HP has recently published a reference architecture for VDI environments based on Citrix XenDesktop 4, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The 24-pages report describes a platform powered by BladeSystems c7000 blade servers, ProLiant BL460c G6 blades, StorageWorks P4800 G2 SANs and HP Thin Clients. The document includes the bill of materials (BOM) and a performance analysis. Quite interestingly HP used the tool Virtual Sessions Indexer (VSI), developed by the Dutch solution provider Login Consultants and used in the popular independent benchmark Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Project.   The VRC Project has been already validated by Citrix and somehow  recognized by VMware too . According to the benchmark, this system can serve approximately 800 concurrent users using Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer applications. Labels: Citrix , HP , Microsoft , Papers , VDI

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As every virtualization professional on the planet knows, Citrix develops a commercial version of the Xen open source hypervisor called XenServer. On top of that, the company also offers management and VDI solutions for Microsoft competing hypervisor: Hyper-V. While Citrix reiterated for years now that it’s fully committed to continue XenServer development, and its newest releases definitively confirm this trend, a number of people believes that at a point in the future the company will drop its own platform to support only Hyper-V. Maybe Citrix contemplated the idea in the past, but at this point it’s less likely than ever: Amazon EC2, currently powered by the Red Hat implementation of Xen, is leading the public cloud computing adoption effort, while the new OpenStack orchestration framework launched by Rackspace , which supports Xen out of the box, has good changes to become a key platform in the race for private cloud computing. Two years ago  Red Hat announced its intention to replace Xen with KVM and the plan is being executed as expected: the company released a new KVM-based virtual infrastructure (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or RHEV) and the upcoming Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 will be the first distribution to not include Xen . So Amazon has two choices for EC2: it either develops its own Xen distribution, or it embraces the one of another vendor. In the second scenario there is not much choice: Citrix, which leads the development of Xen since the early beginning, Oracle, or Novell, even if the company may be switching to KVM too . The adoption of XenServer represents a huge opportunity to cash in for Citrix. It may sell the Platinum edition of the hypervisor, which has been recognized as an enterprise grade virtualization platform , licensing hundreds of thousands of virtual machines to Amazon.   Additionally it’s worth to highlight that Amazon is recognized as a leading example in the hosting industry, so that hundreds of smaller hosting providers may mimic the company in the adoption of XenServer. And this translates into an exponential revenue increase for Citrix. On the private cloud computing side, Citrix secured a key partnership with Rackspace for Openstack, and the two already announced that the product will support XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) going forward.  It doesn’t really matter if OpenStack will support Xen, XenServer or XCP: in every case Citrix will have additional opportunites to win enterprise data centers. In such scenario, it wouldn’t make much sense for Citrix to abandon Xen and just work to build value on top of Hyper-V.  Despite that, the analysis firm Ovum reports something rather interesting about what Citrix believes about the future. The summary of a report released in November 2009 in fact says (emphasis added): …Xen’s prospects in the enterprise are limited by the squeeze it faces from VMware’s dominant ESX/ESXi hypervisor and Microsoft’s increasingly competitive Hyper-V hypervisor. Citrix has predicted that eventually its virtual server business will mostly be based on Hyper-V rather than Xen . Oracle is Xen’s best chance for a long-term enterprise future, but even Oracle faces a battle to build up its small virtualisation business. Novell also has only a small presence in server virtualisation, and, in any case, may split its attention between Xen and the KVM hypervisor… Unfortunately, there’s no way to review the report, unless you want to pay £924 of course, and verify if Ovum included a source for verification in its analysis. Labels: Citrix , Microsoft , Xen

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Last time we heard about Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) was in April, when the company release version 1.0 Service Pack 1. Microsoft got MED-V (formerly Workspaces) from the acquisition of Kidaro , happened in March 2008. The product was rebranded just a couple of months after the acquisition but Microsoft took an entire year to re-release it. MED-V 1.0, released as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in April 2009, didn’t introduce any new feature compared to the Kidaro original solution. So it’s safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years. This translates in an enterprise platform that could remarkably change the way virtual desktops are deployed and secured inside the corporate environment, but that is still featuring Virtual PC 2007 SP1 as its underlying engine, a platform originally released in Q1 2007 and updated in Q2 2008. Microsoft has been so slow and non-committed on this product that there are serious doubts about its plans for it . Indeed there are, as the company finally unveiled something about MED-V 2.0 and it’s not very promising. A 15-minutes video preview of the new platform was uploaded on Microsoft TechNet Edge yesterday. MED-V 2.0 will introduce some features already seen in the Virtual PC package for Windows 7 called XP Mode. The first one is that the virtualization engine will be in fact Windows 7 Virtual PC. The second one is the seamless window publishing.   Other new features on the front-end include URL and document redirection, as well as USB pass-through. Judging from the video, in terms of user experience, the URL redirection looks incredibly confusing for the average user, and definitively years away from the smooth and fully integrated experience that virtualization products like Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion offer today on a Mac OS operating system. On server-side, the URL redirection feature depends on a plain text file where the administrator has to specify which URLs should be rerouted on the host OS.  Considering that this is an enterprise product, that should be able support hundreds if not thousands of users, this approach is terrible and simply not scalable at all. The URL filtering is a huge challenge and even security vendors like WebSense are struggling to provide a smooth experience, despite they rely on categories and a database with million of categorized websites. How MED-V administrators will be able to deal with the hundreds of websites that a single enterprise user may have to visit for work if their only tool is a text file that must be updated by hand? MED-V 2.0 is scheduled for a Q4 2010 release. Thanks to  Centralise Virtualise Manage for the news. Labels: Microsoft

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In January 2008 the hardware vendor ClearCube decided to spin off its software division and started offering a VDI solution that could work with 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers. Called VDIworks, the startup largely remained under the radar, while trying to differentiate itself with a proprietary remote desktop protocol called VideoOverIP (VOIP) that launched in June 2009 . It’s unclear how much VDI market share the company gained in a world ruled by Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Quest, but at least VDIworks is trying to win some niches. It just released in fact a VDI client for the Apple iPad that supports its VOIP protocol: Fast Remote Desktop. VDIworks released a video of the app: Click here to view the embedded video. Labels: Releases , VDI , VDIworks

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At the end of the last week Parallels announced the appointment of Birger Steen as its new President. Steen started in Microsoft in 2002. He led the Norway subsidiary for two years as General Manager, then moved to Russia. There, in four years, he built a 1000+ people subsidiary spread across 34 locations, achieving a 10x revenue and profit growth. Parallels says that Steen will report to Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO, and will be responsible for sales, marketing, product management, and support, as well as assisting Mr. Beloussov in transforming the company for the next stage of growth. Labels: Leadership , Microsoft , Parallels

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In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment. Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009 , while  the second beta went public in November 2009 . Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August. There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions. Labels: Microsoft , Virtual Lab Automation

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At the end of July VMware published an interesting benchmark about its new vSphere 4.1 platform: over 171,000 concurrent users for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment hosted by a single physical server. The virtualization host was a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rack server, powered by two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5570 CPUs and 96GB RAM. The SAN was an EMC CX3-40 SAN with two storage processors and 60 146GB hard drives (15K RPM). vSphere 4.1 hosted five virtual machines: three Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition R2 IIS web servers, a SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2007 SP2. The SQL Server VM was configured with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, the other VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4GB vRAM. The workload, a mix of 80% read, 10% search, and 10% modify transactions, was generated by Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Agent. Labels: Benchmarks , Microsoft , VMware

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Mark Russinovich is a legendary figure in the IT world because of his company Sysinternals. He did so much reverse engineering of the Windows kernel that he ended up knowing it as much as the Microsoft architects. Microsoft acquired his company in 2006 and appointed him as Technical Fellow . So far, his job has been related to the development of the Windows kernel (Windows 7 and beyond), taking care that its architecture was fully virtualization-aware. Now a Microsoft developer evangelist, Matthijs Hoekstra, reports that he moved to the Windows Azure team. CONTINUE READING ON cloudcomputing.info… Labels: IaaS , Leadership , Microsoft , PaaS

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A little more than one year ago, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, reached unprecedented popularity with the launch of its Server Virtualization Evaluation Criteria. The evaluation criteria was used to compare Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtual infrastructures on over 60 features and Burton Group became the first analysis firm to declare that XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition was as enterprise-ready as VMware Infrastructure 3.5 . In May, Burton Group also released a Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria. The company avoided to call it Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) despite it’s a de-facto terminology because it was originally launched by VMware. The new report  compares Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 against over 100 features , but none of them achieved the score to be considered enterprise-ready. Fast forward to last week: Citrix submitted XenDesktop 4.0 Platinum Edition with Service Pack 1 and Burton Group declared it the first enterprise-ready VDI solution available on the market. This is a major achievement for Citrix which is getting yet another recognition of its efforts in the virtualization space, three years after the acquisition of Xensource . It’s another negative note for VMware instead, which isn’t shining on the desktop virtualization space right now: its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) has been delayed several times and it’s unclear if it will ever hit the marke t; its Desktop Business Unit lost the Vice President and General Manager, Jocelyn Goldfein; and the company’s top executives suddenly are very skeptic about the future of VDI, to the point that they can’t forecast the adoption rate by the end of 2011. On top of that, both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs predicted that VMware will be behind Citrix in the VDI market within 2013/2014. VMware still has a secret weapon: View 4.5, which should be launched at VMworld 2010 or later in September. The product has been delayed multiple times too and it won’t feature the user profile management technology acquired from RTO Software in March . Despite that, some beta testers who tried it report that it’s a remarkable update. We’ll see if View 4.5 will achieve the Burton Group enterprise-ready certification and if it will be enough to improve the current perception about the company as a VDI leader. Labels: Citrix , VDI

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The US startup Virtual Computer earlier this week announced its new Senior Vice President of Marketing: Andrew McKay . McKay is the co-founder and former Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Attivio, a software company focused on enterprise search solutions. From 2002 to 2006 McKay has been the Vice President of Sales, Technical Sales and Product Marketing at Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), acquired by Microsoft in early 2008. Labels: Leadership , Virtual Computer

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