Tag Archives: Xenapp

New XenDesktop Trade-up - and a New License Model

January 17, 2011 2:35 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

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.

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing, VDI, Virtualization, XenApp, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

VM Hosted Apps - and Why You Should Care

December 27, 2010 9:22 pm ⋅ 6 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 FilesCitrixICA ServiceSeamlessInitialProgram 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:

Posted in: Application Virtualization, Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, Virtualization, Windows 7, XenApp, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Interview With the Wyse Guys - Part 2 of 2

October 22, 2010 3:38 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

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.

Posted in: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, Windows 7, Wyse, XenApp, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

Interview With the Wyse Guys - Part 1 of 2

October 21, 2010 11:26 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

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.

Posted in: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, Windows 7, Wyse, XenApp, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Cost of a Windows 7 Migration

September 8, 2010 4:00 pm ⋅ 2 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.

Posted in: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, Virtualization, Windows 7, XenApp, XenClient, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,