If you're available on Tuesday March 2, 2010 please join me and five vendors of virtual desktop technology (Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, Symantec, and VMware) for a webinar that's sure to please VDI fans and opponents.  The webinar will be held at 1:00 pm EST and will go until 2:30 pm EST.  We're planning on having about 60 minutes of panel discussion where I will ask all five vendors questions that I've created based upon real world challenges people are having with VDI.  Then we'll be opening the discussion up to audience questions for the remaining 30 minutes.  If there's something you want to know about VDI, this is the time to get your questions answered.  For more information and to register for this great session please visit Laura Whalen's blog entry that has all the details here.

My Olso, Norway training class scheduled for March 22-26th is full.  There are open seats in the Malmo, Sweden class that is running April 19th-23rd.  If you want to get a chance to attend the Advanced Citrix class while it's still in Europe then sign up for Malmo.  Registration information for Malmo can be found here.

Sumit Dhawan has posted a blog entry describing licensing changes that Citrix has made in response to direct customer feedback.  While I assumed that Citrix would eventually breakdown and agree to support additional licensing models, this is more comprehensive than I expected they would do.  The models are now:

• Per user licensing (this is still per user and not named user)
• Per device licensing (XD can be used by unlimited users on a given device) - New option that's great for factories, healthcare, shift workers, etc.
• Campus-wide licensing program - New option that would be great for educational markets and mirrors the model of Microsoft's Campus licensing program
• New Edition of XenDesktop (VDI Edition) - Essentially what the old XenDesktop Advanced Edition was before it was killed off.  This will include Citrix Provisioning Server, StorageLink for XenServer, and User Profile Management.  This edition is capable of being licensed per user/per device or on a CCU (concurrent user basis).  The trick here is that the CCU model requires the $199/ccu sticker price.  This effectively means that there is no longer a CCU option at $99/user (which is what the old Standard Edition was).  Citrix claims this is due to not a lot of customer uptake of the Standard Edition product.  While that may be the case, Standard Edition was perfect for those who wanted just the ICA protocol and weren't interested in doing Provisioning Server, etc.  If this is the worst of the licensing changes, I suppose customers will have to deal with this and just accept it.  It certain puts customers in a much better place.

All of the above being said, it'll be VERY interesting to see how the licensing happens for all of this.  There's already some licensing challenges and now that there's multiple different license types available, it'll be interesting to see how these licenses get deployed, allocated, revoked and troubleshot.

All in all a prettty good move by Citrix.