Validating your VDI / SBC deployment

Everyone is testing, are you?

I am constantly exposed to data surrounding the VDI / SBC industry and their various technologies, and advancements. I've had the opportunity to work with many of the vendors directly. Because of this unique position I get to have a 360 view of the industry.

The company I work for Login VSI has been known as the industry standard in VDI / SBC testing for several years now. Vendors have been utilizing the software to prove their concepts with Login VSI. Login VSI has done a great job of collecting these RA into a single location on their website here. This collection serves two purposes:

1. To allow vendors to demonstrate their capabilities utilizing an independent third party testing tool.
2. Allow potential customers of VDI / SBC to gain some insight into their purchase using real data.

I was recently given the idea by a friend to write about the proliferation of testing and the expansion of VDI / SBC. 

While correlation does not necessarily equal causation it is still interesting to look at the data, and attempt to draw some conclusions.

So, what I did was I took the publicly accessible data on Login VSIs website, and created a database from it by which I created some charts and provided analysis. Hope you enjoy!

First I was interested in who was publishing the white papers. There were a bunch of vendors who have submitted white papers but in the interest of brevity we will look at the top 5.

1. DELL
2. Cisco
3. EMC
4. VMware
5. Citrix

This is to be expected in my opinion. These vendors have been around the longest, and most likely had the availability and capacity for testing their products. Other vendors while becoming popular recently haven’t had the longevity that the above list has.

And most likely as far as market saturation is concerned. DELL / Cisco / EMC most likely have the largest volume of hardware out there. With VMWare / Citrix serving up the software.

DELL, Cisco, EMC, and VMWare are really interested in displaying the power of XenDesktop on their platforms.

Seems that Citrix is really the only vendor interested in promoting XenApp. Maybe it’s time for XenApp to be put to pasteur.

Lots of interest from DELL, EMC, VMWare and Cisco to a small degree to encourage their customers to give Horizon a shot. This is interesting because all of these companies have strategic business dealings or investments in each other. No surprises.

It’s no secret that vendors are buying each other up. Instead of investing money into the latest hyped technology to keep up with another company, why not just buy a company to supplant your offering. We see examples of this in HPE’s purchase of Simplivity to add mature HCI to their offerings. The graph above I’ve used my set of data to correlate the total number of publishers and the amount of reference architectures being published. 

We continue to see a rise in testing, and there is a correlation with the amount of testing that is being performed and the number of vendors doing the testing. If in my example above Simplivity and HPE were both writing reference architectures the reference architectures may be now coming out from HPE. Unless the brands are kept seperate.

Another interesting item is that we see that the trend of continued testing, and the proliferation of testing continue to increase throughout the industry. This further establishes that the vendor community at large sees the value of testing.

I took the major software vendors in the space, and I grouped them together by the published documents within a period. As you can see above, it appears that Citrix has been mostly consistent with their testing since 2009. While starting in 2011 we see some life from VMWare. If you notice towards the 3rd Quarter of 2016 and onto 2017 VMWare has significantly increased their output of reference architectures. 

I’ve noticed recently from my observation of the industry that VMware within the last year or so has been making a major push into the market with Horizon so it would make sense that they have been more active in recently.

 Citrix has been methodical about their testing which would make sense due to them being the market leader in the VDI / SBC delivery space. The blips from Microsoft were “Why Hyper-V? for VDI” and “Windows 2012R2 VDI”. Microsoft products are being delivered on both VMWare and Citrix, so by default these vendors are validating Microsoft as well. 

I think that Microsoft is perfectly happy to facilitate the technology which relies on their OS vs. doing their own individual marketing. Additionally, I don’t believe there has ever been a serious push regarding Hyper-V’s viability as a hypervisor vs. ESXi.

My guess would be that the VDI market place continues to expand, and the landscape will change over time. Being as that testing has been an important part of comparison and validation I think we will see the amount of testing being performed continue to increase.

The testing leads to a better experience for the end user with the technology in their hands, and in their environments. If the end users experience is improving to compete with standard desktops and laptops as end points I personally think VDI / SBC will continue to increase in popularity.

This is substantiated in many locations. One reference from businesswire below. They see 11% growth starting in 2017, and for an industry worth billions of dollars that is a lot of money to be made.

Any type of information you would like to see out of my set of data feel free to leave a comment. Follow me to continue to receive notifications to my new publications.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005754/en/Global-Virtual-Desktop-Infrastructure-VDI-Market-Grow