Blog Post

There are quite a few OEMs in the VDI market these days. Big guns like Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, and a few others have been in this segment for a while now. Citrix is one of the key players in the market if you talk about VDI.

In fact, Citrix has constantly been securing its place in the Leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. A lot of organizations, from startups to big enterprises have been on Citrix VDI for a very long time now. But before we get more into the offerings provided by Citrix, what is VDI?

VDI stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This technology actually helps in reducing the hardware footprint of physical PC for your staff. To explain it better let’s take an example:

• Let’s say you’re running an organization where you must procure desktop computers for your staff. You would keep the configuration like CPU, Memory, Storage keeping in mind the current standards of the market and of course, the bare minimum requirement for your staff to perform their tasks.
• Let’s say after 3 years your requirements have increased and the old desktops are not able to keep up with the new requirements. You would end up purchasing new desktops for all your employees again, meaning you would end up doing a tech refresh of all the hardware which would probably cost a lot and that is a recurring charge as the requirement would keep on changing.
• VDI solves this problem by hosting your desktops in a centralized place in your data center. Now all you need at the desk is to keep a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and all that would connect to one small piece of hardware – A thin client terminal.
• The thin client terminals often come loaded with their own lightweight operating systems like Windows 10 IoT or maybe Thin OS if you talk about Dell thin client terminals. The thin-client terminal has a different types of ports that you can use to connect peripheral devices like a VGA and HDMI port to connect to a monitor or a projector.
• It also has USB ports that can be used for flash drives and connecting mouse or keyboard or any devices via the USB. It also has a 3.5mm audio jack for audio devices connectivity. So thin-client terminal basically provides you the capability to connect to your desktop hosted in data center and all you get is a stream of your desktop on your monitor and it greatly reduces the hardware footprint because you can increase or decrease the specifications like CPU, RAM, or storage with just one click.

Citrix offers XenApp and XenDesktop to deliver a true VDI experience.

Citrix delivers Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions in three different types of deployment

On-Premises

All of the infrastructures are hosted in the customer’s own data center. This type of deployment is typically suited for large enterprises as the capital expenditure involved is much bigger than the other types of deployment because you would need to procure the hardware for the entire solution.

On-Cloud

This type of deployment offers a lot of flexibility to smaller organizations and saves them the cost of purchasing the hardware required. All you need is an internet connection to the Citrix Workspace, and you can launch your virtual desktop with just a few clicks.

Hybrid

This deployment method requires the customer to purchase the hardware for hosting the VDI image and the component called Storefront which authenticates the users against the Active Directory. The monitoring and provisioning services are owned by Citrix in this deployment. This type of deployment is suited for mid-range organizations who want Citrix to monitor and manage their environment.

To sum it up this was a high-level introduction of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and the different types of deployment methods for virtual desktop infrastructure solutions. In the next blog, we will cover the architecture of the Citrix Hybrid deployment methodology. If you’re looking for Planning, Designing, Implementation, or PoC professional services to build a robust VDI solution for your organization, reach us at contact@zindagitech.com or give us a call at +91 9773973971.

Author
Sumit Yadav
Data Center Consulting Engineer