Pandemic planning and a step toward VDI:

30. August 2009 by Tony.

It’s Sunday and I slept most of the morning away with a nasty summer cold. Of course, as luck would have it, I had the TV on and heard more news of the impending Panademic:

To loosely quote what I heard

“ It is anticipated that the pandemic will result in interruption of services and a shortage of supplies and fuel. Identifying contingency plans for sustaining basic functions in case of loss of  Telecommunications, utilities, and IT capability needs to be included.”

This got me thinking:

While this post is by no means all inclusive it will give you a general ideal of how to create a relatively inexpensive path to providing an emergency PC based access system while simultaneously gaining the appropriate Citrix licenses for future VDI environments.

First and Foremost, Why Citrix instead of VMware?

1.       Citrix Xendesktop is agnostic, it allows you to emulate operating system image hosted on any  hypervisor so your not locked in to using VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer in the future.

2.       Citrix XenDesktop also allow you to emulate your OS from ­a physical machine

a.       This is critical, what it means it that, assuming you have a secure connection for your home users (VPN, Netscaler, CAG, etc) you can install the Xedesktop agent on a users PC and have them connect from anywhere!

And it gets better…

For a smaller organization this design (assuming you have a pre-existing secure connection) IS FREE! 

How? Xendesktop Express is free and allows for up to ten users.

If you’re already using XenDesktop in this capacity please drop me a line or post it here, I’d love to hear about it. I’m going back to bed….

Tony

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