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Citrix Systems today announced improvements in scalability across multiple virtual desktop delivery models to address the needs of every user in the enterprise at a lower cost.

Citrix XenDesktop 4 with FlexCast delivery technology has now been verified to deliver up to 125 VDI-based desktops, 500 hosted shared desktops and 5,000 local streamed desktops from a single physical server tuned to take advantage of the unique innovations of the latest Intel Xeon processor 5500 technology.

These numbers represent orders of magnitude higher scalability than first generation VDI-only products, enabling IT organizations to deploy desktop virtualization solutions enterprise wide with less datacenter infrastructure and significantly lower operating costs. The new scalability data and testing methodology is available today in a new desktop virtualization reference architecture.

The latest Citrix scalability tests were carefully designed to use a mainstream server configuration. Desktop workload simulations incorporated a real-world mix of line-of-business apps, office productivity apps, web browsing and multimedia. The results demonstrate that XenDesktop 4 with FlexCast can deliver up to 40 times more users (5,000 per physical server) than competing solutions which only support VDI-based desktops and max out at just over 100 users per physical server. This makes XenDesktop the only solution on the market that can truly deliver enterprise-wide virtual desktop deployments in a cost-effective way. With XenDesktop 4, desktop virtualization can now be implemented with 20 percent lower infrastructure costs.

Citrix also made available today a reference architecture for large-scale deployments that can help guide organizations who are looking at rolling out virtual desktops to a broad set of users. The new XenDesktop reference architecture is based on numerous real-world large-scale XenDesktop implementations, and provides a baseline model for a modular approach to designing and scaling to meet the needs of an entire enterprise. It provides a starting point and a solid understanding of the components and capabilities of each FlexCast delivery model, enabling customers to assemble a desktop virtualization architecture that’s tailored to each environment’s unique needs.

The XenDesktop reference architecture and set of guidelines will be maintained online so that customers can access the latest data.

Cisco, NetApp and VMware have announced that they are expanding their collaboration to deliver new design architectures that help customers evolve virtualized data centers to be more efficient, dynamic and secure.

The three companies introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that provides enhanced security in cloud environments by isolating the information technology (IT) resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

As part of their collaboration, Cisco, NetApp and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pretested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualized infrastructure.

Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is an end-to-end, validated design architecture that isolates IT resources for enhanced security in shared virtual and enterprise cloud environments. The design architecture helps enterprise customers, systems integrators and service providers develop internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units, departments or security zones for enhanced security across the computing, networking, storage and management layers of a unified infrastructure.

The Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture provides details about implementing and configuring the architecture, as well as best practices for building and managing best-in-class solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware. This validated design architecture significantly increases business agility by helping IT administrators to establish the appropriate quality of service for each resource layer and to deliver consistent service performance levels for the applications in each layer.

The Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is based on Cisco Nexus Series Switches and the Cisco® Unified Computing System, NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore, and VMware vSphere and vShield Zones. The design reference architecture has been jointly tested and validated as a Cisco Validated Design so customers can quickly assess their needs and deploy integrated solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware that meet the stringent requirements of their dynamic data centers.

As customers embark on their journey to ITaaS, Cisco, NetApp and VMware will provide a cooperative set of professional services to deliver an outstanding customer experience and help channel partners deploy a Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture with the least risk to their customers’ current environment.

As part of this collaboration, Cisco, NetApp and VMware also introduced a global 24-hour cooperative support model. This model offers customers a more streamlined response from Cisco, NetApp and VMware to identify and solve potential issues related to the solutions used in the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture. This saves customers’ time and resources when they request product and technology support.

The unified storage, unified computing, networking and virtualization solutions that make up the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture are available today from Cisco, NetApp and VMware and in production data centers around the world. Cooperative professional services and support are also available today.

To learn more about how Cisco, NetApp and VMware and their mutual ecosystem of partners, including channel partners, systems integrators and service providers, are working together to help customers build and design their dynamic data centers, visit www.netapp.com/us/cisco-vmware/.