I wanted to do a live blog on the Keynote but my streaming audio collapsed so many times that I can’t write a decent article… but luckily Scott was in the room and he managed to publish an article a few minutes after the keynote ended. So read it here. Great stuff,
vdi
One of the problems with VDI…
One of the problems with VDI has always been RDP. Especially when connecting over a WAN. Key with VDI is, like Paul Maritz just stated in his keynote, is user experience. VMware just announced an alliance with Teradici to achieve a greater user experience for a true remote PC.
The protocol will be incorporated into a future release of the newly announced VMware View set of products that extend VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to include both server hosted virtual desktops and client virtual desktops that can run on any laptop or desktop computer. VMware View will provide a personalized view of users’ desktops from any device, anywhere, while providing centralized management of desktops in the datacenter.
For more info on Teradici’s PC over IP check their website.
Expand Virtual Desktops with VMware View
oSo there have been a couple of major and innovative features and visions released over the last two days. But that’s not where it ends. The official VMworld hasn’t even begun yet and here’s the next announcement: VMware View.
So what will be announced today: VMware View Composer, VMware Offline Desktop and Client Virtualization which all are directly related to VDI.
VMware View Composer – Advanced image management for virtual desktops allows you to:
- Reduce storage cost and management by up to 90 percent
- Reduce desktop provisioning from 15 minutes to just seconds
- Manage hundreds of desktops from a single central image, retaining user settings when updating or patching service packs, application updates or even OS upgrades
- Roll back instantaneously, enabling customers to streamline management and guarantee that all user systems are up to date
- Reduce the number of images to manage
VMware Offline Desktop – Access virtual desktops whether online or offline to:
- Backup critical user data and applications for remote employees
- Create transparent user environments on the road or in the office
- Increase user productivity while decreasing management complexity and risks
- Harness local compute power for a superior PC-like end user experience while maintaining data back ups and settings
VMware Client Virtualization – With virtualization for laptops and desktops PCs you can:
- Reduce the number of PC images with hardware independent virtual desktops that run on each PC
- Provide centralized management of VDI users and virtual client users from the same management console
- Enable users to take advantage of local PC hardware for superior user experience and offline usage
So what more can I say than just wow… and again everything resolves around easier management, automation and reductions in resource needs… And indeed VMware View is what used to be VMware VDI.
update: you can find the formal announcement here.
Virtualizing Citrix?!
There’s been so many discussions on whether to virtualize Citrix Servers or not I can hardly keep track. But today I was pointed out to a discussion on the VMTN forum. Especially Jason Boche’s contribution to this thread is very valuable and makes sense on why you actually should virtualize your Citrix environment. Jason discovered the following:
A few of the things we’re seeing:
1. The VM is handling slighly more users with a fraction of the hardware used
2. The VM is managing application memory more efficiently which I think will allow us to get more theoretical users on a VM than on physical hardware because with 4GB of usable RAM, we always run out of memory first. I need to find out if the memory efficiency is is due to VMware’s Content-Based Page Sharing (see http://www.waldspurger.org/carl/papers/esx-mem-osdi02.pdf). My knowledge of VMware’s page sharing thus far was that pages were shared between VMs only. The memory efficiency I’m seeing when running Citrix inside a VM suggests that VMware page sharing is being used to share common memory pages inside of just a single VM of the same Citrix published application that is being run 40 times in 40 concurrent users sessions.
This is also something that’s new to me, VMware is also doing intra-VM page sharing besides inter-VM page sharing. Which indeed can be really beneficial for Server Based Computing. In the end this will enable you to virtualize more servers on the same hardware and taking advantage of those quadcore processors like no other platform does. Especially the dual-quadcore servers nowadays hardly ever get fully utilized with additional memory and VMware you can solve this inefficient usage of hardware.
Not only the usage will be more efficient but the uptime and portability will increase and with the usage of templates and for instance Thinstall it should be very easy to prep new Citrix servers in a matter of minutes. Than again with Windows Server 2008 and Thinstall small to medium companies might not even need Citrix, and I’m not even talking about the new upcoming VDI features like offline working, patch one patch many and linked cloning.
More info on ESX + Citrix can be found in this PDF that VMware released a while back. And be sure to read the topic on the VMTN forum.
SBC and VDI will definitely make a giant leap over the next months!
VDI / VCM with ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5
Try it out:
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- VMware ESX Server 3.5
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