Recently my company has gone through this huge architectural discussion/debate around using Citrix versus using VDI. It has been rather entertaining to say the least. I've met with the architect that's attempting to put together a comparision document on a direction to go.

Some background... We've worked to get Citrix to run our critical home grown apps 3 times now. All since Citrix is going to save us some untold amount of money in the long run. Each time trying to get our homegrown apps to Citrix-ize has been completely and horribly unsuccessful. So great.. We have Citrix running some 2 dozen applications (not the important ones still) and still have to maintain a separate application deployment system for applications outside of Citrix currently (lets talk about management, labor and support effort of maintaining two separate systems). The current Citrix environment gets at least a dozen new tickets

When we attempted to get Citrix up and running the first time 4+ years ago we spent some 200 hours trying to get One homegrown business critical application up and running on Citrix. That failed horribly. We then looked at running this "Virtual Machine" concept with XP workstations which was completely new at the time. It was this or putting some 200 desktops into our datacenter. Ewwww. We went and tried the Virtual Workstations out and had the application, entire environment and all systems up and running in about 100 hours of effort. It worked. The environment then grew organically as more and more teams heard about it and found that it just kept working. We are up around 1200 VDI instances (we call it Virtual Workstations) now.

Sooo.. Back to architectural discussion..

Citrix has some 12 pages in this document around the things we'd have to fix and all the unknowns and estimated effort to Citrix-ize all these apps and possible, maybe cost savings if we are lucky and can get some of these business critical applications up and working and so forth. Virtual Workstations has 1/2 a page that says basically.. "It works and will work for the forseeable future."

What is upper management thinking about doing? Citrix. Why? Beats the tar out of me as the possible cost savings just don't appear to be there. *sigh*