21. May 2009 by Tony.

Citrix recently announced XenClient, their client side bare metal hypervisor. VMware announced their client hypervisor back in February and I would not be surprised if Microsoft was also developing a product. A bare metal (or type 1) hypervisor is a visualization layer which is installed directly on your hardware. Most of us are familar with server visualization, well client hypervisors are simply applying the same technology to desktops and laptops. A client hypervisor is more challenging to develop though due to the much broader hardware support needed: think graphics, audio, USB, firewire etc.
So what’s the point? Why the race to bring out a client hypervisor? Because the client hypervisor could be the missing piece of the VDI puzzle. Today, if you implement a VDI solution what do you do with your mobile users or power users who need more resources than VDI can provide? Nothing, you leave them running a locally installed OS which is a different image (or possibly several images to accommodation hardware flavours) to the VDI users. This means greater management effort and costs as well as more difficult and complex troubleshooting.
In the client hypervisor world everyone in your organisation can run the same OS image whether connected to a server based VDI instance or on a physical laptop or desktop. This will drastically simplify environments with follow on cost savings.
Bring it on I say! I can’t wait to try out a client hypervisor.

Posted in VMware, Citirx, VDI | No Comments »

21. May 2009 by Tony.

When it comes to t virtualization of XenApp and terminal services workloads i think we could all agree that there is a great need for objective performance tests to help guide us to choose the solutions best suited for the environment we are working with at the moment.

The tool  is called VSI, Virtual Session Indexer. The VSI tool is basically an automation of workloads and collection of the results to give a view into differences. The platform can both be used for performance tests, scalability test, but also as they clearly showed in their session, it can be used to spot challenges with new applications, updates or other changes to the platform. And by preparing it can be possible to avoid deploying a new update which will decrease performance of the infrastructure without having to effect the ‘physical’ users.

You can read more about VSI here: http://www.loginconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=210&Itemid=128

The tool can be downloaded from the Login Consultants download section.

Check out www.virtualrealitycheck.net to see the results of their tests so far.

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21. May 2009 by Tony.

 NetApp recorded a 20 minute Brainshark session on  NetApp Solution for VDI.

In this  presentation, they walk through business drivers for VDI, challenges to deploying  VDI, how the NetApp solution and the associated solution components addresses  these challenges, and what resources are available that can help you design,  deploy, and manage VDI solutions on NetApp.

* Here is the  presentation link:http://learningcenter.netapp.com/LC?ObjectType=WBT&ObjectID=00202064

* You  will need a NOW account to access the presentation.  If you do not have one, you  can sign up for one here.

http://now.netapp.com/eservice/public/now.do

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