21. December 2009 by Tony.

ABSTRACT:

Today’s businesses are tasked with providing the most effective work environment for their users, while meeting budgetary restrictions and maintaining security initiatives. In this expert E-Guide, brought to you by SearchVirtualDesktop.com and Citrix, you will discover how virtual desktops can be used to meet the growing demands of today’s businesses. Gain insight into the significant benefits associated with virtual desktop technology and explore the top ways VDI can be used to improve the security of your organization. Learn how to determine whether or not available virtual desktop technologies will meet your users’ needs and enhance their work capabilities. Get it here

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8. September 2009 by Tony.

At VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP’s services organization, announces two new virtualization solutions that will give system administrators the ability to better virtualize and converge their entire IT infrastructure by enabling access of virtual and physical assets inside the environment.

‘Today we’re announcing a whole set of additional solutions along with VMware, and these are things that we think greatly extend the value and capabilities around our virtualization solutions. The first one extends the power of the desktop all the way back to the data center. What we’re introducing is our HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Reference Architecture. And this allows you to plan, implement and have a highly scalable computing infrastructure based on built from the desktop. The second introduction is a solution which will enable you to greatly increase the productivity of the administrators inside your environment and to be able to manage both the physical and virtual assets in the environment. So this is taking our insight control software and making it available along with vCenter. And this is integrated fully in all of our ProLiant products and also our BladeSystem products so you’ve got that integration right from the box of the management capabilities, and just a dramatic improvement in the productivity for the administrators. A step further than that is our next solution which is also focused on helping with the management of the environment, which, again, we think is one of the key challenges around getting the benefits from virtualization. And this is a step where we’ve taken some enhancements to our HP Operation’s Center software and also our HP Business Service Automation software. And we’ve taken this and done some additional work to enable, again, the full management of the environment. Not just the individual boxes but the environment for both a virtual and a physical world. So you look at all these things and go back to the trends I was mentioning the huge demands that are sitting on top of almost every CIO today and these 3 big trends happening in the marketplace. The data centers in need of transformation, the explosion of information that has to be managed, being able to take services that are being delivered and integrate them into your environment.”

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19. June 2009 by Tony.

Apparently there are some issues pertaining to

Communication with the DDC (pools not working)

Xendesktop Setup Wizard stops working because its no longer sees the templates

the proxy.xml file may be overwritten when upgrading from VCenter Server 2.5 to 4.0

Citrix is working on releasing a hotfix

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1. June 2009 by Tony.

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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.

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