Citrix Synergy 2010 notes (part 1)

So I spent the entire week at the Citrix Summit/Synergy event for partners/customers. Those of you who have worked in or with Data Centers in the past 20 years or so are probably familiar with Citrix. Many people are familiar with a product now called XenApp, previously known as Presentation Sever, Metaframe, or Winframe depending on your longevity in the business. Essentially Citrix invented Terminal Services for Windows which allowed users to access programs running remotely on Windows servers using very little bandwidth. Many users still call this “running Citrix.”

Certainly, like Lotus (famous for 1-2-3, Symphony, Notes, etc.) or OpenView (an HP family of software, best known for it’s Network Node Manager) Citrix suffers from the success of its original flagship product, so much so that all its other offerings tend to be eclipsed.

Every year, Citrix (who VERY rarely sells directly to end-users) throws a love-fest for its reseller partners, integrators and various vendors who create an ecosystem around their products, and then adds customers from around the globe into the mix.

Though Citrix is essentially a data-center-oriented company, they are of course, looking to get a piece of the Cloud pie. I will concentrate here on a few technologies I focused on which are pertinent to the Cloud as we know it.

XenApp, the original flagship product, allows multiple copies of apps to run on a back-end server, and transfer only the screen bits, mouse movements, keystrokes and various multimedia across very high-latency low-bandwidth lines pretty efficiently. Of course, on a LAN it screams, but the “secret sauce” of delivering a usable app over crappy telecomm is still the major reason folks look to Citrix for “internal SaaS.” When an end-user (like a customer service rep in Bangalore or the Philippines) needs to access a dedicated app for HQ anywhere in the States or Europe, chances are it is Citrix delivering those bits. Unless you have a fully-functional Web-based app, this is still probably the most viable means of delivering in-house SaaS.

Desktop As a Service (DaaS) is a term that you don’t often see, but with the VDI wars beginning to rage among VMware, Citrix and Microsoft (though the latter two partner out of necessity) it was certainly top-of-mind. Sometimes, delivering one-off apps is not enough. It is, today, perfectly feasible to deliver entire Operating Systems (like XP or Window 7) from the Cloud, to numerous heterogeneous client devices. Citrix makes a big deal (rightfully so) about its ability to deliver a full-blown Windows 7 experience to Thin Clients (dumb, and not-so-dumb terminals,) aging PCs, Linux clients, and of course, all the Apple eye Candy devices from iPhones to iPads.

Citrix owns some pretty neat technologies which allow hundreds, and potentially thousands of desktops to be streamed out from a single 9GB or so image. Imagine how THAT pisses off the storage vendors. You don’t even need local disks in the client devices. Your hosted VM PXE boots over the network, the that old Citrix mojo sends the bits to your “Receiver” whatever its make or model of client. Microsoft is (somewhat reluctantly, IMO) partnering with Citrix for the puzzle pieces they lack (like brokering of desktops for various defined users) but mostly to stave off VMWare who has apparently “declared war” on Citrix (and consequently Microsoft as well) in the Desktop arena which is growing as server virtualization stagnates.

Citrix certainly has failed to thwart VMware in the server virtualization space. XenServer 5.6 was announced to a lukewarm response. It continues to get cool new features, but always seems to lack the “whiz-bang” ones with which VMware consistently hammers them. Better memory management made it into 5.6, but it is still not as “Dynamic” as Marketing has dubbed it. You can re-allocate memory live among various VMs, but it is still not “on-demand” dynamic like ESX has been doing for years. The major thing XenServer has going for it is the tight-integration with Intel’s new CPUs and chipsets. While VMware pays lip service to paravirtualization, XenServer is driving deeper and deeper into the silicone. Look for screaming I/O improvements, as XenServer gets bare-metal on the Intel NICs.

Staying in the Type-I hypervisor space, another rabbit out of the hat was the announcement of XenClient. Like its big-brother XenServer, XenClient takes the hardware integration a step further, allowing for GPU pass-thru to guests. This means that instead of emulating a 1980’s era Cirrus graphics chip in software, video calls go right to the metal. Based on XenServer at the core, running on a laptop or desktop, the end-user can run multiple VMs (a home version of Windows, and a Work Copy of XP, for example) seamlessly on the same endpoint. Refresh (resynchronization) can take place with the “Synchronizer” over the cloud, making patches and updates a cinch (as well as rollbacks.) XenClient may make the combination of local processing and Cloud a hybrid solution that will bridge the gap until wireless broadband is ubiquitous. You can “lease” the desktops out to expire if not refreshed within a time period, and even remotely “kill” the image if a laptop is lost or stolen. Integrity of the Hypervisor is checked at launch time to ensure it bits have not been fiddled.

On the Cloud Provider front, Citrix is touting its “Citrix Service Provider” program which is, in my opinion, more akin to an Application Service Provider model. Mostly this has to do with licensing issues, and the difficulty of modeling an arrangement to provide, for example, Windows 7 and Office on any more elastic than a monthly basis. Citrix has the provisioning tools, and even the self-service components to do “real” cloud. For now, it looks like it's old business models rather than technology that is being the roadblock.

One VERY interesting announcement was that Rackspace, the second largest Cloud Provider after Amazon and EC2 is adopting Citrix XenServer over the Open Source Xen for its public cloud offering. The CEO's reason was principally the ability to provide Microsoft platforms on a SUPPORTED infrastructure. Apparently, MSFT requires this, and to play in the PaaS arena with their code, you’d best not be mucking around with support that consists of forums and USENET.

This is part 1. Next week I will delve in to the “hardware” side of this software company. Many “enterprise” folks don’t put Citrix in the space of Cisco, Juniper, F5 etc. but the analysts, Telcos and Internet biggies like Google, Amazon and Yahoo sure do. I will discuss some of the latest announcements in Citrix’ networking arsenal (Application Delivery Controller s etc.) and discuss some of the trends in Cloud this will be affecting.