The new beta version of Citrix Xen 4.0 Desktop will be release in November. It looks very nice. We had a demo yesterday and the options are very interesting, allowing for virtual Windows installations direct on the hardware or played out from a Xen Server, which distributes a software free image and the packages are then added to the instance.

What is however interesting is that they have demonstrated it running on Mac (Intel) hardware. The Xen virtualisation layer boots, and offers the options of booting OS X and Windows and allows switching back and forth between them on the fly. You could also run different instances of OS X, so you could have a development environment and a test environment running at the same time, or different versions or patch levels of OS X for testing purposes etc.

The only problem with this is that Steve Jobs wasn't very impressed with it - and the EULA doesn't allow you to do this, even if the software does...

Expect some interesting times ahead.

We have citrix at work. I hate it. If it was a person I'd run over him with my car, then reverse over him for good measure. Frequently grinds to a halt, embedded office wants to save to a folder you shouldn't be able to get to, printing is a "trial & error" affair, frequently turns pdf's to gibberish if you don't use the convoluted method of printing and oh yeah, the frequent grinding to a halt.

With which guest OSes are you using it (he showed it using XP and Windows 7 over a 3G stick on a 4 year old Dell portable, loading the images from their corporate server)? The XenApp way of installing apps on the clients seems a little convoluted.

The displaying of streamed media, over 3G via the host was very impressive, the server load at base wasn't affected at all.

The guest OS is XP (which is awful at the best of times), office 2003, uniprint handles the printing (well, when it feels like). We have a mixture of thin clients and proper PC's that also run Citrix...as well as full versions of the software - apparently citrix can't handle things like Adobe Acrobat Standard, Dreamweaver etc reliably. We spend less on hardware now, but the support costs from dealing with all the software issues has probably gone through the roof.