Have a play with this sometime

We all love VDI – it makes things simple to look after desktops but sometimes the back end is a little complicated. That’s where Citrix VDI-in-a-box comes in use!

With many other VDI products you will find that the setup process is all about getting the SAN ready, getting various installations of Windows server ready and then getting the VDI management/provisioning/connection broker software running – all of which takes a very long time.

The magic of VDI-in-a-box is in its simplicity which can be summed up in a few key points-

• No need for a SAN – your compute nodes just have local hard disks, the ‘golden image’ is then replicated and duplicated locally on each compute node.
• No need for complicated management software – the entire management/provisioning/connection broker is all contained within a single virtual pre packaged virtual machine. In fact all you need do with the Xen Server install is import a virtual machine – there isn’t even any need for a setup wizard!
• Single point of management – all the VDI management is performed through a web based management console – quite luckily it is completely devoid of Flash/Silverlight/Java and as such you can even manage your VDI install from a smart phone!

Getting hold of a free trial from the Citrix website is pretty easy and all you need is any old bit of hardware with a few GB of RAM and a processor that supports your choice of Virtual Host OS (Hyper-V/XenServer/VMWare).

To download the trial and find out more visit this link – http://www.citrix.com/vdi-in-a-box