Bare Metal Battle: Microsoft and Citrix vs. the World -- Virtualization Review

Bare Metal Battle: Microsoft and Citrix vs. the World

Microsoft leads partners to side with Citrix in virtualization's newest battle.

By John K. Waters
07/01/2010

The battle of the client hypervisors is on, and Microsoft channel partners are right in the middle of it. Many Microsoft partners have close alliances with virtualization market leader VMware Inc., but Microsoft is encouraging those partners to consider the potential of a new bare-metal client hypervisor -- the world's first -- which its longtime technology partner Citrix Systems Inc. just announced.

Citrix beat its chief rival, VMware, to the punch when it unveiled its new XenClient at the company's annual Synergy conference, held in San Francisco in May. Citrix developed the client-side hypervisor with Intel Corp., optimizing it for the chip-maker's vPro processors to accelerate the delivery of client-side virtualization. XenClient is designed to let organizations deploy centrally managed virtual PC images to run natively on notebook or desktop systems, even if they're not connected.

During his keynote address launching the new client hypervisor, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton described XenClient as a "super fast, 64-bit, bad-to-the bone hypervisor -- a true Type 1 hypervisor that bonds to the laptop and delivers a bare-metal experience to the apps and OS and things that run on top of it."

The company has made a trial version available for download, and promises general availability later this year. "Corporate laptops are the last mile in extending the full benefits of desktop virtualization to all users in the enterprise," Templeton said.

Both Citrix and VMware promised in 2008 to deliver a client-side hypervisor in 2009. Now that Citrix is a step closer to delivering on that promise, Microsoft channel partners have some questions to consider. Is now the time to begin working with Citrix (or extend work with the company), or is it wiser to wait and see what VMware comes up with? Maybe it's better to wait for a pure Microsoft solution? But also, how important is a client hypervisor in the overall ecosystem versus the traditional Windows desktop and mobile clients?

"Corporate laptops are the last mile in extending the full benefits of desktop virtualization to all users in the enterprise."

Mark Templeton, CEO, Citrix Systems Inc.

"I think Citrix is making inroads, but VMware still has a lot of the server market," says Robert Bello, vice president of sales and a partner with Bit By Bit Computer Consultants Inc., a New York-based Gold Certified Partner that has partnerships with Citrix and VMware. "People like the [VMware] products -- they do a great job with the product and they have strong research development."

That said, as a Microsoft partner, Bello says there's growing interest from customers in Citrix -- and the Microsoft partnership with the company is definitely having a persuasive impact. "It's an interesting battle," he explains. "I think Citrix aligns itself with Microsoft very well in that battle. I think they have a very strong story to tell as they come into the market together." Many customers are now prone to seek quotes from both VMware and Citrix, he points out.

Though he hasn't yet tested the new Citrix bare-metal client hypervisor, Bello believes it will up the ante for Citrix. Certainly it adds new capabilities for client-side virtualization that aren't available to mainstream customers.

"I look at the client hypervisor as technology with the potential to enable better manageability, easier support and easier migration," says Mark Margevicius, a Gartner Inc. research director. "But Windows is still very important and clients need to stay with that."

The bare-metal client hypervisor is essentially the same technology used on servers, but designed for a client machine. Although it's possible to use a server hypervisor on a client machine, it's not made for that hardware, so you lose things like support for USB devices, graphics devices and other features essential to the client.

Citrix XenClient is a Type 1 hypervisor, a native hypervisor that runs on bare metal in client machines. Existing Type 2 hypervisors -- which have been around for a long time and allow users to do things like run Windows on a Mac (Player, Parallels) -- aren't as secure as the native versions, because Type 2s run on an operating system and that OS can be hacked.

The hypervisor serves as "a foundation for centrally managed OS/user environments to be streamed, cached and executed locally on desktop/laptop devices, including off-network mobility," according to a statement by both Citrix and Intel. Citrix says it already has serious momentum on the desktop: In the past two quarters, it sold 1.5 million licenses for its XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product. Broad support for the new XenClient could be a harbinger of things to come in Redmond as well.

"If and when Microsoft adopts a client hypervisor as part of Windows, it's likely it will be Xen-based," Margevicius predicts. "This is especially true if Intel continues to adopt it further. Microsoft, Intel and Citrix: It's a trifecta of sorts."

Dell and HP to Offer Citrix New XenClient-Based PCs

Two marquee OEMs have added their support for the new bare-metal client hypervisor from Citrix Systems Inc. Computer makers Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. disclosed plans at the Citrix Synergy conference in May that the companies will roll out new laptops designed to support the XenClient.

HP demoed the XenClient on its Elite 8000 business desktop and its Elite 8440p business notebook. Jeff Groudan, director of thin client solutions for the HP Personal Systems Group, says that HP has been working with Citrix on the local hypervisor for about a year.

However, the advent of a client hypervisor won't be changing the HP business model dramatically in the next 24 months or more.

"In the traditional PC market, you should look at the client hypervisor as an opportunity to enrich the feature set and capabilities of an already rich and flexible platform," Groudan says.

Groudan points to mobile computing as an example. "Mobile computing has been left out of the client virtualization evolution," he says, "because of its need to always be connected to work in a remote virtualization virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI]-type model. Having a local hypervisor means that, instead of having that virtual machine [VM] run remotely, you can have it run locally, and thus get many of the benefits of client virtualization on mobile products. That adds value to our notebook line that we didn't have before."

Also, local hypervisors will allow testers and engineers, who often need to work with more than one operating system, to run multiple OSes on one machine in a simpler and more dynamic fashion, he notes.

During the Citrix Synergy event, HP unveiled VDI reference architectures for XenDesktop and XenServer. At Synergy, Joseph George, client virtualization business lead for the HP Infrastructure Software and Blades Division, said the reference architectures are the fruit of his company's ongoing strategy of "converged infrastructure." HP believes that that strategy can accelerate the delivery of client virtualization.

"We've got the best portfolio out there when it comes to converged infrastructure and client virtualization," he said. "And the expertise we have in our ranks has allowed us to put together these new reference architectures."

The new HP and Citrix VDI reference architectures provide the functionality of a standalone desktop, George said, while enabling unified management of both physical and virtual infrastructures from a centralized console. "You manage both physical and virtual infrastructures from that same console," he explained.

For its part, Dell says it's making a big push to add XenClient-based PCs. "Client virtualization is going to be a big wave that customers can take advantage of," Dell CEO Michael Dell said during his keynote at Synergy. "We think this client refresh cycle is very alive and well."

Juan Vega, Dell senior product marketing strategist, has been working on client virtualization for the past five years. Vega gave a talk at the Synergy event, during which he declared that the Citrix client hypervisor was the final piece of an evolving strategy his company has been pursuing for three and a half years: the Dell "Flex Computing" initiative.

"Now, in addition to the basic hypervisor functions -- the ability to run multiple VMs, etc. -- we can also run the same image on the server that you're running on the client," he said. "So you can now start to use one image for any device, any user. That's a very powerful step toward helping IT solve a long-standing concern they've had about remote management of client devices."

The company rolled out its new Latitude E-Family Laptop line, which supports the XenClient, including the E4310 ultraportable, the E5410 and E5510, and the 2110 for business customers. The Latitude 2110 is a successor to the 2100, which was designed for school environments. The 2110 is designed to fill a niche for affordable secondary computers for training workstations and laptop users.

Gartner Inc. analyst Mark Margevicius sees the Dell and HP announcements as promising, but still advises Microsoft partners to take a cautious approach to the client hypervisor. "It's interesting that Intel talked about supporting the technology in its hardware, but didn't offer the hypervisor as part of its hardware," he says. "It's not embedded, at least not yet. It's a toe in the water. It's not a lack of confidence in the technology, but it's going to take some time for enterprise mainstream adoption."

-- J.W.

No Rush
Citrix has generated big buzz with its new client hypervisor, but the final product is yet to come, Margevicius points out. He says there will be plenty of time for Microsoft partners to kick the tires. "This market is going to move more slowly than originally predicted," he says. "We're looking at mainstream adoption for enterprise use no sooner than a year from now."

Even so, Margevicius believes the client hypervisor has a lot of potential that Microsoft partners will want to begin exploring now. Enterprise customers especially will want to consider the advantages of running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single corporate laptop. Users could, for example, keep their personal computing files and apps on the corporate laptop securely isolated in separate VMs. The company could provide a temporary employee or contractor with a VM loaded with the corporate apps. And client-side hypervisors make provisioning to mobile client machines much simpler.

"It's the promise of hardware-independent images," Margevicius says. "I think that alone will generate a lot of interest over the next year."

Interest in the new XenClient does appear to be high; Citrix is reporting thousands of downloads per week since the release of the trial version. Sumit Dhawan, Citrix vice president for desktop virtualization marketing, says he's not surprised by the level of interest in a client hypervisor because it addresses a common pain point in the enterprise.

"Part of the goal of a virtualization strategy should be not to add any additional management overhead," Dhawan says. "It should only simplify things. And that's one of the promises of the XenClient. It removes one of the big problems in managing laptops in enterprise environments. Managing multiple types of images for each and every piece of hardware -- and yet giving users the flexibility to be able to have their personal applications on those machines -- has become extremely challenging."

Ovum analyst Tim Stammers agrees that Microsoft partners would be well advised to take the time to download the trial version of the XenClient and do some tire kicking, to see how they might want to leverage a client-side hypervisor. Also, it'll be worth getting familiar with the new Citrix product both because it has gained such a technical lead over VMware with this release, and because of the company's close relationship with Microsoft.

"Citrix is Microsoft's closest big software partner," Stammers says. "Remember that Microsoft partly funded Citrix when it was founded, and even gave Citrix access to Windows source code. They've been extremely close ever since then. There was some speculation last year that the relationship was cooling, but that turned out not to be so."

"With application virtualization, what we're doing is taking all the assets, all the experience from the desktop [and] applying it to the server."

Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Management and Security Division, Microsoft

Making Server Inroads
Bello, of Bit By Bit, believes Microsoft and Citrix have aligned themselves well. "I think they do a good job of stating that Microsoft Hyper-V serves a purpose and Citrix sits on top of that and adds value to that, and I think Microsoft does a good job of not trying to compete with Citrix but treating them as a true partner," he says. Bello sees Citrix using its desktop strength to try to gain more inroads into the server virtualization market.

Brad Anderson, whose role at Microsoft was recently changed to corporate vice president for the company's Management and Security Division, gave a keynote address at the Citrix event, where he announced that the next version of Microsoft System Center, due out in 2011, will manage the Citrix XenServer hypervisor.

"With application virtualization, what we're doing is taking all the assets, all the experience from the desktop [and] applying it to the server, and this will be released in conjunction with the next version of System Center in 2011," Anderson said in a recorded discussion with Simon Crosby, CTO of the Citrix Datacenter and Cloud Division.

New Desktop Virtualization Licensing Looms

Microsoft is talking up application virtualization, and there are some new technology, partnering and licensing considerations on the horizon. Look for Citrix Systems Inc. and Microsoft to act as true partners-in-crime to take on the cause for desktop application virtualization in their battle against VMware Inc.

First, in case you haven't heard, effective July 1, those customers who don't qualify for Windows Client Software Assurance (SA) will require a new license called Windows Virtual Desktop Access (Windows VDA). According to a posting on the Microsoft Web site, the company came up with Windows VDA to allow organizations to license virtual copies of Windows in virtual environments for devices that don't qualify for Windows Client SA, such as third-party contractor PCs and thin clients, among others.

Windows VDA is a device-based subscription license that will cost $100 per device per year. "It will allow organizations to create multiple desktops dynamically, enable user access to multiple virtual machines [VMs] simultaneously, and move desktop VMs across multiple platforms -- especially in load-balancing and disaster recovery situations," Microsoft says.

What's the benefit of that added cost? Among other things, Microsoft says it will allow users to run Windows in a datacenter, including Enterprise editions; rights for a primary user to access corporate virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) desktops from non-corporate PCs, including home systems and kiosks; and access rights for up to four VMs concurrently. It will also support unlimited mobility of VMs between servers and storage and unlimited backups of VMs, according to Microsoft.

-- J.S.

"Think about this as being embedded into [System Center] Virtual Machine Manager [SCVMM], [which] gives you the ability to separate out your existing applications so that you can actually have that separation of the app and the OS and dramatically reduce your number of operating system images," Anderson said.

One of the things Anderson demonstrated in his keynote was the next version of SCVMM making XenServer a first-class citizen. "The integration is definitely there," Anderson said.

"You can drag and drop a multi-tier app from XenApp and XenDesktop, which has tons of components, and it just magically shows up," Crosby added. "One cool use case: Once you've done all this virtualization, it's a good way to deploy things into the cloud, so I can then take an app that I've virtualized and pop it up into Windows Azure."

The Desktop Challenge
Meanwhile, Microsoft has fallen behind in the desktop virtualization race, according to Stammers. The company only added support for hosted virtual desktops (desktops as VMs) last year. "As it did with thin clients for years, Microsoft is saying very publicly that customers who want to make big VDI deployments should go to Citrix," Stammers explains. "Microsoft is, however, developing the screen-delivery protocol, so obviously it does have some sort of VDI ambitions."

Ovum also believes that, though VDI will help to grow thin-client market share, it won't grow substantially in the near term. "Bare-metal client hypervisors will make thick Windows clients much cheaper to manage, and workers want offline-capable laptops, not thin clients," Stammers notes.

"We're very closely aligned with Microsoft when it comes to desktop virtualization," Dhawan says. "We have joint offerings for VDI and hosted virtual desktops. In terms of XenClient adoption, Microsoft and Citrix agree that it's going to appeal to less than 10 percent of the total desktop and laptop population in the next year or two. But while Microsoft expects XenClient to be a niche [technology], we expect it to have broader appeal."

Right now customers are just trying it out and finding the potential of where the technology can be leveraged, Dhawan adds. "The second half of this year is when we'll begin to have XenDesktop products," he says.