Seven Days and Counting

Just in case you haven’t heard, there’s one week to go on the Citrix XenDesktop 4 Trade-Up Promotion. Here’s a quick recap:

  • The XenDesktop 4 Enterprise and Platinum Editions include all of the functionality of the corresponding XenApp edition. In other words, if you buy XenApp licenses today, you get XenApp. If you buy XenDesktop licenses, you get XenDesktop and XenApp.
  • however, the license model changes: XenApp licenses have always been – and continue to be – based on concurrent use. If you own 100 XenApp licenses, it doesn’t make any difference how many users hit your XenApp farm, you’re just limited to a maximum of 100 at any given time. XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum licenses are non-concurrent – they are either per user or per device (your choice).
  • on the other hand, XenDesktop licenses are only about half the price per license as XenApp licenses. That means if your concurrency ratio (the ratio of total users to concurrent users) is less than 2-to-1, you’re better off buying XenDesktop licenses even if all you plan to use today is XenApp! You’ll pay less money, and you’ll have all that XenDesktop functionality in your back pocket ready to be deployed when you’re ready.
  • The current trade-up promotion allows you to convert your existing XenApp licenses to XenDesktop licenses at a price that you will probably never see again. This promotion is ending June 30.
  • If your Citrix Subscription Advantage is current, and you trade up all of your XenApp licenses, Citrix will give you two XenDesktop licenses for every XenApp license you trade up. E.g., if you have 100 XenApp licenses, your Subscription Advantage is current, and you trade up all 100 of them, you’ll end up with 200 XenDesktop licenses.
  • If your Subscription Advantage has been expired for a while, you may find that it’s less expensive to trade up to XenDesktop (which will come with a year of Subscription Advantage) than to pay the fee to get Subscription Advantage reinstated on your XenApp licenses. You won’t get the 2-for-1 deal, so you’ll have to look closely at whether the new license model will mean you have to buy additional licenses, which will obviously affect whether or not the total cost is advantageous to you, but it’s worth running the numbers to find out.
  • If the Subscription Advantage renewal on your XenApp licenses is coming due soon, consider the benefits of redirecting those renewal dollars to help pay for the trade-up. That can make an already-sweet deal even sweeter.

Citrix has a helpful on-line trade-up calculator that you can use to help you compare costs. You’ll need to enter (1) how many XenApp licenses you own, (2) how many of them you want to trade up, (3) what version of XenApp you own, (4) what version of XenDesktop you want to trade up to, and (5) whether or not your Subscription Advantage is current.

I suppose it’s possible that, come July 1, Citrix will announce that they’re extending the promotion…but I doubt it. So far, everyone I’ve talked to at Citrix has assured me that it will not be extended. I’m sure that there will still be an upgrade path after July 1, but it will cost you more money than the current promotion.

One more thing – if you’re going to do this, please don’t wait until the afternoon of June 30 to issue your purchase order! June 30 is like the “triple witching hour” – it’s end-of-month, end-of-quarter, and end-of-promotion. So it’s bound to be crazy busy in the Citrix order entry department. We’ve been requesting that all of our customers get their orders to us by end of business on the 29th, just to make sure that we can get the order placed through distribution and into Citrix’s hands before end of business in Fort Lauderdale on the 30th.

P.S.: We’re frequently asked why Citrix is making the change to non-concurrent licensing for XenDesktop. The main rationale is that if you’re looking at a serious desktop virtualization initiative, your concurrency ratio is probably going to be close to 1-to-1 anyway, so you won’t get much benefit from a concurrent license model. It also aligns more closely with the Microsoft VDI licensing model.

The important thing to remember is that if you are in that situation, you’ll actually spend less money and get more functionality for it, because the XenDesktop licenses will cost you roughly half of what it would cost to buy an equivalent number of XenApp licenses.

And if your use case is primarily to support a large pool of remote users, but you will never have more than half of them logged on at any given time, you can still purchase XenApp licenses to support those users, and they will still be concurrent use licenses.

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