Building Momentum of Cisco Desktop VIrtualization Solutions with Citrix XenDesktop

Cisco and Citrix are collaborating to accelerate application migration, enable mobility, and ease virtual desktop deployment.

Accelerating enterprise adoption of Citrix XenDesktop 7: Cisco and Citrix are developing prescriptive reference architectures or Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) for the Citrix XenDesktop 7 release to accelerate the adoption in the enterprise and commercial customer environments. These solutions are based on the Cisco Desktop Virtualization Architectures. Hosted on the Cisco UCS B-Series and C-series server platform with delivery models though XenDesktop 7, focuses on radical simplification through the automation and unification of both app and desktop delivery on either hosted-shared (RDS) Windows Server or Windows desktop OS-based VDI hosts with Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS).

Expanding the desktop use cases: Cisco in partnership with Nvidia, is supporting Nvidia GRID based GPU technology to complement the new GPU pass through and HDX 3D pro features in XenDesktop 7 to support power users and designers.The Nvidia GRID is supported on the Cisco UCS C240M3 rack server, which can be managed as part of UCS Manager domain, providing customers a cohesive single pane view of multiple use cases. The integrated architecture of XenDesktop 7 and Cisco UCS will enable enterprise customers more flexibility and manageability in delivering virtual desktops and virtual applications with the full range of Citrix FlexCast solutions all based on Cisco industry-leading data center solutions.

Focusing on desktop and application virtualization adoption in transformational accounts: Cisco and Citrix have jointly focused on driving the upgrade of the transitional XenApp install base and drive adoption of desktop virtualization particularly in transformational accounts where scale, resiliency and performance are key. Cisco and Citrix have jointly validated large scale 5000 user XenDeskop solution  as well as large scale heterogenous 4000 user desktop delivery solution with both hosted-shared (RDS) Windows Server and Windows desktop OS-based VDI hosts (including personal vdisk option).

For customers and partners to easily adopt these solutions, Cisco has targeted configurations for various deployment models defined through the Cisco UCS SmartPlay Configurations for Citrix XenDesktop.

As always for more details, please visit www.cisco.com/go/vdi and www.cisco.com/go/citrix