I recently spoke with Calvin Hsu from Citrix regarding the new capabilites they are including in the Enterprise and Platinum versions of XenDesktop. Citrix HDX is the blanket name for a suite of protocol enhancements that are focused to improve the end user experience of graphically intense applications on XenDesktop.

“One of the most frequent requests we’ve had is from the manufacturing sector wanting the capability to run graphically intense engineering applications in XenDesktop. These designs often contain sensitive information and they are looking to keep the data secure. XenDesktop with HDX can accomplish that by offering the performance and the information never leaves the data center. ”  Hsu said.

If you haven’t tested virtual desktops yet, they are a great solution and work really well to a targeted subset of the normal enterprise end user population. Task-based workers and users with little or no graphically intense applications are prime candidates for desktop virtualization, but users that do require more graphics, to this point, haven’t been good desktop virtualization candidates.

I tested the beta of HDX when it first came out, and it does improve the graphical experience appreciably. I could actually watch YouTube videos on XenDesktop.

10 Times Less Bandwidth

Citrix says they conducted tests pitting HDX versus Teradici PCoIP with host hardware accelerators.  According to Citrix,  they set up two machines exactly alike, one using HDX and the other using Teradici PCoIP with the hardware host card. Citrix says the results showed the machine with HDX consumed 10 times less bandwidth versus the PCoIP machine.

My analysis:

I fully expect VMware to make an announcement that shows the exact reverse results that Citrix is showing. But I think the take away from this is bigger than the tit-for-tat numbers games that vendors particpate in for marketing. If HDX can help deliver graphical content to end users better and is 10x more efficient than the competition; that will force the competition to step up their quality, and a better  experience to more of the end user  population is the result.  That’s good for us because we take yet another step in the progression of  having a legitimate option to provision fully functional desktops from the data center to much more of the end user population.

I’d like to thank Calvin for his time talking with me about desktop virtualization in general, and HDX specifically.

More on Teradici is located here and more on HDX can be found on this web site.