vTeardown

I believe I am one of the few people who actually shelled out $1,650 for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Enterprise Edition when it first was released last year. How do I know this? When I tried to use the Essentials Enterprise license that was provided, Workflow Studio, one of the applications included in the suite, would not install due to a licensing error.  I contacted Citrix Support back in September, 2009 and they had no idea what caused the problem. The sole license that was provided was supposed to work on all the included applications. So what was I to do after numerous unsuccessful calls to their licensing support reps? Broadcast my issue via twitter! I actually received a quicker response from the Citrix Engineers who monitored their twitter feeds. To cut a long story short, I finally got in touch with a Citrix Product Manager who escalated my issue and declared it a licensing bug. To this day, I’m not sure if the issue has been fixed as my ticket was mysteriously closed as of January 26, 2010 with no reason attached. This whole ordeal made me wonder if there were other customers experiencing the same problem? Am I the only one who noticed this bug? I know it’s just software and all software programs have bugs, but how did a critical license issue like this stay unnoticed for months after its release? Citrix shipped an unusable product, yet no one, not even Citrix engineers themselves, seemed to notice it. The only logical conclusion: Few customers, if any, actually purchased this so-called “essential” application.

A look at Citrix’s own Support Forums gives a clue about the popularity of Essentials for Hyper-V. Back in November,2009, this is what it looked like:

The numbers highlighted are the actual number of posts—a total of six posts. Maybe it was the holiday season. Well, let’s take a look at it today, almost four months later:

A 100 percent increase in postings! Ok, this post was meant to poke a little fun at Citrix, but in all seriousness, how many of you out there are actually using Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V? If you’re a Hyper-V administrator, don’t you already have tons of management applications to deal with?  Having another application to manage your back-end storage would just add to the complexity. If Essentials was so essential wouldn’t Microsoft be talking about how much customers need this product?

Stay tuned for an in-depth look into some of the technical reasons why administrators should think twice before implementing Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.