The X550 is a genuine old-fashioned terminal server with a twist. One or two PCIe ports are needed in a server box to host NComputing's Ethernet boards. A small, smartphone-sized box called the XD2 has speaker, Ethernet, PS/2-style mouse and keyboard jacks and a VGA jack. Two PCIe cards yields 10 machines, and the 11th is the host computer itself. The host machine can run Windows XP, 2003 Server or 2008 Server editions.
Pano Logic's Pano Cube is a very small 'designer'-looking cube containing three USB jacks, VGA and audio/mic jacks. It ostensibly has no CPU or memory/storage inside, permitting it to be used strictly as a KVM+ access device. Pano Logic also makes a USB dongle called Pano Remote for Windows-based machines that logs them onto a VM as well, but we couldn't find any use for it. Pano Remote does have the ability to constrain data transfer between a host and client PC, including print data, but this was not extensively tested.
Wyse makes a number of devices that can display Windows (or other OS) sessions. We tested the Wyse V10L/VXO terminal device, which is a lightweight and book-sized terminal.
MokaFive is an image and virtual desktop management platform that's a VDI 'crossover' product for mobile desktop use. MokaFive is VDI that's up-close-and-personal because it's downloaded or distributed as an image directly to a Windows PC or Mac and lives not on a VM server, but inside the client Windows PC or Mac workstation.
Like XenDesktop, VWorkspace works with many VM server platforms, including Virtual Iron, VMware ESX/vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo, and also supports Microsoft Terminal Services. External (meaning remote) access uses a vWorkspace SSL proxy gateway that's installed on a dedicated gateway Windows 2000/2003 server in a physical or virtual machine.
Ericom's 'secret sauce' is a transportation protocol called Blaze, which is an adaptation of RDP for terminal services, which is Ericom's historical strength.
With OnDemand, users access VM sessions via Web page authentication. Session links from client to VM are accomplished via Java (JRE 1.6). The host session can be Windows XP, Vista or Windows 2003 Server.
We began testing with VMware View Version 3, but upgraded to Version 4 during the testing cycle. The big difference between the two is that View 4 adds a new transport protocol – PCoIP -- that speeds communications between hosted VMs and clients.
Citrix's XenDesktop 4 was the most accommodating VDI platform tested, likely owing to its origins as a hybrid of Linux and Citrix. While it's not a lightweight platform, we found it to be the most flexible. Microsoft recommends XenDesktop for its own Microsoft Standard VDI and Premium VDI suite client-side components. XenDesktop runs on Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare's ESX/vSphere platforms, as well as XenServer.
Microsoft does not offer a specific, purpose-built VDI tool comparable to XenDesktop or VMware View, so we did not include Microsoft in our test. In fact, based on Microsoft's longstanding relationship with Citrix, Microsoft suggests using XenDesktop for VDI — especially for Windows 7 hosting.
Setting up a VDI infrastructure obviously placed a burden on the network to provide fast response times between the server and client device.
We confined our testing to Windows XP sessions, since Vista is unpopular and Windows 7 is only now trickling into the general population. We tested using three different platforms.