You can read the Microsoft announcement here.

Executives are weighing in on what to expect next year in server and desktop virtualization, cloud computing, OS virtualization, I/O virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization and more.

We offered our thoughts which are anchored in the game-altering impact new RDP protocols, including VMware View 4, XenDesktop 4, RDP 7 and SPICE are having on the marketplace.

While Citrix ICA and Windows Terminal Services clearly have the deepest market penetration, the high-powered technologies of PCoIP and others, coupled with advanced thin client hardware, can deliver users true PC experiences – on everything from YouTube videos to CAD engineering programs – in a virtual desktop.

It will be interesting to see the adoption in the industry now that some of these performance barriers will be broken – we think it’s the future of alternative desktop computing.

Among other things, this new version of View runs PC-over-IP (PCoIP), a high-powered remote display protocol from Teradici. We’ve received a number of inquiries from customers about PCoIP and View 4, and wanted to address them on Thin Tank.

People have used RDP (Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol) in the past but it was never designed to be the primary access to a virtual machine running XP. Although MS has improved RDP with its new version, RDP7, it is still not as comprehensive as PCoIP, which was designed from the ground up to handle remote multimedia display capabilities.

PCoIP has also been out for a number of years and was originally designed to run on dedicated hardware. VMware partnered with Teradici and ported the PCoIP protocol so it can run on VMware virtual machines.   However a thin client must be robust enough to handle the PCoIP traffic. (See our Intel® Atom™ processor-based TC5 thin client that fits this bill.)

The only difference between the new PCoIP on View 4 and the original is that it runs as software on the virtual machine and can run as a software client on the thin client hardware. This means users don’t have to purchase special hardware to run PCoIP, potentially a very expensive situation for one user.

By virtualizing PCoIP, one can share one server among multiple users who can connect from powerful thin clients running VMware View 4.

See more information about View 4 and its capabilities here .

But a drawback is most companies must build a new infrastructure or greatly expand their current hardware to host all the back end desktops. Discretionary IT dollars are a thing of the past so a solution must be absolutely better and less expensive to make wide scale changes. It needs to be in order to unseat whatever is in place. And if it is more expensive, it must have a spectacular upside, something that is of real value to the IT department so they are willing to part with the extra money because it is genuinely worth it.

I worked with a school on a hosted desktop solution once that really wasn’t hosted. They had tried server-based computing but it didn’t meet the needs of their graphically intense lab users. So with one 3U server (and internal storage) they will be able to meet the need of having 6 different desktop workloads available on demand to these users. Each end point computer runs the workload assigned to it using the local CPU and Memory, all from a single disk image that is on the server. This one 3U server could support hundreds of end point machines so you can see we don’t need a giant scaled out back end infrastructure. We don’t even need a hypervisor on the client or the server side.

I think that this is a pretty cool way to give the end user the power of local machine performance and we as administrators get one image to manage on a single windows server. Not very complicated. A second windows server adds HA and failover. Drag and drop image updates and upgrades. And no compromising info has to live on the end point device. So you can use your existing hardware on the desktop to accomplish this. As desktops fail you simple replace them with a thin client.

While I am sure that it will be cool, we don’t have to wait for the client side hypervisor. When it gets here your current desktop hardware probably won’t support it. You could use this type of solution in any environment. It can work with hypervisors if you have them, we can even get remote users connected. That’s another thing I like about it, you can leverage this solution in so many different ways.

Some people think that VDI is complicated and expensive. It doesn’t have to be. Let me know what you think.

I think everyone I know has switched to web interface or Program Neighborhood agent (a.k.a XenApp services). Anyone paying attention to Citrix has seen this coming for a long time. Program Neighborhood is now missing a lot of features. For instance you can’t do application streaming; it doesn’t support zone preference and fail over; also it’s very difficult to centrally configure your new applications.

I am curious if custom ICA sessions also go away. I will also miss the ability to connect to multiple farms of my choosing, and to have the ability to customize my various session settings.  I guess this might be a small price to pay for the centralized ease of management that web interface and XenApp service supports.

I kinda miss the old ICA client – but then I remember how difficult it was to manage.

My conclusion: Goodbye, Program Neighborhood, and good riddance

We’ll engage experts from all over the world to discuss everything related server and desktop virtualization, thin clients, virtualization software, cloud computing, blade servers, and much more.

Our authors will include Stephane Verdy, CTO for Devon IT; Rafael Gonzalez, Technical Sales Engineer for Devon IT; and Jared Hoover, Director of Professional Services for Devon IT and its sister-company, CentriServ Solutions. Jared is also a co-editor of “The Real Citrix CCA Exam Preparation Kit: Prepare for XenApp 5.0.”

We’ll also post videos, links, and other cool industry-related stuff, so PLEASE check back often, and join the conversation!