Citrix iForum wrap: TS, Xen and Linux losing

I thought that I’d follow-up my post the other day – questions about when to use Terminal Services vs. Citrix — by pointing out ERICOM Guy post titled, “are Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Good Enough for me?” Here’s an excerpt:

Windows Server 2008 may be good enough for you if:

• Your needs are simple, e.g. you do not need central management of the Terminal Servers
• You plan to upgrade all your clients to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). No, Windows CE 6.0 won’t do.

And a colleague saw my post and asked me to add a few additional points:

• customers with significant deployments of Terminal Services will, just as today, require other technologies on top of Windows Server 2008 to meet their needs – solutions such as those from Citrix
• customers—and partners that remotely manage SMB environments– can choose Citrix Access Essentials as a value-add to Terminal Services based on their needs.  CAE features like enhanced application compatibility is just one example of value-add that CAE provides on-top of Terminal Services
• our TS RemoteApp feature we distribute the application connection information using MSI files.  This gives customers the flexibility to choose how they distribute connection information. Citrix Application Publishing, on the other hand, provides a single integrated solution for getting the application icons to the user desktops, as the number of applications increases this sort of functionality can be extremely valuable.

For deployment answers and tips, be sure to visit the TS team blog.

Nothing remarkable per say from the Day 2 keynote. Our own Mike Neil got some stage time to talk about areas Microsoft is investing in virtualization; nothing new if you read his February post. He touched on areas of continued and expanded partnership with Citrix … especially since the XenSource acquisition. The four areas highlighted were: presentation virtualization (security, stability, extensibility), application virtualization (management technologies, app publishing), server virtualization (hypervisor interop, manageability), and interop (image format standards, industry standards). Here’s a shot of Mike on stage.

As I already noted, Peter Levine’s demos were great. Most impressive was the live migration demo using media server.  The “Top Gun” video during the demo didn’t blink when the workload was migrated from one host to another. On the note, I learned that Xen doesn’t have a high availability/clustering offering until next year. For more on the Day 2 keynote, see Tim’s post at Brian Madden.

Finally I’ll close by pointing out the eWeek article titled, “Linux losing market Share to Windows Server.” Here’s an excerpt:

Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.

The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.

Over the same time period, Windows has continued to report positive annual growth, outpacing the total growth rate in the x86 market by more than 4 percent in 2006, indicating that Linux has actually lost market share to Windows Server over this time.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that the migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down markedly.

“I spend a lot of time talking with both Linux and Windows customers and partners, and the feedback that I hear is that, in volume, Linux is primarily deployed in two workloads—high-performance computing and as Web servers,” Hilf told eWEEK.

It’s interesting to consider how broader deployment of server and application virtualization may impact these numbers studied by IDC. It has the potential for lots of OS instances per box instead of the traditional 1:1 ratio.

Patrick