This year at Citrix Synergy, it’s all about the future of work and how Citrix enables experience (a great new workspace experience), security (a comprehensive approach to internet access security), and choice (cloud portability, cloud independence and broad device support).
At Citrix, we are fully aligned and focused on delivering the industry’s leading secure digital workspaces. We’re also committed to enabling your cloud strategies with our Citrix Cloud services so you have the flexibility to choose any public, private, or hybrid clouds. Our integrated suite of products enables secure access to applications, desktops, and data on any device, anywhere —empowering your business to expand and grow in new ways and improving your employees’ quality of life by enabling a healthy work/life balance.
So, how does XenServer help deliver the secure digital workspace and enable cloud technology? Here are 4 ways:
XenServer enables the highest performance digital workspaces with the most mature graphics-acceleration capabilities
As a founding member with NVIDIA of the graphics virtualization space, customers such as Nissan, Gensler, and Red Bull Racing, continue to choose Citrix to deliver the best performance for their 3D, CAD, and graphic-intensive virtual applications and desktops. XenServer supports the industry’s widest range of vGPU vendors, the widest range of graphics applications, and enables up to 128 vGPUs per host. Only XenServer enables Live Migration of NVIDIA GPU-enabled VMs with vGPU XenMotion. In addition to users of graphic-intensive applications, the typical office worker can benefit from graphic-accelerated virtual apps and desktops. A study from Lakeside shows that graphics usage increases by 30% in Windows 10 compared to Windows 7. Graphic-accelerated apps and desktop from Citrix will give your users a superior experience with daily office tasks — generating PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and spreadsheets; playing multi-media files; and the best possible Windows 10 experience.
XenServer delivers the most secure digital workspace with hypervisor introspection
Citrix and Bitdefender pioneered the revolutionary security solution, Hypervisor Introspection (HVI), which prevents advanced and targeted attacks in a way that no other security product on the market can. While there are hundreds of millions different variations of malware, there are only a handful of attack techniques hackers can use to remotely gain a foothold in your system (heap spray, code injections, buffer overflows, API hooking, etc.). HVI is the only agentless security solution that blocks these attack techniques effectively and in real-time. Last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack spread to 185,000 systems across over 100 countries in less than 24 hours, by infecting unpatched systems. HVI was able to prevent that attack by blocking the buffer overflow technique it used, without needing any updates. Hypervisor Introspection also blocked the recent Flash zero-day exploit, which infiltrated organizations across Asia. And if you want more evidence, HVI has been validated by IDC, and more importantly, validated by customers in production!
XenServer is the most-integrated hypervisor with XenApp and XenDesktop
XenServer now follows the current release and long-term service release strategy, as well as aligned release and product lifecycle dates with XenApp and XenDesktop. XenServer optimizes the performance and scalability of XenApp and XenDesktop deployments with unique PVS-Accelerator and MCS-Accelerator technology. PVS-Accelerator improves boot times by up to 25% and MCS-Accelerator reduces read I/O up to 80%. XenServer, with XenDesktop, is the only hypervisor to enable the Windows Continuum experience in Windows 10 virtual desktops, enabling the interface of the operating system to toggle between Tablet and Desktop mode as the state of the hardware changes.
XenServer enables your Hybrid Cloud strategy
With more customers choosing to run their app and desktop delivery platforms in the cloud — why would they choose to keep their workloads on-premises? Performance and security (see #1 and #2)! Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service enables customers to run their workloads in any cloud and on any hypervisor. XenServer Enterprise Edition entitlement is included with XenApp and XenDesktop Service from Citrix Cloud. This enables you to run a hybrid cloud deployment with the Citrix infrastructure you would typically installed in your environment, simplified as a Cloud service, while you can spin up your virtual application servers and virtual desktops on XenServer, located on-premises. Hyper-converged infrastructure vendors have begun investing in the Citrix Cloud strategy. One such proof point is that Nutanix released the first ever Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance.
Best of all, our customers realize huge savings by eliminating legacy vendors’ hypervisor costs (vTax) for their XenApp and XenDesktop deployments. You can save $136 per desktop (list price) as compared to running VMware vSphere. This is because XenServer Enterprise Edition is an entitlement with every edition of XenApp and XenDesktop, including the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service. The cost-savings can be used to increase server capacity, add GPUs to your deployment, or secure your virtual infrastructure with Hypervisor Introspection!
Want to learn more? Join us this year at Citrix Synergy in Anaheim and check out my breakout session (SYN134) with David Cottingham on how XenServer enables your secure digital workspaces and hybrid cloud strategies — plus, we’ll be revealing some new features coming in the next release!
If you have not yet registered, check out our Justify My Trip tool to build out a personalized session track to help you persuade your manager to send you to Citrix Synergy.
