VDI in a box......opinions please

[superatticman]

Have just sat through a webinar regarding Citrix 'VDI in a box' in an educational environment. Would be nice to hear any opinions on this product and how it works for you as opposed to the full blown Citrix Xendesktop solution.

 

From my initial take, this solution appears to be easier to administer and more suitable for several hundred users as opposed to several thousand.

[nadeem]

IF you look at the threads on here by @jamesfed then you'll see his experiences of setting this up - we're potentially going to roll this out to our users too

[jamesfed]

I've got loads of stuff on VDI (and VDI-in-a-box) in my website (see sig) but if you have anything that you would like to know in particular do let me know

[JHLEHS]

Nice blog, some very interesting things. Have you ever heard of application jukebox from Numecent? It is really good at packaging applications. I wasn't very fond of app-v as it was really hard to package complex applications etc. We use Citrix Xenapp at our school but for external access. We haven't gone to VDI\Thin clients. What is the performance like on GPU intensive applications and CAD programs?

[jamesfed]

Cheers - I've packaged things all the way up to the Adobe CS6 suite in App-V so pretty much anything is possible but every now and again a little imaginative thinking is required

 

VDI-in-a-box uses the Citrix HDX protocol so anything that HDX can do (as far as graphics goes) you will be able to do it in VDI-in-a-box.

 

You might want to take a look at these videos-

Video Editing with Citrix HDX on a Linux Thin Client - YouTube

Citrix HDX Flash Redirection Demo (Citrix VDI-in-a-Box v5.2) - YouTube

[JHLEHS]

APP-V is a swear word to me lol. It wasn't very good when I was using it about 2 yrs ago. Sure CS6 is a piece of cake but when it comes to highly intesenive product ie. Solidworks 2012, Ansys etc it falls at the first hurdle, Application jukebox was smarter and works with all drivers etc as you can intergrate the virtualisation levels.

 

Thanks for your links I will have a read.

[jamesfed]

Was that 4.5 pre SP1 by chance? Its come a long way since then especially with connection groups in App-V 5.

[jtotheb]

I've run up a proof of concept, which runs nicely enough (Flash redirection and WMP video playback are fine) but ideally I need to soup up the graphics. Does anyone know if it will play nicely with RemoteFX if using Hyper-V as the hypervisor? I seem to be going round in a circle when searching, but it seems to suggest no.

[jamesfed]

RemoteFX isn't supported in VDI-in-a-box as yet I'm afraid.

[jtotheb]

Yeah, that's what I thought I was hoping I could use RDP with RemoteFX goodness instead of HDX as a cunning solution but didn't want to shell out for a monster graphics card if it wouldn't. I'm not sure HDX3D and a full Xen deployment is worth the premium in this case (as opposed to sticking with moderately priced fat clients).