Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, or XenDesktop) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application virtualization solution from Citrix.
$375
Oracle VDI
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Oracle VDI) is an enterprise level solution providing a virtual desktop environment for users within an organization.
DaaS is ideal in large-scale environments that require centralized, secure management. Remote workforces at large organizations. Highly regulated industries like finance. It allows for easy security and monitoring over one aspect instead of multiple remote machines. DaaS is not ideal for organizations with small budgets due to the pricing and organizations with lousy network connectivity. This would make the end-user experience terrible.
Considering Oracle VDI is not supported by Oracle anymore, and will not receive any future updates, I wouldn't recommend Oracle VDI for most scenarios. Unless your organization is under some strict contractual agreement or there is a feature in Oracle VDI that isn't supported in its modern successors/competitors (haven't come across a feature like that based on my experience), I would recommend using something like VMware Horizon.
Getting the environment setup took me three months of off and on work, with 3 complete rebuilds of the environment. Utilizing the WebUI to access the environment had presented so many random issues that we had to require end users to use the Citrix Reciever App. As it was the only stable solution. Aside from that, it hasn't required much admin intervention since the stand-up was completed.
The performance of XenDesktop is the best in the industry because of the fine-tuned protocol and years of updating. Overall, I don't think there is a better performer on the market. The question is if the added complexity of running XenDesktop is really worth the performance gain. While the latest version of XenDesktop is the easiest to deploy so far, it is still more challenging than the competitors.
The easiest way to describe the performance is like this - when it is working, it works almost flawlessly. When it starts freezing, your day is going to get very interesting very quickly. As I have stated earlier, I used it for one purpose, and it did what I needed it to most of the time, but I did have issues with it.
The support is great when you get an engineer that knows what they are doing but getting that individual sometimes takes a while. Overall, they are professional and polite and competent in their knowledge. Sometimes the cases are open for an extended period of time which becomes very frustrating when dealing with critical issues.
Take it slow and read the directions each step of the way. If you are not familiar with Citrix products, use a reseller or other experienced engineer to assist you in the setup of your environment
Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops is platform agnostic (we can use any underlying hypervisor technology) and really flexible for any use case. Using a golden image and provisioning it (with Machine Creation Services or Provisioning Services) is powerful and really straightforward, compared to the complexity in Microsoft RDS of maintaining a coherent farm, or the limitation of VMware Horizon to run on VMware Products.
VMware Horizon does everything that Oracle VDI is capable of doing and offers many more features, and unlike Oracle VDI, it is still receiving constant updates. Oracle VDI was a great solution for enterprise-level management of virtualized desktop when it was getting updates, but now that it won't be getting any, I would put it in the "outdated technology" category.
XenApp has allowed us to continue support of legacy applications and all access of those applications to users across the globe with any device.
XenApp can also manage software licenses by restricting number of users, number of concurrent sessions, or combination of both to required specification.
While initial investment in XenApp can be costly, continuing support and upgrade are very cost effective and product stability is excellent.
While there are competing products from Microsoft and VMware, when it comes to remote application access, XenApp is the best of breed.