The emergence of virtualization as service for the client got another boost this week with the arrival of a new offering from Citrix.
As many might recall, Citrix acquired the Xen virtualizaton platform and since then has been steadily remaking the companies image around all things virtualization. To that end it has married its Presentation Server technology with virtualization to give IT organizations a tool through which they can manage to deployment of virtualization implementations on the client.
The Citrix moves comes on the heels of a similar offering from a startup company called MokaFive. But how the Citrix offering differs from MokaFive is that the latter is based on a virtual machine developed by MokaFive while the Citrix offering not only supports the Xen virtual machine but can also be used with VMware virtual machines and the forthcoming virtual machine technology that Microsoft plans to use for Windows.
The difference between the two approaches also differ in terms of their availability. MokaFive is only available through them while Citrix plans to make its service available through it and all its channel partners.
Adoption of virtualization on the client is still in its infancy but being able to make use of a service to deploy and manage virtual machines should go a long way towards speeding adoption. How widespread that adoption becomes remains to be seen but given all the ongoing issues associated with managing Windows it will probably gain a lot of tractions as services like these make it easier to not only deploy a virtual machine but also manage it.