Citrix's recent acquisition of virtualization software company XenSource is finally bearing fruit for the company. Monday, the company announced the release of a new line of products titled "XenDesktop 2.0." This family of software consists of Citrix Desktop Server with XenServer, allowing mass hosting of virtual desktops in a transparent back-end datacenter.

As we've previously explored, desktop virtualization may be the coming thing, particularly in corporate environments. Citrix's product demonstrates a preview of how this may look, with highly efficient hardware utilization, easy management, and potentially some excellent trending information on application utilization and user behavior (cue Big Brother).

This packaging of service and potential goes some way beyond what current industry leader VMware is capable of offering, and well beyond what Microsoft has thus far announced for their own enterprise virtualization offering, Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD). In fact, if you check out the VECD section on the "Flexible Desktop Computing" page, you find that they devote about as much space to discussing licensing as they do to the functionality of the product... in other words, a lot of "what you can do for us" instead of "what we can do for you" which should give you a pretty accurate preview of the joys of deploying such a system. VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is considerably less burdened with licensing tripwires, but also is less capable than the end-to-end solution Citrix describes.

XenDesktop is scheduled to ship in early 2008; XenServer and other Citrix components are already available.

Dana Gardner has a typically insightful article up on the possibilities of this brave new world, which wanders off into flights of fancy toward the end which are a bit further afield than I might personally contemplate at this point, but which are thought-provoking and worth a solid read nonetheless. Regardless, as he points out in wrapping it up, the real takeaway from the Citrix announcement is that this all "...could happen much sooner than you think."