Kaviza partners with Citrix on desktop virtualization

Stressing desktop virtualization as a cost-saver for smaller enterprises, Kaviza is partnering with Citrix to boost Kaviza’s VDI-in-a-box (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technology.

Citrix has invested an unspecified amount of money in Kaviza, according to an announcement on Tuesday.

VDI-in-a-box features a turnkey solution enabling deployment of Windows desktop images across multiple systems and management from central servers. Desktops can be accessed from such locations as home PCs, airport terminals, repurposed PCs, or thin clients. Benefits are offered in security, desktop management, troubleshooting , disaster recovery, and power consumption, according to Kaviza. Fast log-in also is enabled.

Kaviza VDI differs from traditional VDI in that it utilizes a consolidated virtual software appliance and direct-attached storage as opposed to requiring connection brokers, load balancers, management and compute servers, and expensive shared storage,  according to the company.

“Now, what you have is solution where you can have virtual desktops that cost less than a PC,” said Kaviza CEO Kumar Goswami.

“The benefit is, you’re not managing 1,000 PCs individually,” said Krishna Subramanian, vice president of marketing at Kaviza.

Citrix is investing in Kaviza because it sees Kaviza as a way to access the  more affordable virtualization market, Goswami explained. A Citrix spokesman cited an emphasis on the SME market.

“With an increasing focus on desktop virtualization, Citrix’s investment in Kaviza is to support the startup’s efforts in building a VDI solution for the SME market,” said Andrew Cohen, Citrix senior director of strategic development. “We are closely watching the growing need for virtual desktops for the SME market, and the early success for Kaviza suggests that the SME market could be well served by their solution. Citrix is very impressed with the simplicity of the Kaviza solution and believe that it could serve certain segments of the market very well.”

VDI-in-a-box leverages commodity servers at $100 per desktop, hypervisors including VMware ESXi at $50 per desktop and the Kaviza kManager software-based virtual appliance. Total cost of VDI-in-a-desktop is less than $500 per desktop, Kaviza officials said. Windows 7 and XP can be virtualized via Kaviza, with Microsoft software licenses required.

The currently shipping version of VDI-in-a-box is version 2.2. Due at mid-year, version 3.0 will add support for hypervisors, including Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

While Citrix and Kaviza officials would not discuss the size of the Citrix investment, Goswami described it as a “decent amount.”

This story, “Kaviza partners with Citrix on desktop virtualization,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.