By VSM News Staff published: Thursday, August 07 2008
To view the original video of this interview click here .
VSM:How are things going so far at the show?
SC: Oh, it's been fantastic, thank you. It's really a terrific opportunity for us to hear from customers in terms of Xen Server, Xen Desktop, even Xen adding new features – it's just tremendously exciting. And of course, everything that we do here in my division, which is all around Xen, that's all working as part of that. It's the foundation for everything that we do, so we're very excited.
VSM:And Xen Desktop is really the big buzz around the convention this year.
SC: Yes, you know, Citrix had Desktop Server as a product previously, and then indeed we had customers using that in production, um, for quite some time, so this is really a release of two of the products, so it's not a wonder they're product at all, and it's terrific. It has this really massively to-scale VDI, and we think that it addresses primary objections that customers had had to VDI today, to which is price, end-user experience, and complexity, and those are the key things that you have to get right if this whole use case is going to fly. So, let me give you the details on that. Price, ok, pretty obvious – but it's not just the price that we charge the customer, it's the cost of the infrastructure overall. What we do with Provisioning Server…it's just a capability set that's built in there, is you can reduce the storage costs and the storage by a factor of a thousand for large deployments, and you can reduce the amount of management that you've got to do in terms of maintaining and updating those OS images and everything else by the same order of magnitude, so very, very powerful in that respect.
VSM:May I just interrupt you for a second? You talk about Provisioning Server - now that's part of the whole product line, right? From platinum down?
SC: I'm delighted to say we're proud to be just a component, and Provisioning Server is just a component of Xen Server, too, and Xen Server is just a component of Xen Desktop, right? So, you know, and that's also part of the deliberate experience that is we don't believe that the desktop IT administrator needs to be a server virtualization administrator, we just think that's one profoundly problematic. And so the whole objective in terms of ease of use also applies to the administrator who really should do exactly four things to get a desktop up and delivered – you know, install the guests that they want to deliver, install the apps that they want to deliver, you know, provision the users in their roles, and push a button and you're in the business. You know, notice no notion of a virtualization management console here. That's not what you have to do. And so, making it easier for organizations to adopt virtual desktop infrastructure is really important, and that means you don't have to retrain your whole IT department. So, making the delivery of desktops a key function, which is as simple as it is to manage desktops today.
VSM: And also, I wanted to add making the desktop user experience the same as what they're accustomed to. That brings me to one of the things that I saw at the show, which I think is very exciting, is the fact that now you can have that rich environment through a thin client, no matter what the end point is.
SC: So, high-performance video – up to that device – up to the desktop appliance you know, an immersive PC experience. If it doesn't feel like a PC, the use case is not going to fly. And when I say “feel like a PC,” everything's got to work. Rich media experience – you’ve got to be able to doaudio and video; I've got to be able to plug in after-market devices – USB devices and so on. It's all got to work, and then the whole thing has to be manageable. The big problem that most people have had in early VDI deployments has been the guy who phones up and says, “I can't see my virtual desktop!” and then all you have the ability to do is look at your virtual center console and say, “Gosh, I can see the VMs running, but between you and me, there could be 2,000 miles, and we don't know where the bits went.” And so building in the management and supportability for that user is absolutely critical. EdgeSight is in there – it gives us management and the whole line of sight, just like you have management of dial tone for your phone. And then we have an ability to manage the SLA that is delivered to that end user. Also included in their desktop is another really cool thing that Citrix has called GoToAssist, which is if you are a desktop user and you need support, you click the button, and with the built-in GoToAssist function, at least somebody can assist you.
VSM:Kind of like the OnStar button?
SC: The OnStar button for your desktop. So, managing the user's transition into a virtual desktop infrastructure and managing their experience is a key component.
VSM:What are some of the other exciting things that Citrix has been showing at the site?
SC: In general, from a Xen Server perspective, we're showing what's coming up in Product 2 with high availability and also our storage architecture, which we think is very exciting. It's allowing us to work at a very advanced level with the leading storage vendors. XenApp’s been a great partner there. There are other vendors coming along on the list very quickly. What that really allows us to do is leverage the new features that storage vendors have put into their products so the key things that tend to clog up virtualized environments like SnapShot and cloning and backup and HA and DR can be done in the storage domain without any overhead on the virtualized server itself or the cluster, um, and by just using the native functions that are provided by the storage vendors, we think that that's very cool. It also allows us to get all of the existing utilities and backup and DR facilities and people who have bought, they just work because that's the whole point. Then in HA, that's about providing, you know, all of the capability that's required to make sure that the VMs survive single or multiple server failures within a cluster, so as you do this, as you add new guests to your cluster, we can tell you ahead of time how many server failures you can survive with your various VMs prioritize those that will be automatically restarted, but also working with a partner marathon so that that architecture can just be extended into four or five ninths full tolerance. When Product 2 ships, all of that will be available.
VSM:And no solid data when that's going to happen, right? Later this year?
SC: We have it here and it's running at the show, so now we're going into beta very shortly. Obviously in something like HA and full tolerance, you've got to know that it really works, so bidding it up really hard is an important part of what we do.
VSM:It's been a pleasure speaking with you today. As always, you can find out more information by checking out our website – www.virtual-strategy.com, or go to Citrix.com and download a copy of Xen
