Only Citrix provides a complete virtual app and desktop solution to meet all your business needs. Give employees the freedom to work from anywhere while cutting IT costs.  Deliver Windows, Linux, and web business applications or full virtual desktops from any cloud—public, on-premises or hybrid—within a modern digital workspace. The main features of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops:

• HDX technology for optimized user experience

• Virtual Windows, Linux and web applications

• Single management console for apps and desktops

• Centralized security in the data center

• FIPS and Common Criteria certified

• Single image provisioning technology

• VDI desktops

• Remote PC access

Unifying editions across the Citrix product portfolio

• Citrix is also unifying product editions across its portfolio – designating them Standard, Advanced, and Premium.

• XenApp Advanced edition now will map to Citrix Virtual Apps Standard edition

• XenApp Enterprise edition maps to Citrix Virtual Apps Advanced edition

• XenApp Platinum edition maps to Citrix Virtual Apps Premium edition

• XenDesktop VDI edition maps to Citrix Virtual Desktops Standard edition

• XenDesktop Enterprise edition maps to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Advanced edition

• XenDesktop Platinum edition maps Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium edition

View a detailed feature matrix

In the banking, telecommunications, energy, and retail industries, remote branch offices often deploy business-critical applications on local server and storage infrastructures. But these offices face challenges like limited budget and space, lack of skilled IT staff, and complex infrastructure-management issues. Red Hat® Hyperconverged Infrastructure―the integration of Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage―provides open source, centrally administered, and cost-effective integrated compute and storage in a compact footprint to meet the needs of remote sites and the edge. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure lets you consolidate infrastructure for your remote sites by eliminating the need for an independently managed storage tier and delivering an integrated solution of compute plus software-defined storage. This reduces capital and operating expenses and operational overhead associated with managing a larger, more traditional infrastructure.

VMware ESXi: The Purpose-Built Bare Metal Hypervisor Discover a robust, bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto your physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi effectively partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs. It’s the industry leader for efficient architecture, setting the standard for reliability, performance, and support. What ESXi Delivers IT teams are under constant pressure to meet fluctuating market trends and heightened customer demands. At the same time, they must stretch IT resources to accommodate increasingly complex projects. Fortunately, ESXi helps balance the need for both better business outcomes and IT savings. VMware ESXi enables you to:

• Consolidate hardware for higher capacity utilization.

• Increase performance for a competitive edge.

• Streamline IT administration through centralized management.

• Reduce CapEx and OpEx.

• Minimize hardware resources needed to run the hypervisor, meaning greater efficiency.

FEATURES By consolidating multiple servers onto fewer physical devices, ESXi reduces space, power and IT administrative requirements while driving high-speed performance. Small Footprint
With a footprint of just 150MB, ESXi lets you do more with less while minimizing security threats to your hypervisor.
Reliable Performance
Accommodate apps of any size. Configure virtual machines up to 128 virtual CPUs, 6 TB of RAM and 120 devices to satisfy all your application needs. Consult individual solution limits to ensure you do not exceed supported configurations for your environment. Learn more about configuration maximums.
Enhanced Security
Protect sensitive virtual machine data with powerful encryption capabilities. Role-based access simplifies administration, and extensive logging and auditing ensure greater accountability and easier forensic analysis.
Ecosystem Excellence
Get support for a broad ecosystem of hardware OEM vendors, technology service partners, apps, and guest operating systems.
User-Friendly Experience
Manage day-to-day administrative operations with built-in modern UI based on HTML5 standards. For customers who need to automate their operations, VMware offers both a vSphere Command Line Interface and developer-friendly REST-based APIs.

VMware NSX® Data Center is the network virtualization and security platform that enables the virtual cloud network, a software-defined approach to networking that extends across data centers, clouds, and application frameworks. With NSX Data Center, networking and security are brought closer to the application wherever it’s running, from virtual machines (VMs) to containers to bare metal. Like the operational model of VMs, networks can be provisioned and managed independent of underlying hardware. NSX Data Center reproduces the entire network model in software, enabling any network topology—from simple to complex multitier networks—to be created and provisioned in seconds. Users can create multiple virtual networks with diverse requirements, leveraging a combination of the services offered via NSX or from a broad ecosystem of third-party integrations ranging from next-generation firewalls to performance management solutions to build inherently more agile and secure environments. These services can then be extended to a variety of endpoints within and across clouds.

Networking in software VMware NSX Data Center delivers a completely new operational model for networking defined in software, forming the foundation of the software-defined data center (SDDC) and extending to a virtual cloud network. Data center operators can now achieve levels of agility, security and economics that were previously unreachable when the data center network was tied solely to physical hardware components. NSX Data Center provides a complete set of logical networking and security capabilities and services, including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, virtual private network (VPN), quality of service (QoS) and monitoring. These services are provisioned in virtual networks through any cloud management platform leveraging NSX Data Center APIs. Virtual networks are deployed non-disruptively over any existing networking hardware and can extend across data centers, public and private clouds, container platforms and bare-metal servers.

KEY BENEFITS

• Protect applications with micro-segmentation at the workload level and granular security.

• Reduce network provisioning time from days to seconds and improve operational efficiency through automation.

• Gain consistent management of networking and security policies independent of physical network topology within and across data centers and native public clouds.

• Obtain detailed application topology visualization, automated security policy recommendations and continuous flow monitoring.

• Enable advanced, lateral threat protection on east-west traffic using the built-in, fully distributed threat prevention engine.

vRealize Suite provides developer-friendly infrastructure (supporting VMs and containers) and a common approach to hybrid and multicloud, supporting major public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. What vCloud Suite Delivers

• Application Operations. Enable developers to quickly release, troubleshoot, and optimize performance of highly distributed microservice-based cloud applications in real time.
• Self-Driving Operations. Help IT continuously optimize capacity and performance based on operational and business intent.
• Programmable Provisioning. Help developers and IT easily access infrastructure and application resources on any cloud through API, catalog, or CLI with full lifecycle management.
• Data Center Virtualization. Leverage the world’s leading virtualization platform as the foundation for multiple data center initiatives. Consolidate servers and data centers. Improve application availability and performance. Address application requirements for scale up or scale out.

What’s Included in vCloud Suite?

• vRealize Suite . Cloud management platform that helps IT enable developers to quickly build VM and container-based applications in any cloud with secure and consistent operations.
• vRealize Lifecycle Manager. Automated installation, configuration, upgrade, patch, drift remediation, health, and content management of vRealize products.
• vRealize Operations. Automated IT operations management that enables IT to manage performance and gain visibility across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.
• vRealize Business for Cloud. Automated cloud costing, cloud consumption analysis, and cloud comparison for private, public, and hybrid cloud.
• vSphere . Deliver business value from day one, with powerful server virtualization, breakthrough availability, safe automated management, and intelligent operational insight that adapts to your environment.
• vRealize Automation. Self-service, policy-based infrastructure and application provisioning and lifecycle management for multi-vendor virtual, physical, and public cloud environments.
• vRealize Log Insight. Heterogeneous and highly scalable log management for deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

VMware vRealize Network Insight helps customers build an optimized, highly available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation deployment, minimizes business risk during application migration and enables customers to confidently manage and scale NSX deployments. USE CASES Plan Application Security and Migration • Accelerate micro-segmentation deployment • Troubleshoot security for SDDC, native AWS and hybrid applications • Minimize business risk during application migration Optimize and Troubleshoot Virtual & Physical Networks • Reduce mean time to resolution for application connectivity issues • Optimize application performance by eliminating network bottlenecks • Audit network and security changes over time

VMware vSphere® Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) is a specific configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). These configurations are commonly referred to as stretched storage clusters or metro storage clusters and are implemented in environments where disaster and downtime avoidance is a key requirement. This best practices document was developed to provide additional insight and information for operation of a vMSC infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere. This paper explains how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios, and it discusses various design considerations and operational procedures. vMSC infrastructures are implemented with a goal of reaping the same benefits that high-availability clusters provide to a local site, in a geographically dispersed model with two data centers in different locations. A vMSC infrastructure is essentially a stretched cluster. The architecture is built on the premise of extending what is defined as “local” in terms of network and storage to enable these subsystems to span geographies, presenting a single and common base infrastructure set of resources to the vSphere cluster at both sites. It in essence stretches storage and the network between sites. The primary benefit of a stretched cluster model is that it enables fully active and workload-balanced data centers to be used to their full potential while gaining the capability to migrate virtual machines (VMs) with VMware vSphere vMotion®, and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion®, between sites to enable on-demand and nonintrusive mobility of workloads. The capability of a stretched cluster to provide this active balancing of resources should always be the primary design and implementation goal. Although often associated with disaster recovery, vMSC infrastructures are not recommended as primary solutions for pure disaster recovery. Stretched cluster solutions offer the following benefits: • Workload mobility • Cross-site automated load balancing • Enhanced downtime avoidance • Disaster avoidance Technical Requirements and Constraints • Storage connectivity using Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, and FCoE is supported. • The maximum supported network latency between sites for the VMware ESXi™ management networks is 10ms round-trip time (RTT). • vSphere vMotion, and vSphere Storage vMotion, supports a maximum of 150ms latency as of vSphere 6.0, but this is not intended for stretched clustering usage. • The maximum supported latency for synchronous storage replication links is 10ms RTT. Refer to documentation from the storage vendor because the maximum tolerated latency is lower in most cases. The most commonly supported maximum RTT is 5ms. • The ESXi vSphere vMotion network has a redundant network link minimum of 250Mbps. The storage requirements are slightly more complex. A vSphere Metro Storage Cluster requires what is in effect a single storage subsystem that spans both sites. In this design, a given datastore must be accessible—that is, be able to be read and be written to—simultaneously from both sites. Further, when problems occur, the ESXi hosts must be able to continue to access datastores from either array transparently and with no impact to ongoing storage operations. This precludes traditional synchronous replication solutions because they create a primary–secondary relationship between the active (primary) LUN where data is being accessed and the secondary LUN that is receiving replication. To access the secondary LUN, replication is stopped, or reversed, and the LUN is made visible to hosts. This “promoted” secondary LUN has a completely different LUN ID and is essentially a newly available copy of a former primary LUN. This type of solution works for traditional disaster recovery–type configurations because it is expected that VMs must be started up on the secondary site. The vMSC configuration requires simultaneous, uninterrupted access to enable live migration of running VMs between sites. The storage subsystem for a vMSC must be able to be read from and write to both locations simultaneously. All disk writes are committed synchronously at both locations to ensure that data is always consistent regardless of the location from which it is being read. This storage architecture requires significant bandwidth and very low latency between the sites in the cluster. Increased distances or latencies cause delays in writing to disk and a dramatic decline in performance. They also preclude successful vMotion migration between cluster nodes that reside in different locations.