At last week’s iForum user event in the US, it announced two products that contain the Ardence capability. These are Citrix Provisioning Server, which combines Ardence with the hypervisor it got by buying virtualization vendor XenSource in August, and XenDesktop, which is a renamed and expanded version of Citrix Desktop Server. XenDesktop comprises CDS, Ardence, and the Xen hypervisor.
The app streaming technology also became a product in its own right, but it was subsequently decided to offer it instead as a separately licensed feature on the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company’s flagship product, the Citrix Presentation Server app virtualization platform.
With three separate virtualization offerings in the house (application, server, and desktop), the natural question is where else the streaming technologies could go. Server virtualization, which is one half of what Citrix bought with XenSource, is now called XenServer, and the company was demonstrating Ardence OS streaming in that product at iForum. App streaming there clearly wouldn’t make sense, as there is no point streaming an app to a virtual server.
With the Tarpon technology already available in CPS, the other potential recipient for the capability would be XenDesktop. One of Citrix’s partners, Dell, was showing it on its stand at iForum, calling the overall offering SmartClient. They were streaming the desktop OS to the user with Ardence in XenDesktop, then using Tarpon to keep the apps isolated from each other, said a spokesperson for Citrix.
It only remains to ask when Citrix will deliver app streaming as a standard feature, albeit with a separate license, in its desktop virtualization product.
