Bramfitt Says VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop Both Winners

Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst for Entelechy Associates LLC, has a restless mind, so he spent a few months talking to engineers and architects from some 194 different companies--in 16 countries, no less--who are responsible for a grand total of 1.4 million endpoints. Wisely, before he forgets any of the high points, he is gathering up all that data with the goal of putting it into a report he expects to release in August.

So what did he find? Without spilling too many beans, he reveals that VMware View outsells Citrix XenDesktop in VDI environments with fewer than 500 seats. (Note: this was before Citrix acquired Kaviza.) Conversely, XenDesktop is "a clear winner" in large environments.

"In the sub-500 category, respondents indicated that lower cost, familiarity with vSphere and View's relative ease of setup were the primary factors in the decision to go with View," Simon states, adding "Organizations that chose XenDesktop offered platform flexibility, performance and experience with XenApp as leading factors in their decisions."

When it comes to turnoffs, he reports that the strongest negative factors reported by sub-500-seat respondents regardless of platform choice were "the high cost of storage and overall complexity of VDI solutions."

Bramfitt also addressed the issue of why respondents chose a server-hosted desktop virtualization solution over a distributed desktop virtualization package. What he found was that data security, lack of guidance and general lack of awareness of options were the primary reasons.

A couple more data nuggets: During the past nine months, there has been a flip-flop in the number of respondents (27 percent) saying they would consider "widespread use" of distributed desktop virtualization, or not consider it at all (42 percent). Now, more than 50 percent said yes, they expect to employ distributed desktop virtualization "as their primary desktop management solution by 2013," while under 10 percent ruled out that possibility.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/02/2011 at 12:48 PM