Rolling Review: Sychron OnDemand DesktopRolling Review: Sychron OnDemand Desktop

Now For The Bad News
While there's plenty to like about OnDemand, we pride ourselves on finding the gotchas. Mapping Active Directory groups or user roles to Habitats is not a point-and-click operation, but rather a process that requires tweaking an XML-like system file. And if you're looking to back-end your virtual desktops to Hyper-V, you'll need to run a separate OnDemand Command Center instance. Finally, if Citrix XenServer is your hypervisor of choice, you're out of luck because Sychron has no immediate plans to add support for Xen.On a positive note, Sychron does plan to address some of these shortcomings in a future release.

There's little doubt that OnDemand can add value to VDI implementations of any size. Large organizations that aren't happy with View 3's provisioning and brokering capabilities can purchase OnDemand Desktop as a replacement.

However, the sell for smaller shops will be tougher. On average, a quad-core, dual-processor box with plenty of RAM should support up to 50 simultaneous virtual desktop sessions. And with the list price for OnDemand Desktop set at $1,000 per hypervisor core, compared with View 3's list price of $1,815 for the 10-pack Gold version of View 3 VDI, small to midsize enterprises could save a few bucks by replacing View 3 with OnDemand.

Conversely, for short dollars more, you get View 3 and a licensed version of ESX along with support from VMware, which is huge for companies of all sizes, but particularly for small shops that can't afford a dedicated virtualization engineer to oversee the environment.

Our take is that OnDemand is a worthwhile investment from a provisioning and resource management perspective, but it's not a killer app that all VDI users must have. The brokering and provisioning capabilities of View 3 and XenDesktop are extremely comparable, with the exception of a few uniquely implemented OnDemand Habitat features. Finally, an update on the players in this Rolling Review. Stoneware has opted out, as the company is now focusing on cloud computing. Joining the fray are Ericom Software and Leostream.

Randy George is an industry analyst covering security and infrastructure topics.

Our Take

SYCHRON ONDEMAND DESKTOP