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Virtual Desktop Acquisition Cost Analysis | White Paper

Virtual Desktop Acquisition Cost Analysis

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Desktop virtualization is much more than a technology solution. It is transforming the way organizations of all sizes are enabling their workforces while simplifying the desktop management process for the administrator. With desktop virtualization, IT organizations are able to provide every user with a workspace environment completely unrestricted by physical location.

Desktop virtualization is also able to address many of the common business initiatives facing IT organizations, such as empowering a mobile and virtual workstyle without compromising security, increasing the speed of integration and standardization required for mergers and acquisitions, streamlining desktop management efforts as the number of employees in remote offices and offshore locations increases and making the user experience personal through self-service access to applications and desktops.

In many cases, the pure business benefits of desktop virtualization alone justify any acquisition costs associated with a deployment, but none-the-less, the historic costs of VDI have given organizations pause as they try to justify what may be increased acquisition costs. Afterall, simply deploying more PCs is a known and accepted strategy despite the security, management and flexibility challenges that drive interest in desktop virtualization. In past years, deploying VDI at scale could be expensive, primarily driven by the need for high performance storage infrastructure, exacerbated by the sprawl of unique or dedicated desktop virtual machines. The clear differentiator within the industry is Citrix® XenDesktop® with Citrix® FlexCast™ technology. XenDesktop, the market leader in desktop and application virtualization, is the best solution for transforming Windows® desktops and applications into an on-demand service available to any user on any device, anywhere. XenDesktop with FlexCast technology allows IT organizations to provide the right kind of virtual desktop to each individual user, optimizing for cost through layering technologies that separate desktops, apps, profiles, and data into individual layers that can be dynamically combined for the optimium user experience.

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The benefits of desktop virtualization as provided by XenDesktop are well known, but the total cost of acquisition associated with any desktop virtualization solution, including XenDesktop, needs to be thoroughly understood and evaluated. This white paper investigates the acquisition costs of desktop virtualization and the infrastructure cost benefits associated with providing a XenDesktop solution with FlexCast technology. For illustration purposes, this white paper includes assumptions for environment design, resource configuration, user categorization and cost based on deployment and implementation recommendations available to customers with the Citrix Desktop Transformation Accelerator. This analysis serves as a tangible reference for calculations and results that further demonstrate the cost benefits of XenDesktop with FlexCast.

Cost analysis

Figure 1: Desktop Virtualization Cost Analysis

The costs of desktop virtualization are declining as design, features and optimizations improve, but XenDesktop with FlexCast technology remains the most cost-effective desktop virtualization solution in the marketplace. XenDesktop continues to differentiate itself from the other offerings based on unique attributes such as shared storage optimizations for centralized image management with full user personalization via Personal vDisk technology, Citrix® XenApp® server-based desktop virtualization, WAN optimization via Citrix® Branch Repeater®, hardware virtualization with Citrix® XenServer® and secure remote access with mobility management using Citrix® NetScaler® with Citrix® CloudGateway™ Express.

The costs associated with desktop virtualization as shown in Figure 1 are as follows:

PC costs: According to a 2011 Gartner report, “…the cost of a desktop will be $972 (monitor included) with a four-year life cycle.”1 This is the baseline PC cost against which virtual desktop acquisition costs were compared.

1 Gartner Desktop Total Cost of Ownership: 2011 Update, Federica Troni, February 2011.

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Other (competitor) VDI: Total acquisition costs for this category are based on the same hardware and storage configurations as the XenDesktop model and were only marginally more than existing PC costs, further endorsing the cost advantages of desktop virtualization. The virtual desktop per-user cost was broken down into $150 for device, $193 for shared storage, $246 for server hardware, $359 for software, $87 for remote access and WAN optimization and $32 for additional datacenter equipment to support the new servers.

XenDesktop with FlexCast: Total acquisition costs for XenDesktop with FlexCast technology based on the methodology and assumptions presented in this white paper were $150 for device, $15 for shared storage, $141 for server hardware, $394 for software, $20 for remote access and WAN optimization and $26 for additional datacenter equipment to support the new servers.

Cost of acquisitionThere are various fiscal methods that can be used for evaluating the investments associated with desktop virtualization, but as those cost assumptions increase in complexity it becomes more difficult to relate to your individual costs. Therefore, Citrix create this white paper to focus strictly on the total cost of acquisition associated with XenDesktop. The costs included in the analysis are restricted to the following capital expenses:

•Physical servers used to host virtual desktops and their supporting virtual desktop infrastructure components

•Shared storage used to provision and personalize the virtual desktop as well as shared storage required for virtual desktop infrastructure redundancy

•Software that enables the virtualization, provisioning, user connection and data collection associated with a virtual desktop deployment

•User devices, both personal and corporate issued, used to access the virtual desktops

•WAN optimization equipment to improve performance for users in remote offices

•Network equipment associated with secure, remote access as well as the additional servers required

•Datacenter equipment associated with the increase in physical footprint

FlexCast cost methodologyFlexCast delivery technology is designed to provide the right type of virtual desktop for each user, so a mix of desktops, users and workloads must be evaluated when comparing capital costs of a virtual desktop versus a traditional PC. This analysis evaluated the baseline infrastructure costs for 2,500 concurrent users accessing a XenDesktop virtual desktop environment with FlexCast technology.

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User Segmentation: The 2,500-user workforce was broken down into more-granular user groups. The first categorization step was to determine user types: 75 percent of the users were assumed to be task workers, 20 percent to be knowledge workers and 5 percent to be power users. Once the high-level user types were identified, the user workload for each type was also assessed. User workload depends upon both the type and number of applications utilized throughout the workday. User workload is categorized into three categories: light, normal and heavy workloads. There is a direct correlation between the type of user workload and the computing resources associated with the virtual desktop.

Task Workers: It was assumed that with a normal user workload, access to a standard Windows desktop would address all of the business and computing resource needs for this user group.

Knowledge Users: The workload differs for knowledge and power users, but both groups require the ability to customize their virtual desktop, unlike the task workers. The knowledge workers were assumed to have a normal workload with access to a personalized Windows desktop.

Power Users: The power users were assumed to have a heavy workload with access to a personalized Windows desktop.

FlexCast Models: The next step in user segmentation was to determine the appropriate FlexCast delivery model for the individual user groups. Personalization, or the ability to make modifications to the virtual desktop that would persist between uses, beyond what is currently available in a user profile solution, was a key decision point when evaluating FlexCast desktop delivery methods. Task workers are typically able to work within a standard desktop image without the need for personalization beyond that provided through a profile. For this reason, it is assumed that task workers are best suited for a Hosted Shared desktop delivered through the XenApp feature of XenDesktop. The other 25 percent of the workforce, the remaining 625 knowledge and power users, need some level of personalization that persists across logins; this FlexCast model is referenced as Hosted VDI. Other desktop virtualization solutions require a more costly, dedicated virtual desktop for user personalization, but Personal vDisk from XenDesktop allows organizations to utilize a central, pooled desktop image for all users with a unique Personal vDisk layer for user personalization and customizations.

The following table summarizes the complete user and workload categorization:

User category Workload User count FlexCast model

Task worker Normal 1875 Hosted Shared

Knowledge worker Normal 500 Hosted VDI (Pooled VDI)

Power user Heavy 125 Hosted VDI (Pooled VDI)

Table 1: FlexCast model selected for each user grouping

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Requirements process: Once the assumptions and user groupings were established, Citrix continued to leverage the design and planning tools within the Desktop Transformation Accelerator to determine the core sizing and requirements for each of the user groups within their respective FlexCast model and the supporting infrastructure across the entire deployment. Each subset of the FlexCast models were evaluated independently with a different set of computing resources associated with each type of user workload. This grouping allowed Citrix to determine a list of requirements for each individual FlexCast model and a collective list of computing requirements for the overlying infrastructure and remote access components. The overall analysis was broken down into the following individual modules:

Module Description

Desktop–Pooled VDI Resources required to support the XenDesktop virtual desktops virtualized on XenServer, streamed with provisioning services and personalized with Personal vDisk

Desktop–Hosted Shared Resources required to support shared desktops from the XenApp feature of XenDesktop virtualized on XenServer and streamed with provisioning services

Infrastructure Module Resources required to support the overlying XenDesktop infrastructure including XenDesktop controllers, license server, Web Interface, Microsoft® SQL Server®, provisioning services, XenApp XML brokers, XenApp data controllers and Desktop Director servers

Remote Access Module Resources required to support remote access through Citrix Access GatewayTM Enterprise Edition and WAN optimization via Branch Repeater

Table 2: XenDesktop Module Definition

Design assumptionsWhen identifying the computing needs for each XenDesktop architecture module, there were some key XenDesktop design decisions that needed to be made to help finalize the sizing and resourcing requirements. These design decisions followed best practices recommendations from the Citrix services and engineering teams:

XenServer was selected as the hypervisor of choice for the configuration, given that XenServer is included in every edition of XenDesktop. For this analysis, the IntelliCache feature of XenServer was not included in an effort to make the model transferable to other hypervisors through differential hypervisor cost adjustments.

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The Pooled VDI configuration was based on a Windows 7 x86 desktop with 20GB operating system drive streamed by Citrix provisioning services in orchestration with XenDesktop Personal vDisk for personalization. The provisioning services write cache was 5GB located on local RAID 10 storage in a client-side configuration. The Personal vDisk was 10GB in size with a 50/50 split for applications and profile located on shared storage. A Microsoft VDA license was required for the Pooled VDI desktops.

The Hosted Shared configuration was based on the XenApp 6.5 feature of XenDesktop. The XenApp server image was assumed to be 50GB in size and streamed with provisioning services. The provisioning services write cache was 10GB and located on a local RAID 10 storage in a client-side configuration. A Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (RDS CAL) was required for each Hosted Shared desktop connection.

All existing infrastructure required for a standard PC workplace environment, such as Microsoft® Active Directory®, file servers for profile solutions and existing XenApp servers for application virtualization were assumed to remain the same in the virtual desktop environment. The Citrix profile management solution, a feature of XenDesktop Platinum, was used, but the 50/50 split of the Personal vDisk storage provided a storage location for a local, roaming or mandatory profile solution without any modifications for cost.

Scalability numbers vary across different server hardware configurations for desktop virtualization but in most cases IT administrators only order from a limited number of standard physical server configurations to reduce variation in the datacenter. To align with this procurement process, Citrix selected only two physical server configurations for this model. The physical rack mount servers hosting the virtual desktop infrastructure were standardized with 128GB RAM, 16 logical processor cores, two 146GB drives and four NICs for the provisioning, storage, desktop and management networks. The physical rack mount servers hosting the virtual desktops were standardized with 192GB RAM, 16 logical processor cores, eight 146GB drives and four NICs for the provisioning/desktop, management and storage2 networks.

Redundancy was factored into the overall cost as a way to ensure that desktops and infrastructure components could be moved between hosts for physical server and hypervisor maintenance.3 Redundancy was calculated at 10 percent to ensure that adequate physical resources were always available, but it should be noted that the redundancy factor is not intended to be utilized as a high-availability or disaster recovery solution.

With a work anywhere desktop virtualization solution such as XenDesktop, remote access is a key component. Citrix therefore incorporated remote access into the analysis for all 2,500 users. An Access Gateway Universal License is included with XenDesktop Platinum, requiring only the physical or virtual appliance to be purchased. Given the 2,500-user workforce, a pair of physical NetScaler appliances with Access Gateway Enterprise Edition was selected to provide remote access. A single physical NetScaler appliance could support the 2,500-user model, but a second device was added for fault tolerance.

2 Assumption is that storage network would utilize teamed NICs.3 Infrastructure virtual machines are hosted on shared storage and support XenMotion. Virtual machines hosting virtual desktops are leveraging local storage, making XenMotion unavailable,

but the redundant servers would still provide the necessary resources for physical server maintenance.

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Citrix also assumed that a portion of the overall workforce would be accessing the virtual desktop environment over a T1 WAN connection from a branch office. XenDesktop Platinum includes Branch Repeater VPX™ for WAN optimization. The number of branch offices utilizing Branch Repeater VPX was estimated at 10, but this number does not affect the overall cost of XenDesktop given the inclusion of Branch Repeater VPX in XenDesktop Platinum. However, Citrix determined that a pair of physical Branch Repeater devices in the datacenter would ensure WAN optimization will continue even if one failed.

Cost assumptionsEach of the following cost assumptions is based on the standard list price to eliminate any volume discount bias and make the analysis simple to compare against other solutions. By taking this approach, the final results are typically higher than those actually paid by businesses due to variables such as size of workforce, number of locations and existing IT investments.

Desktop servers: The physical servers allocated for the Pooled VDI and Hosted Shared desktop modules had 192GB RAM and 16 cores for maximum desktop density with optimal performance. A price point of $11,163 was identified for a 2u rack mount server with two 8-core Intel® Xeon® E5-2660 processors (2.20 GHz) with 12x8GB dual rank memory per processor and eight 146GB 15K RPM 2.5 SAS hard drives. Each physical server utilized XenServer as the hypervisor for the virtualized desktops. Citrix ensured that the number of Pooled VDI desktops per server would not exceed 130 and that the number of virtualized XenApp servers providing Hosted Shared desktops would not exceed 16 per host.

Infrastructure servers: The physical servers allocated for the XenDesktop infrastructure modules (control and imaging models) had 128GB RAM and 16 cores. A price point of $8,357 was identified for a 2u rack mount server with two 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2660 processors (2.20 GHz) with 12x8GB dual rank memory per processor and two 146GB 15K RPM 2.5 SAS hard drives. All infrastructure virtual machines were located on shared storage for XenMotion® capabilities. Each physical server utilized XenServer as the hypervisor for the virtualized infrastructure servers. Hypervisor features, such as memory or CPU over-commit, were not factored into the infrastructure server sizing.

Client devices: The analysis examined device costs using two different approaches. The first approach was a bring your own (BYO) model; in this case the client device cost was estimated to be minimal or zero since the user’s personal device was leveraged. The standard FlexCast model assumed a thin client with system on a chip (SoC) technology; the cost for this thin-client device was calculated to be $150 without keyboard, mouse or monitor.

XenDesktop licensing: XenDesktop is available in Express, VDI, Enterprise and Platinum Editions, with the latter including the most comprehensive feature set for desktop and application virtualization. For this analysis, Citrix selected XenDesktop Platinum to ensure that every feature of desktop virtualization was available in the cost estimate. XenDesktop Platinum is priced at $300/user ($350 less $50 for Citrix Subscription Advantage™).

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Citrix appliances: XenDesktop Platinum includes the Access Gateway Universal License, but the physical or virtual appliance needs to be purchased independently. A pair of physical NetScaler appliances with Access Gateway Enterprise Edition was identified during the design process as the optimal solution for remote access, so the analysis includes a pair of NetScaler MPX 5500 appliances with a price point of $9,000 each. For WAN optimization, XenDesktop Platinum includes the licenses and virtual Branch Repeater VPX appliance. During the design process it was identified that a pair of physical Branch Repeater would be best suited for the datacenter while each branch office would utilize Branch Repeater VPX. The cost for a pair of physical Branch Repeater 8820 (45 Mbps) appliances was $33,150.

Pooled VDI desktops licensing (Microsoft): The Windows 7 Professional x86 operating system was selected for the Pooled VDI desktops. A Microsoft Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license is required for each Pooled VDI desktop instance when accessing the virtual desktop via a BYO endpoint or thin client. A price point of $100 per desktop was assumed for the Microsoft VDA license.

Hosted Shared desktops licensing (Microsoft): Each XenApp server providing Hosted Shared desktops require a Windows Server 2008 R2 license and a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (RDS-CAL) to ensure that the solution is properly licensed for named users. It was assumed that the Windows Server 2008 R2 license was covered under an existing enterprise agreement. XenApp requires an RDS-CAL for each Hosted Shared desktop connection; a cost of $80/user was identified for each RDS-CAL required for the 1,875 users accessing a Hosted Shared desktop. It should be noted that if RDS-CALs are already available based on existing XenApp application virtualization, this cost can be negated.

Infrastructure licensing (Microsoft): The physical servers hosting the XenDesktop infrastructure virtual servers were Windows Server® 2008 R2 with the assumption that the costs were covered as part of an enterprise agreement. Microsoft® SQL Server® is the only other component with an individual associated Microsoft cost. SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition is licensed per processor core with a cost of $1,793 per 4 cores. The SQL Server virtual server has 16 cores and is priced at $7,172 or $1,793 per quad-core.

Storage: When determining the price point for storage, it was difficult to lock down a specific price per gigabyte, given that Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) rather than storage capacity is typically the most restrictive factor in a virtual desktop design. The demand for IOPS is most prevalent within the provisioning services write cache and can be addressed through various storage optimization techniques based on proprietary solutions from a particular storage vendor, leveraging SSD hard drives or increasing the number of spindles by increasing the number of available SAS or SATA drives. Opinions on this topic differ, but for the purpose of this analysis, increasing the number of SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration available as local storage on each physical desktop server was utilized for the provisioning services write cache. This ensured that an adequate number of SAS spindles were available to meet the storage IOPS requirements with some redundancy in place. The cost for the additional hard drives is collectively addressed in the physical desktop server costs previously noted.

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Local storage is able to address some storage needs, but shared storage is still required for the more critical infrastructure servers and Personal vDisk data that persist across logins. Shared storage is dependent upon storage controllers with attached disk shelves for storage capacity. A controller was priced at $19,250 and it was assumed that each controller could then have up to 40 individual disk shelves associated with it. An individual shelf has twenty-four 450GB SAS 15K RPM SAS drives at a price point of $17,057 (per shelf). It was assumed that this storage was utilized in a RAID 6 configuration for optimal redundancy and fault tolerance configuration.

Datacenter infrastructure: There are incremental datacenter infrastructure costs associated with adding a solution of this size. The following price points were selected for datacenter components:

Network switches: Additional network switches were allocated to the architecture to support the desktop, provisioning and management networks. Each switch was priced at $14,000 and included forty-eight 10/100/1000 PoE ports and two X2-based 10 gigabit Ethernet ports.

Rack: All the storage, servers, and appliances required a new storage location, so a price of $1,098 was allocated for a single, 42-unit rack.

Power strips: Additional power strips were also required for the new equipment; each metered power distribution unit (PDU) was priced at $549 with 42 connectors.

RequirementsThe Citrix Desktop Transformation Accelerator, specifically the Hardware and Storage calculator, was utilized to establish the overall requirements for each of the XenDesktop modules for a 2,500 user XenDesktop FlexCast deployment based on all the design assumptions.

Module Requirements

Desktop–Pooled VDI module Total virtual machines: 625 Total CPU cores: 147 Total RAM (GB): 1500 Total IOPS: 12,500 Total storage for Personal vDisk (GB): 6,250 Desktop image size (GB): 20 Total storage for provisioning services: Write cache (GB): 3125 vDisk (GB): 20

XenServer hypervisors: 15 Redundant XenServer hypervisors: 2 Total XenServer hypervisors: 17

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Module Requirements

Desktop–Hosted Shared module

Total XenApp virtual servers: 63 Total CPU cores: 125 Total RAM (GB): 1,008 Total IOPS (steady state): 7,500 Server image size (GB): 50 Total storage for provisioning services: Write cache (GB): 945 vDisk (GB): 50 XenServer hypervisors: 9 Redundant XenServer hypervisors: 1 Total XenServer hypervisors: 10

Infrastructure module (control and imaging modules)

Total virtual machines: 17 Total CPU cores: 66 Total RAM (GB): 196 Total storage for VMs (GB): 851 XenServer hypervisors: 5 Redundant XenServer hypervisors: 1 Total XenServer hypervisors: 6

VM breakdown: Citrix license servers: 1 Citrix Web Interface servers: 2 SQL Servers: 3 Citrix provisioning services servers: 3 Citrix XenApp data collectors : 2 Citrix XenApp XML brokers : 2 Citrix XenDesktop controllers : 2 Citrix Desktop Director servers : 2

Remote access and WAN optimization module

Access Gateway Enterprise (physical): 2 Physical Branch Repeater (datacenter): 2 Branch Repeater VPX (branch office): 10

Cost The cost analysis was broken down into different phases; the individual hardware and software licensing costs were accumulated based on individual desktop module. The datacenter, remote access and shared storage costs were evaluated on a collective basis.

Hardware and software licensing costs

The following costs reflect the physical hardware costs and license costs associated with XenDesktop Platinum, SQL Server and Microsoft RDS-CAL and VDA licensing.

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Module Requirements Costs Total costs

Desktop–Pooled VDI module

Hypervisors: 17 VMs: 625 XenDesktop licenses: 625

$11,163 (server) $100 (Microsoft VDA) $300 (XenDesktop Platinum)

$189,771 $62,500 $187,500 $439,771

Desktop–Hosted Shared module

Hypervisors : 10 Users : 1,875

$11,163 (server) $80 (RDS-CAL) $300 (XenDesktop Platinum)

$111,630 $150,000 $562,500 $824,130

Infrastructure module (control and imaging modules)

Hypervisors: 6 SQL Server VMs: 3

$8,357 (server) $7,172 (SQL Server)

$50,142 $21,516 $71,658

Storage costs

The following costs reflect the shared storage, both storage capacity and IOPS, for Pooled VDI, Hosted Shared and infrastructure modules.

Module Requirements

Storage module Total shared storage: Personal vDisk: 6,250 GB Infrastructure: 851 GB

Total local storage: Hosted shared write cache: 945 GB; 7,500 IOPS Pooled VDI write cache:3,125 GB; 12,500 IOPS

Module Capacity

Shared storage device Raw storage capacity/shelf (GB): 21,071 Net storage capacity/Shelf (GB)4: 9,900 Controller: 1 Shelves: 1

Local storage Physical host: IOPS/server: 864 Raw storage capacity/server: 1168 Net storage capacity/server: 584 Hosted Shared servers: 9 (based on cores or IOPS)

Pooled VDI servers: 15 (based on IOPS)

4 Net storage capacity inclusive of RAID 6 configuration with tolerance for 2 drive failure.

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The storage calculations were evaluated based on both total storage capacity and total storage IOPS required for the provisioning services write cache. Storage capacity was never the most restrictive factor for local storage. The total number of servers for the Hosted Shared module was nine based on either IOPS (7,500/864) or required number of CPU cores, making the server sizing ideal. The total number of servers for the Pooled VDI module was 15 based on strictly on IOPS (12,500/864). Shared storage for Personal vDisk and infrastructure VM was calculated based purely on storage capacity. The total shared storage costs are broken down as follows:

Module Requirements Costs Total costs

Shared storage module Storage controller: 1 Disk shelves: 1

$19,250 $17,057

$19,250 $17,057 $36,307

Remote access, WAN optimization and datacenter costs

The following costs reflect the Access Gateway Enterprise and Branch Repeater appliance and licenses for remote access with WAN optimization. The NetScaler appliances with Access Gateway are physical devices. The Branch Repeater appliances are physical in the datacenter and virtual in the branch office.

Module Requirements Costs Total Costs

Remote access and WAN optimization module

Access Gateway: 2 Physical Branch Repeater (DC): 2 Branch Repeater VPX: 10

$9,000 $19,500 $0 (XD Platinum)

$18,000 $33,150 $0 $51,150

Datacenter costs

Network switches: 4 Racks: 3 PDUs: 9

$14,000 $1,098 $549

$56,000 $3,294 $4,941 $64,235

ConclusionDesktop virtualization has been criticized in the past for being more costly than a traditional PC deployment by requiring expensive virtual infrastructure and defaulting to VDI deployments when lower cost desktop virtualization options suffice. FlexCast technology is the key differentiator for desktop virtualization. XenDesktop with FlexCast technology provides the right type of virtual desktop for the right type of user, such as a server-based desktop for a task worker versus a fully personalized desktop for a knowledge worker. FlexCast balances the high user density of server-based desktops (hosted shared desktops) with the centralization, personalization and storage optimizations of pooled VDI by enabling desktop virtualization for the entire workforce and distributing cost evenly.

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About CitrixCitrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the company transforming how people, businesses and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 enterprises. Citrix touches 75 percent of Internet users each day and partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

©2012 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, XenDesktop®, XenApp®, XenServer®, NetScaler®, Branch Repeater®, XenMotion®, Citrix Access Gateway™, CloudGateway™, FlexCast™ and VPX™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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This paper addressed many of the hard acquisition costs associated with deploying XenDesktop desktop virtualization, but there are many other operational cost advantages to desktop virtualization, including the ability to streamline desktop management, introduce flexible workspaces to reduce real estate costs and simplify the employee on-boarding process to accelerate productivity. Cost-effectiveness is only one of the reasons why an organization should be evaluating desktop virtualization with XenDesktop. With the cost of desktop virtualization lower today than typical enterprise PC deployments, ensure that your organization has the right solution in place to retain employees, adapt to a global workforce and stay ahead of your competition.