Caught a tweet from @robupham to @tom_howarth today regarding Citrix Synergy and it startled me somewhat. Enough to write about it anyway – it regards the announcement of Citrix XenClient.

Last year, VMware announced the Client Virtualisation Platform (CVP). A type 1 client hypervisor to go head to head with XenClient. 15 months later, XenClient is here but it’s pretty quiet on the CVP front. Annoying because I see the client hypervisor as one of the boons for a VDI deployment.

As has been stated many a time, the Capex arguments for VDI are non existent. It’s all about Opex. In the Enterprise, I see the client side hypervisor as greatly reducing the costs related to desktop/laptop lifecycles.

By abstracting the user’s environment from the hardware, lifecycle management becomes a case of waiting for the courier to deliver the replacement. No acceptance testing, no imaging or pre-staging. Glorious.

In addition, there’s also the promise of near native desktop performance using the client hypervisor. Sounds like a win win.

The problem is, without CVP, we’re left with offline/local desktops in View. This is all very good if you use a BYOPC model, but if you don’t have this, the management overhead per user doubles. Two OS deployments (updates, troubleshooting et al), two copies of AntiVirus and likely duplicated applications. That sounds like a nightmare scenario to me.

Which leads me back to the original tweet. Having tested both XenDesktop and View, my experience is that XenDesktop is more mature and has a far greater feature set but View has a better core infrastructure and is far more simpler. VMware are adding features so that they can ‘catch up’ to Citrix, but with announcements like this and huge gaps in the View product set (remote access, end point performance tracking, etc), it feels like VMware are constantly one step behind at the moment.

Therefore I can safely say, I’m a VMware customer and I want a client hypervisor. Am I alone?