Wednesday, April 6, 2011

The CAD Cloud. Finally. Citrix and AutoCAD 2012

I'll spare you the stories about long-gone experiments with lab rats like myself and Autodesk engineers with strange names and complicated accents handing us code on disks with no names written on them and project codenames that were more like a mash-up of numbers and letters.  My brain is fading fast.

Yesterday, Shaan Hurley dropped the long-awaited bombshell from Autodesk that 9 of their products are now certified for use with Citrix and XenApp.  The internal cloud.  IT admins the world over are sitting and staring into blankness as their brain cells rattle around like a ball in a spraypaint can, just trying to get their heads around what this means.

It means ONE INSTALL on a SHARED SERVER instance.  Possibilities?  Plenty:  Client push installs?  Gone. Client updates?  Gone.  Client upgrades?  Gone.  If you have a dozen or so clients this is probably not a big deal.  If you have hundreds or thousands of clients - this is a huge deal.

System Requirements
Licensing and License File requirements for Citrix XenApp apps
AutoCAD performance recommendations for Citrix XenApp

Autodesk Press Release

4 comments:

Patrick Hughes said...

Does this mean your future livelihood is in jeopardy?

skatterbrainz said...

Not at all. My livelihood doesn't really involve Autodesk support services anymore really. It's become more of a side thing for me. But even as far as books (I assume that's what you really meant?) the Citrix/internal-cloud option isn't going to work for everyone, especially SMB customers. Citrix is most often an option found at medium to large corporate behemoth environments. The kinds of places where employees are numbers and cubes stretch out like corn fields in Nebraska.

Patrick Hughes said...

No, I was attempting a little humor. A smiley should have accompanied my comment.

skatterbrainz said...

You got me. No worries