Citrix Acquires VDI-in-a-Box Vendor Kaviza

Citrix announced yesterday at its annual Synergy user conference that it has acquired Kaviza, makers of the VDI-in-a-box SMB solution. The announcement gives a boost to both companies, primarily because the dearth of these sorts of solutions are just one of many reasons why VDI implementations aren’t a slam dunk, as Alex Williams has written for us here previously.

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VDI has lots of moving parts and multiple strategies to consider, such as a connection broker – the piece of software that connects a remote desktop to a piece of storage to boot themselves up, load balancers to ensure that a network isn’t overloaded at 9:15am every workday when users try to login, provisioning servers that handle new instances of virtual servers, and the storage networks themselves. In the past, VDI implementations usually combined products from a variety of vendors, making it an integration headache.

Kaviza naturally supports XenServer and also VMware ESX, promising Microsoft’s Hyper-V soon. The company claims a solution can be up and running within a few hours, which sounds optimistic.

“Without question, low-cost desktop virtualization in-a-box solutions extend the operational, security and TCO benefits common in large-scale virtual desktop deployments to the small or branch office,” said Chris Wolf, research VP for Gartner.

There are other all-in-one or at least more-in-one bundles available in the marketplace now: Ericom’s PowerTerm, Synchron and Quest Software’s vWorkspace (among others) all offer steps towards a complete package and can start off with attached storage rather than a full SAN deployment.

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