Autodesk have been a trail-blazer amongst CAD and AEC vendors for their strategic approach in investing in virtualisation and cloud technologies. Pro-actively seeking out key-partners such as Citrix, NVIDIA and server vendors; and adopting flexible licensing models that are encouraging partner investment and adoption. The Autodesk 360 cloud has proved a novel model for the delivery of virtualised CAD, CAE and PLM, where others have stumbled Autodesk have reached productisation.
A couple of weeks ago I was at the awesome Develop3D Live conference, here in Europe and saw a stunning demo of Autodesk 360 by the impressive Autodesk SVP, Robert “Buzz” Kross. I grabbed a snap of his headline slide, 3 statements “Access Anywhere, Team Collaboration and Rapid Iteration”… and I thought yes this guy really does know how CAD junkies work day-to-day! I was actually lucky enough to have a quick chat with him later and this guy certainly knows his stuff right down to surface fitting and the constraint modellers used by ShapeManager – very impressed!
A large number of the vGPU customers and PoCs (proof of concepts) we have seen have involved Autodesk products particularly Autocad, Inventor and Revit (architectural), probably partly because Autodesk already have a significant market share in their industry but probably also partly due to their clear strategy on virtualisation. Autodesk have issued clear licensing terms and certified their applications for use in virtualised environments, in fact you can check out the large support matrix here: www.autodeskandcitrix.com
Whilst vGPU has opened up another way of virtualising Autodesk products, we have seen Autodesk products virtualised using Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro for many years now, often implementing other GPU solutions.
Autodesk at Synergy
Enterprise IT organizations have been deploying Citrix CloudPlatform-based private cloud infrastructure and orchestration environments with successful business outcomes for a wide variety of workloads and use cases including Autodesk. If you are at Citrix Synergy next week you can find out more directly from Autodesk themselves at:
- SYN111 From the field: Autodesk’s journey towards an enterprise private cloud : where you can gain valuable first-hand knowledge about how Autodesk has realized substantial cost savings, operational efficiencies and service delivery agility through its journey towards private cloud computing with Citrix CloudPlatform.
Some options to discover more about Autodesk use in Citrix environments
Citrix Partner IMSCAD are a specialist resource company for Autodesk users and partners, their key business activity is the delivery and support of CAD applications virtualized on the Citrix platform. They have some interesting case studies on their website that I would recommend to those interested in virtualising Autodesk products. You can read more about their case studies over on their site, here. If you prefer visuals some of their case studies along with others were presented at NVIDIA GTC 2014 and you can watch them here: S4581 – Customer Experiences with GPU Virtualization and 3D Remoting
UK-based Open Boundaries ran a successful PoC of remote Autodesk application delivery last year, which you can read about – here. Open Boundaries are now looking for experienced CAD/AEC beta-testers for their next development cycle. If you have the appropriate CAD application experience and would like to try some of these technologies without investing in your own hardware you can contact them at: mailto:info@openboundaries.co.uk