Source: Gartner
Citrix has become the first vendor to meet all requirements in the Burton Group Server Hosted Virtual Desktop evaluation criteria.
The evaluation criteria was developed over a five month period. During that time, Gartner worked with numerous early server-hosted virtual desktop (SHVD) adopters, as well as the key vendors in the space. In the end, vendors were supportive of the criteria in spite of the fact that not one met all of their requirements. The reason for the support was simple – customers were telling vendors they needed the same elements that Gartnet identified in the criteria.
Gartner evaluate and score SHVD platforms across three stratifications:
- Required: absolute necessities
- Preferred: important features that result in better experience, operational management, and improved TCO
- Optional: use-case driven features needed in select deployment scenarios
The assessment is broken down across major areas of focus such as user experience, management, and security.
The initial XenDesktop 4 release lacked:
- Role-based access controls (RBACs) for delegation of administrative duties
- Administrative change logging capabilities to provide an audit trail for all administrative actions
- Enterprise-class support (3 year minimum) for all products in the XenDesktop 4 Platinum portfolio
Among other improvements, the above three shortcomings were addressed in XenDesktop 4 SP1 release. You can read the updated support policy here. Burton Group extensively tested the above features in their lab to ensure that they met their requirements, and the result was a platform that Gartner can recommend for large-scale enterprise environments.
The XenDesktop 4 SP1 scorecard is shown below.
As you can see, while meeting their essential requirements, XenDesktop 4 SP1 meets 76% of our preferred features and there is still room for improvement. Areas Gartner would like to see improved include:
- Management consolidation: Citrix must reduce the number of consoles required to manage the XenDesktop environment
- Management complexity for very large environments: In Citrix’s reference architecture, each XenDesktop 4 Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC) runs 5,000 desktops. Citrix recommends that organisations build separate management domains to horizontally scale XenDesktop management, placing greater challenges on areas such as configuration management.