Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, or XenDesktop) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application virtualization solution from Citrix.
$375
NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
NVIDIA Virtual PC software & NVIDIA GPUs, including NVIDIA A16, accelerate productivity apps to deliver an incredible user experience — so today’s worker can seamlessly access the tools they need from anywhere.
DaaS is ideal in large-scale environments that require centralized, secure management. Remote workforces at large organizations. Highly regulated industries like finance. It allows for easy security and monitoring over one aspect instead of multiple remote machines. DaaS is not ideal for organizations with small budgets due to the pricing and organizations with lousy network connectivity. This would make the end-user experience terrible.
Nvidia GRID is the only real ready-made hardware solution available for streaming game services, 3D graphics acceleration in Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, and 3D enhanced streaming apps. Grid is also great for processing large quantities of small data-sets, such as financial, trading, science, astronomy, and much more. Grid is also well known for digital currency mining, such as Bitcoin.
The cost for Nvidia GRID capable hardware is still very high, but is & has been dropping fairly rapidly.
Latency is a large problem for "interaction" based systems (Gaming, remote desktop use) and requires high-speed data, and hosting close to the client.
No real solutions for smaller businesses, but cloud hosting providers like SoftLayer are beginning to offer affordable hosted grid-capable environments.
Getting the environment setup took me three months of off and on work, with 3 complete rebuilds of the environment. Utilizing the WebUI to access the environment had presented so many random issues that we had to require end users to use the Citrix Reciever App. As it was the only stable solution. Aside from that, it hasn't required much admin intervention since the stand-up was completed.
The performance of XenDesktop is the best in the industry because of the fine-tuned protocol and years of updating. Overall, I don't think there is a better performer on the market. The question is if the added complexity of running XenDesktop is really worth the performance gain. While the latest version of XenDesktop is the easiest to deploy so far, it is still more challenging than the competitors.
The support is great when you get an engineer that knows what they are doing but getting that individual sometimes takes a while. Overall, they are professional and polite and competent in their knowledge. Sometimes the cases are open for an extended period of time which becomes very frustrating when dealing with critical issues.
Take it slow and read the directions each step of the way. If you are not familiar with Citrix products, use a reseller or other experienced engineer to assist you in the setup of your environment
Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops is platform agnostic (we can use any underlying hypervisor technology) and really flexible for any use case. Using a golden image and provisioning it (with Machine Creation Services or Provisioning Services) is powerful and really straightforward, compared to the complexity in Microsoft RDS of maintaining a coherent farm, or the limitation of VMware Horizon to run on VMware Products.
XenApp has allowed us to continue support of legacy applications and all access of those applications to users across the globe with any device.
XenApp can also manage software licenses by restricting number of users, number of concurrent sessions, or combination of both to required specification.
While initial investment in XenApp can be costly, continuing support and upgrade are very cost effective and product stability is excellent.
While there are competing products from Microsoft and VMware, when it comes to remote application access, XenApp is the best of breed.
Allows us to simplify all of our VDI designs, as power users can be managed like all other cloud users, instead of requiring individual systems.
Provides a way of offering a substantial processing increase for computing/calculations over and above what additional CPUs could offers.
Offers the only "ready-made" solution for on-demand gaming services, after Sony purchased OnLive, and provides an affordable method for startups to enter the Industry.