users VMs of Win7 with 1GB ram each etc to do powerful work is one option. For users who just need a desktop and office apps or general productivity apps then a XenApp based desktop makes more sense. This has a much higher user density and thus a much higher ROI than just VDI. It's this mix of giving users the RIGHT desktop for RIGHT job which means the Citrix solution gives a much higher ROI. There's a nice reference on Citrix.com about a UK job hunter who saves 6 figures in under 6 months just on power costs using this model. http://flexcast.citrix.com has a good explanation for doing this.

A few good reference customers I've found are

25,000 for Swisscom
http://www.citrix.com/English/aboutCitrix/caseS…

10,000 + for the Dutch MOD
http://www.citrix.com/English/aboutCitrix/caseS…

And lets not forget the 140,000 XenDesktop 4.0 licences the UK government bought last year which VMware lost out on for the desktop but were the server virtualisation vendort of choice – everyone wins there

I don't see why you're pushing on how long it takes to deliver as I could deliver 3500 desktops in under an hour but to complete a project correctly, on budget, on time and on the mark the customer needs does take time – with ALL technologies. I know one company who took 2 years to rollout SP2 and a new AV system (don't they sound like they need desktop virtualisation ASAP!)

4.) Delivery and management is mainly used around provisioning services which means you can use one image for all your desktops and for your servers. In reality some users might have desktops on their own so they can install apps etc, developers are a good example. As for one console? They don't have that yet, which you know (reading from your VMware battlecard, page 1 probably) but in reality the main functions are done from one MMC for me, which has the XenDesktops and the XenApp stuff in it. I dip into Provisioning Services console once a month when I roll up my windows patches into the base images. I also have separate consoles for DNS, DHCP, Virtual Centre, Exchange and also for my old Quake Arena server. I work in IT, it's not an issue for me but I do get your point. Thankfully that should be in the next version of XenDesktop and now they've got a UI director it should look much better than the current consoles. Doesn't View have several different places to do tasks as well? Just because they're all started from one central console doesn't mean that's a single management console, but that's just my view. Consoles are nice but one day everything will be in system center for most vendors anyway.

1000 user deployment? No idea as that's too vague to accurately answer. What do the users do on their desktops? what are their needs? do they already have storage in place? Are the users connecting from the LAN, remote offices, VPNs, home offices, over the air? Do they use a variety of devices; thin clients, home PCs, Macs, phones, insecure computers? Do they have any way to monitor their users & desktops? Do they already have a hypervisor in place and do they have space on it for 1000 users?

See what I'm getting at? Costing up 1000 users is not just about licencing costs for the products as there are many factors. I will say that to do the typical split of 800 task workers and 200 dev workers will always turn out cheaper than 1000 View users. That's the whole point of flexcast. If your job was to deliver papers to your block would you use a bicycle or a car? If you then had to deliver heavy crates of cheese would you use a bike or a car? The right tool, for the right job. And it's easy to move a users from one to the other simply by moving user groups in Active Directory – curses another console!

5.) The Citrix/MS rescue offer is free for the first year isn't it so after that it's regular pricing unless I'm mistaken. By then you'll already start seeing cost savings. However the XenApp to XenDesktop4.0 trade-in offer, the one that VMware are aiming at as well, is HALF PRICE as someone else has pointed out.

In the end the customer decides what they want and people like you and I deliver it. I do not care what technology someone uses, it's their decision, but I know what's fact and fiction and it's my duty to the customers I have to point that out.

Techboy
VMware SE

- moderated -
http://www.vmguru.nl Anne Jan Elsinga

Can we please keep it civilized? There's no need for name calling.
VMWare SE

Youre still an idiot…you know that right?