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Citrix Remote Desktop Broker (CRB)

Saturday, 05 August 2006 by Michel Roth

Ron Oglesby has written an article at BrianMadden.com on a new product that Citrix will be releasing shortly, called the Citrix Remote Desktop Broker (CRB): I�ve decided to do a series of articles on the different VDI solutions available today. In this article I�ll discuss a solution (forthcoming) from Citrix for VDI implementations, and in future articles I�ll look at packages from Leostream, Propero, and any others I can get my hands on.

Before I get into the Citrix solution I need to qualify it some. First of all, the Citrix solution is not on the street yet (while the ones from Propero and Leostream are). Second, the Citrix solution I�m going to describe is a �stopgap� solution. Citrix is working on a full featured solution for release at some point in the future and is targeting a solution that covers most of what I described in the first article. The solution they are going to release now is a stopgap to help their existing customers with the VDI issues they face and is not meant as the end-game.

Okay, with the qualifications out of the way let�s talk about Citrix�s stopgap solution they�re calling the �Remote Desktop Broker� (or RDB). The concept with RDB is pretty simple; it�s an application that can feed parameters into the RDP client and provide you a way to manage connections and create resource pools of desktops (VMs, blades, etc.). The RDB application is installed on a Citrix Presentation Server and then published as an application. Users execute the application which then connects them to the type of desktop they (or the app) is configured for.

I�ll get into more detail on HOW it works in a second, but for now understand that it�s an application, not a server, and because of this is it uses a double-hop scenario with ICA connecting to the Presentation Server and then RDP connecting from the Presentation Server to the virtual desktop.

Read the entire article here.