Citrix Dramatically Improves Economics of Desktop Virtualization to Drive Mainstream Adoption

Citrix announced dramatic improvements in scalability across multiple virtual desktop delivery models to address the needs of every user in the enterprise at a significantly lower cost. Citrix XenDesktop™ 4 with FlexCast™ delivery technology has now been verified to deliver up to 125 VDI-based desktops, 500 hosted shared desktops and 5,000 local streamed desktops from a single physical server tuned to take advantage of the unique innovations of the latest Intel® Xeon® processor™ 5500 technology. These numbers represent orders of magnitude higher scalability than first generation VDI-only products, enabling IT organizations to deploy desktop virtualization solutions enterprise wide with less datacenter infrastructure and significantly lower operating costs. The new scalability data and testing methodology is available today in a new desktop virtualization reference architecture. This advancement in virtual desktop scalability is especially significant because it enables enterprises to deliver virtual desktops to more users at a far lower cost.

The latest Citrix scalability tests were carefully designed to use a mainstream server configuration. Desktop workload simulations incorporated a real-world mix of line-of-business apps, office productivity apps, web browsing and multimedia. The results demonstrate that XenDesktop 4 with FlexCast can deliver up to 40 times more users (5,000 per physical server) than competing solutions which only support VDI-based desktops and max out at just over 100 users per physical server. This makes XenDesktop the only solution on the market that can truly deliver enterprise-wide virtual desktop deployments in a cost-effective way. With XenDesktop 4, desktop virtualization can now be implemented with 20 percent lower infrastructure costs.

New XenDesktop Reference Architecture Provides Guide for Large-Scale Deployments
Citrix also made available today a reference architecture for large-scale deployments that can help guide organizations who are looking at rolling out virtual desktops to a broad set of users. The new XenDesktop reference architecture is based on numerous real-world large-scale XenDesktop implementations, and provides a baseline model for a modular approach to designing and scaling to meet the needs of an entire enterprise. It provides a starting point and a solid understanding of the components and capabilities of each FlexCast delivery model, enabling customers to assemble a desktop virtualization architecture that’s tailored to each environment’s unique needs.

The XenDesktop reference architecture and set of guidelines will be maintained online so that customers can access the latest data. More information about XenDesktop 4 and the reference architecture can be found at www.citrix.com/xendesktop.

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