Next week I will be in Orlando attending my first ever Citrix Synergy and as you can imagine there’s a lot to be excited about and look forward to. To name a few… there will be dozens of technical deep dive and Geek Speak sessions, meeting up with community friends, getting to know new people, the Keynote, new and (hopefully) surprising product announcements, dinner parties, other parties :) the welcome reception, TechEdge, the closing appreciation party in the Universal Studio’s etc. And besides all that I also have my very own Match.Geek sessions to look forward to (exiting stuff). Yes, I think it’s safe to say that we will all have a great time in Orlando, once again. Like many others, I have my expectations and hopes on what will be announced at Synergy this year, so without further ado I’ll list them here.
Let’s get some of the most obvious ones out of the way first.
Desktop player for Windows, Desktop player for Mac and the new Linux VDI. These three products / technologies were announced as upcoming Tech Previews at Citrix Summit a few months and, in the mean time, have been released as such. I’m sure some new and existing features will be highlighted and one or two GA’s will be announced.
Octoblu (recently acquired) and the Internet of Things, or IoT in short, will without a doubt get enough attention.
XenMobile 10.x and ShareFile will get a lot of love as well. I’m (almost) sure we’ll see new and enhanced versions of both.
The Citrix X1 Mouse (+ X1 Receiver) which everybody seems to love. Not sure if it’s a prototype still, it might be announced GA / on sale come Synergy. And who knows, we might just get one. Update… Ah, missed the announcement, apparently it is up for sale already.
I expect some additional information on the recent Atlantis HyperScale / XenServer launch.
Talking about XenServer / XenCenter. Last week XenServer Dundee (Alpha 1) was announced. It appears that one of the future XenServer releases will provide Docker support in the form of a Container management supplemental pack. The Docker containers / images will be manageable through XenCenter. Perhaps more on this at Synergy as well? Docker, and containerization in general, are hot topics at the moment. I know, they just released a XenServer blogpost mentioning Docker, but since I already wrote this…
New XenApp / XenDesktop editions / versions, 7.x or 8.x even, which will include some, if not all, of the below.
Framehawk HDX combined with the new X1 Receiver will get a lot of attention.
A new StoreFront release, it might even include a web.config GUI (although there is a separate one available today).
Multiple new, redesigned and re-engineered graphical user interfaces (HTML5?), more responsive. Perhaps some GUI’s will be combined / integrated. Just a wild guess, but there has been a lot of debate, and complaints, on almost all current Citrix product user interfaces. They’re to slow, there are to many etc. Who knows, wouldn’t surprise me. It’s an issue most of the bigger vendors are struggling with so it might be a welcome change.
As a follow-up to the above we might also see more integration with regards to monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Here I’m primarily referring to the integration of Director, TaaS (Insight Services) and SCOUT for example. Depending on what will happen with to the earlier mentioned GUI’s, these tools / solutions might find there way into Studio or a similar interface.
The same applies to Single Sing-on / Password Manager. Could be a ‘renewed’ (platinum) feature in the making. Since it is missed and mentioned by many.
A third-party monitoring solution. Not that long ago there was a Citrix questionnaire send out and shared on social media requesting all customers, partners and Citrix admins to give their opinion, and to answer a bunch of standard questions on the general approach of monitoring / troubleshooting Citrix solutions / products. They (Citrix) were steering towards a SCOM orientated solution back then, although I’m sure a lot of techies will have mentioned the integration, or expansion, of existing tools as well. According to Twitter they did anyway.
Of course there are more monitoring / troubleshooting vendors of interest. For example, Login PI, or VSI for that matter, might be mentioned, or Goliath maybe. A new partnership of some sort.
How about a EUM vendor buy-in / partnership? This would be the time.
Improved migration tooling to get from the IMA to the FMA.
New load balancing features, Connection Leasing improvements (perhaps some of the old LHC features but in another form), a way to implement geographically separated Sites without the direct need for an additional (local) SQL deployment.
Personally I’m looking forward to hearing about the Citrix Workspace Cloud. Not that long ago there were a couple of interesting Tweets coming from some of the Citrix CTP’s who had just been in a CTP briefing / webinar, and they were very impressed and excited with what they had seen and heard regarding the Workspace Cloud. This should be good.
The Sanbolic acquisition and the Melio software that comes with it. Another one I am curious about. They just released a blog announcing the official release and GA of Melio, the core product of Sanbolic, read more on it here. They mention two separate editions, Melio VDI and Melio Enterprise. Not much more information is given at this time (including the products page on Citrix.com). The VDI edition seems to be what they already had and did with PVS earlier, while Melio Enterprise provides seamless scale-out, geo-distribution and high availability for critical enterprise workloads, and supports server clusters up to 2048 nodes, as they state in their blog. The good news is (at least I think it is) that the Melio software will be, or stay, workload, hypervisor and storage agnostic. I expect to hear a lot more on this at Synergy.
If you say Sanbolic, you have to say WorkspacePod as well. The WorkspacePod announcement was pretty big at this years Summit back in January. Shortly after that, in March to be exact, they announced a so-called Early Adapter Program (EAP) specifically aimed at WorkspacePod. As you might recall, there were (are?) two Pod configurations available, one based on HP Moonshot (as the main VDI / HSD platform) combined with a bunch of HP SL4540 storage servers running the Sanbolic software stack (since Moonshot is all physical), which was also referred to as the Warp Drive, to host all core services like AD, SQL, StoreFront, Director etc. If I’m not mistaken, it supported three Moonshot chassis per Pod configuration.
And there was a second Pod, Powered by DataON, which integrated the Citrix workspace infrastructure software with DataON’s Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) platform, scalable up to three disk enclosures. Again leveraging the Sanbolic software to deliver all core services as mentioned above. The Moonshot edition was aimed at bigger companies / enterprises, with the DataON configuration being more suitable for smaller businesses, or so they told us.
Citrix promised us, at least, a few new (Citrix Certified) third parties and thus some new Pod setups / configurations. I’m also keen to hear how the Early Adaptor Program has worked out and what they’ve learned along the way. The initial thought behind the concept was to have the customer fill in a pre defined questionnaire, which would then be used to preconfigure the Pod before placing it at the customer’s site. There was also talk of a self-validation available through the Citrix Ready program, so customers can check for themselves if their current hardware can be turned into a Pod. Although that sounds like (and probably is) the earlier mentioned Melio software release a few paragraphs back. Without a doubt more on this at Synergy.
A VDI in a Box replacement? Who knows? There might be a Pod configuration in there somewhere that will serve as a potential replacement, sort of anyway (yes, I’m a bit sceptical). VDI light anyone?
I also came across ViewSonic, offering a so-called VDI-Out-of-the-Box experience. They have a booth at Synergy as well, it’s #422. This comes from one of the Citrix sales engineers “This solution reduces the Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp installation and administration time by as much as 98%” It enables businesses to easily deploy and manage the entire Citrix® desktop virtualization environment without the complexity and high costs of a typical VDI deployment. Might be worth checking out.
And finally, though not technical, I expect to hear a thing or two about the community surrounding Citrix. For example, a while back I asked, via Twitter, if the Citrix Blogs page could include a community section like they have at VMware. They replied that they were working on something similar and that Synergy would be the place and time to find out. Just this week one of the Citrix CTP’s Tweeted that Citrix should come up with a concept similar to VMware’s VMUG advantage where members can get discounts on licenses, training and certifications, VMworld tickets and more. Again Citrix replied that this is something they are currently working on, so I guess Synergy it is. And what about a secondary community program equal to VMware’s vExpert, Nutanix NTC or Microsoft’s MVP program for example. I say secondary since they already have the CTP program, which is great, but there is only room for 50 people max, although there are some other differences as well of course :) They might even split it into separate sections / specialisms like they do with their certifications as well, Virtualisation, Networking, Mobility etc.
Well that about sums it up for me. I’m pretty sure that some of this will make it into Synergy, and I’m also quite sure that some will not. Feel free to add or comment on this, did I leave anything out? I’m sure I did, tell me.
