I remember the first time I saw vMotion invoked – you got this sense that no matter how the movie played itself out – things had changed, for the better, forever. Nothing would be the same again. Then I remember seeing my first Riverbed Steelhead cold and hot pass and watching a 400mb file transfer, over a rusty, latent, and small link in the blink of an eye. We called it PFM at the time – Pure F#%king Magic. Indeed.

Then, a lot of time passed, and while for sure other technologies have been pretty interesting, it was not until Miami 2015, the inaugural Nutanix Next conference that the spidey sense again tingled. I want to explain why.

For those of us lucky to have been around virtualization since 2002 or so – and have lived this transformation day in and day out – we also have to admit that there has been a LOT of pain and suffering from those early days – not just to where we are today, but around where we WANT to get to now.  The dream of virtualization was always to make this “stuff” invisible, self healing, omni-aware, scalable, etc so we could all get back to the businesses we are in.

No where is this more true than in End User Computing. I remember some early customers wanting VDI to work on airplanes and beaches in Tahiti – and voila the Protocol Wars began. Then we arm wrestled with the CAPEX of the whole thing hammering storage costs and out came the great Persistent vs. Non-Persistent debate. User Environment Management, application layering, and microscopic, historical, visibility have always been, and are just now re-emerging as critical components of the delivery stack – but then again, all this STUFF, needs to live on STUFF. Lets talk about stuff.

First and foremost – what we have seen in VDI sizing exercises over the years has led to some horribly expensive OVER provisioned bills of materials, and some User Experience suffocating UNDER provisioning. Not withstanding the cost and complexity of even trying to get disassociated vendor brands to work together – no matter what you build, or what reference architecture you follow – its a one off for your current project. Period.

Nutanix solves this in such a fundamental way, affording you linear and predictable CAPEX. If you are doing VDI – you owe it to yourself to immediately weave their solutions into your project plans. Add to that their VDI Assurance Program and you truly are in No-Brainer territory. Furthermore – with many rushing away from being landlocked into one vendors chaotic “stack” – the seamless and invisible nature of Nutanix scalability will be a welcome relief to both your OPEX and CAPEX budgets.

Secondly, given the fact that none of us are starting from scratch, having end users already doing work, on existing systems and architectures, the notion of flipping over to a fairy tale world only works in the land of make believe. Citrix has been solving workspace delivery problems and delivering hundreds of millions of workloads for 25 years. While others like to burn marketing dollars to confuse you,  the fact remains that Citrix is an End User Computing Company – from desktops to mobile to cloud – working heads down daily to solve real problems we all have TODAY – and my money is on them to most elegantly solve your workspace delivery challenges. Period.

Lastly, for the better part of our history here at Liquidware Labs we have evangelized and built superior User Environment Management (UEM/Persona), Visibility (monitoring), and Application Layering products with true cost, scalability, and feature rich advantages over anything else available alone, or together, in the market. Not limited to Horizon Enterprise deployments – our assumption is that you will have a number of different ways you choose to deliver workspaces to users, and certainly should not pay a premium for inferior products. The smaller competition will knock on your doors with point solutions that {might} solve a problem here or there – but not the full gamut of Visibility, UEM, and Application Layering.

Only VMware and Liquidware Labs have that.

We challenge anyone to stack ProfileUnity, FlexApp, and StratusphereUX up against Vmware Immidio, AppVolumes, or vRealize. Run on Nutanix, deliver via Citrix – and you will find that little Liquidware Labs trumps them in every conceivable metric of measurement from cost, scalability, complexity of deployment, integration of features, you name it. We double dare you 🙂

If you truly want Best of Breed instead of Lowest Cost Bidder  – Let the Nutanix/Citrix/Liquidware Labs vs VMware bake offs begin – and please share your findings with the community. My bet is that you will find, like many are, that its #not_even_close 🙂

J.Tyler T.Rex Rohrer

CoFounder – Liquidware Labs Inc.

@t_rex_vdi