Proxmox and Citrix?

[His.Dudeness]

Hi

I am not sure if this is the right place for this kind of question. It is not really a feature request but a suggestion.

Has anyone ever thought about creating a Proxmox plugin for Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops to work wich MCS (Machine Creation Services) ?
I mean Proxmox is a great hypvervisor and with all the nice features (Clustering, ZFS, Ceph) it might be a good platform for running lots of virtual desktops.

An integration with Citrix MCS might be a good way to acquire new customers. I mean there is a plugin for Nutanix and they seem to make good money with VDI…
I am not a software developer, but I imagine a Proxmox-Plugin for Citrix MCS can’t be that hard to develop. Basically MCS works by telling the hypervisor to create VMs, clone disks etc.So it might “just” be some advanced scripting and automating api calls…


cheers
Michael

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm not 100% sure but as far I know Citrix MCS needs a proprietary license.
If so Proxmox VE is not willing to integrate such type of software.
We do only use opensource compatible projects to stay open for the users.

 

[His.Dudeness]

Hi

well yes, most of the Citrix software is proprietary – except for XenServer and parts of ADC maybe.
But that shouldn’t be an issue. You wouldn't have to change one thing at Proxmox VE.
MCS ist mostly a tool to tell the hypervisor what to do via an API.

For example: You want to create 200 virtual desktops. There is a wizard on one of the citrix infrastructure servers where you select the VM template, chose a naming scheme (e.g. VM001 to VM200) select the specs (vCPUs, RAM, etc.) and in the end it connects to the hypervisor and tells it what VMs to create, which disks to clone and to attach, etc.

So in general this is hypevisor agnostic. There are hypervisor connectors onboard for XenServer, VMware vSphere and HyperV SCVMM. But other Vendors can create their own plugins to enable Citrix MCS to talk to their hypevisor. I guess there is no reason why such a plugin can’t be FOSS.
So I think as long as a hypervisor is manageable via an API all that is needed is an interface between the Citrix MCS component and the hypervisor API...

But as I said: Just an idea

Cheers
Michael