Back in September, VMware announced a price hike of 10% in several countries. This price hike was in line with other vendors in the virtualization space. Now, VMware is going against the grain and actually announcing a price cut of 10%. Why the change? As it turns out, the strengthening US dollar has a bit to do with it. European vendors pay for VMware software in US dollars. So the 10% price hike in September now feels more like a 18-20% hike. This also makes VMware more competitive with Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Citrix, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware
Del.icio.us : Citrix, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware
Ice Rocket : Citrix, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware

With VDI becoming more and more of a hot topic, companies like VMware and Citrix are piloting a program called BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer). InformationWeek posted an article earlier this month detailing the workings of Citrix’s BYOC program. Basically, employees get a certain amount of stipend to buy a computer of their choice (brand, OS, features, etc.). Certain criteria must be met when purchasing the computer like a 3 year support contract, anti virus, ability to connect to the corporate SSL VPN, and running a XenApp client. Other than that, everything is fair game (including Mac). Once the computer is purchased, the user connects to a corporate desktop (VDI) for all corporate work. The corporate desktop is controlled by IT. The actual physical hardware is controlled/supported by the end user (and the 3 year support contract). This gives the employee personal ownership and a personal stake in the equipment. There is one down side to this scenario for the employee - taxes. Rich Crusco points out how the stipend is affected by taxes in this blog post. VMware also has an informal BYOC program. Mike DiPetrillo writes a little about VMware’s BYOC program in a blog post as well.

Technorati : BYOC, Citrix, Employee Owned PC, VMware
Del.icio.us : BYOC, Citrix, Employee Owned PC, VMware
Ice Rocket : BYOC, Citrix, Employee Owned PC, VMware

Mark your calendars, Microsoft and Citrix are teaming up to deliver a VDI webinar titled “Lean and Green with VDI” on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 1:00 PM EST.

As you may, or may not, already know, Citrix XenDesktop is hypervisor agnostic. Naturally, Citrix would like you to choose Xen/XenServer for the Hypervisor, but XenDesktop works just fine with VMware, Virtual Iron, Hyper-V, etc. So, Microsoft and Citrix are going to show you XenDesktop in action with Hyper-V to deliver a complete VDI solution in the webinar mentioned above. In this webinar, you will learn:

• Energy-saving & flexible desktop virtualization
• Desktop optimization and VDI scenarios
• Management solutions for physical & virtual environments
• Delivery of desktops & applications on demand through dynamic provisioning

Register for the webinar here…

Technorati : Citrix, Green Computing, Microsoft, VDI, Webinar, XenDesktop
Del.icio.us : Citrix, Green Computing, Microsoft, VDI, Webinar, XenDesktop
Ice Rocket : Citrix, Green Computing, Microsoft, VDI, Webinar, XenDesktop

Part of VMware’s VDI vision is a technology called VMware View. VMware View allows multiple VMs to share the same disk image. This is similar to Citrix’s Ardence Provisioning Server technology. This type of technology is key in a VDI environment. Otherwise, you have to clone and manage a desktop disk image for each desktop VM. This is also wasteful of disk resources. Brian Madden put together a nice overview of VMware View and VMware View Composer. Brian breaks down this technology from VMware to give you the highlights, pros, cons, etc. A few comparisons to Citrix’s Provisioning Server are thrown in there too. It’s a good read to get your head around the concept.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Ardence, Citrix, VDI, VMware, VMware View
Del.icio.us : Ardence, Citrix, VDI, VMware, VMware View
Ice Rocket : Ardence, Citrix, VDI, VMware, VMware View

Earlier this year, Aaron Delp helped out all the ESX engineers out there have a better understanding of Microsoft Hyper-V from an ESX standpoint. Aaron has put together another article along the same lines, only this time Citrix XenServer is the focus instead of Hyper-V.

Here is a subset of bullet points (keep in mind that a lot of this information is based on XenServer 4.1 - XenServer 5.0 is out now):

• 6 physical NICS in a server
• XenServer supports Live Migration (think VMotion)
• XenCenter is the management GUI. It provides the management GUI similar to Virtual Center but is a client product that can be loaded on any server, client, etc
• Requires a 64 bit proc to run. Supports up to 32 cores and 128GB
• Sizing of XenServer -> XenServer runs on first core (plan on it using the whole core), Xen will take an average of 580MB - 880MB (128MB at core and 200-742MB for ring 0) for XenServer,16GB for OS, one NIC for “service console”
• A “farm” of servers are called a resource pool. This pool can have up to 16 hosts. One server is the master and the rest are members (think PDC/BDC model in the pre-Active Directory days). The Master holds the configuration for the entire resource pool and has the only writable copy. Member servers are updated every minute on configuration changes
• The pool holds the configuration of all servers. Networking must be similar but not exactly the same (although it is recommended). Network adapters must be in the same order, on the same network, and have the same speed.
• If removing a host from a pool and VM’s are on the local storage, they will be DESTROYED! Best practice when inserting a machine into a pool is to remove all local virtual machine storage

Continue at source…

Technorati : Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, VMware, XenServer
Del.icio.us : Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, VMware, XenServer
Ice Rocket : Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, VMware, XenServer

Both VMware and Citrix have entered the cloud computing space with their virtualization technologies. Now, Microsoft and Amazon are entering this space too. Amazon has been offering cloud computing services for a while with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon is expanding its offerings by adding Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a dynamic virtual machine in Amazon’s data center. EC2 supports the following Operating Systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• OpenSolaris
• Fedora
• Windows Server 2003
• openSUSE Linux
• Gentoo Linux
• Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Ubuntu Linux
• Debian

Several types of software are available as well including, but not limited to:

• Oracle 11g
• Microsoft SQL 2005
• MySQL
• Apache HTTP
• IIS/Asp.Net

Interestingly enough, EC2 is powered by Xen.

Microsoft isn’t sitting still on the cloud computing initiative either. Microsoft recently announced something called the “Azure Services Platform“. Azure is a combination of several services by Microsoft (some new - some not so new). One of the services offered is SQL Services. I have personally been testing Microsoft SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) for a while now. It looks like SSDS is rolled up in to Azure now. Microsoft Azure includes:

• Live Services
• .NET Services
• SQL Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

Technorati : Amazon, Azure, Citrix, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, VMware, Xen
Del.icio.us : Amazon, Azure, Citrix, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, VMware, Xen
Ice Rocket : Amazon, Azure, Citrix, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, VMware, Xen

I recently attended one of the stops of Microsoft’s Get Virtual Now tour. Microsoft describes these tours as follows:

“Spend a day learning how a well-designed virtualization strategy can help you control costs, improve service levels, and drive business agility. See solutions built on the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization. And learn how you can leverage end-to-end virtualization to unlock benefits from the data center to the desktop. “

There are three sessions that go on during these tour stops as well as a hands-on lab and a vendor pavilion. Here are the three main sessions:

• Session I: Server Virtualization and Management
• Session II: How Microsoft Builds Dynamic Data Centers
• Session III: Understanding Virtualization at the Desktop Level

As I sat through these sessions, I made a few notes. Here are the high level bullet-points:

• Microsoft mentioned Citrix/Xen several times during the introductions of Hyper-V. Later on in the presentation, Citrix was mentioned as helping Microsoft Hyper-V with 3rd part guest VMs (specifically SUSE was mentioned).
• When choosing which type of HDD to use with your Hyper-V VMs, keep in mind that Pass-Thru disks do not support snapshots.
• In some cases, a Hyper-V VM can appear to run faster than a physical server. The reason for this is because Hyper-V passes off disk requests to the SCSI controller that has a buffer. This “tricks” the VM into thinking the data is written to disk when it actually is in the SCSI buffer. This is probably a rare situation though.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) generates PowerShell scripts to perform tasks. You can save these scripts in a Library for later use or automation. Pretty cool I think!
• Microsoft’s internal IT (MSIT) provisions virtual servers by default for all server requests (unless a business case dictates otherwise).
• MSIT replaced 1000 physical servers with VMs in 2 years.
• technet.microsoft.com and msdn.microsoft.com run 100% Hyper-V
• SCVMM has a “self service” web page that allows users to perform certain VM actions (like suspend, resume, reboot, etc).
• SCVMM can manage VMWare ESX VMs (through APIs of VirtualCenter).

Technorati : Citrix, Hyepr-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen
Del.icio.us : Citrix, Hyepr-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen
Ice Rocket : Citrix, Hyepr-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen

Earlier this year, I wrote about a new technology coming from Citrix that would deliver on the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and enable hypervisor agnosticism. Today, Citrix has released this technology called Project Kensho in a free technology preview. Project Kensho “…provides administrators with highly usable tools that facilitate the export and import of virtual machines and virtual machine based workloads (virtual appliances) using the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and Common Information Model (CIM) industry standards developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The Project Kensho OVF Tool utilizes the OVF standard for the export and import of virtual appliances. The Open Virtual Machine Format is an XML document that describes the metadata of virtual machine(s) that are stand alone or part of a virtual appliance along with pointers to the location of the virtual disks.

Citrix Project Kensho also provides a CIM interface to the XenServer™ API. As well as introducing a WSMAN interface to XenServer™. The Xen-CIM component is required by the Project Kensho OVF Tool and installs directly on the XenServer™.”

There are some nice resources available at the Citrix Community website including videos, discussion forum, step by step directions (with screen shots), etc.

Continue at source…

Technorati : CIM, Citrix, DMTF, Hypervisor, Kensho, OVF, Virtualization
Del.icio.us : CIM, Citrix, DMTF, Hypervisor, Kensho, OVF, Virtualization
Ice Rocket : CIM, Citrix, DMTF, Hypervisor, Kensho, OVF, Virtualization

One of the new features coming from VMware is High Availability with Fault Tolerance. Traditionally, High Availability has meant that if a physical piece of hardware a virtual machine is running on has a failure, the virtual machine will be *restarted* on a different physical host. This will cause down time (albeit a small amount of down time) for the end user. Fault Tolerance addresses this situation by providing a mechanism that will cause no downtime in the case of a hardware failure. The way Fault Tolerance achieves this is by running a secondary virtual machine in lockstep with a primary virtual machine on a different host. All instructions sent to the primary virtual machine are sent to the secondary virtual machine in real time. In fact, if you view both virtual machine consoles at the same time, you will see the secondary virtual machine console mirror everything going on on the primary virtual machine (for example, playing a movie on the primary VM shows up on the secondary VM). VMware has posted a video of this technology.

Check out the video here…

For more information about Fault Tolerance, check out VMware’s website.

Technorati : Fault Tolerance, High Availability, VMotion, VMware
Del.icio.us : Fault Tolerance, High Availability, VMotion, VMware
Ice Rocket : Fault Tolerance, High Availability, VMotion, VMware

I have written in the past that Microsoft was planning a release of just the Hyper-V components of Windows Server 2008. This release would be a super thin bare metal hypervisor called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. What’s more, Microsoft announced that the release of Hyper-V Server 2008 would be free. Well, the day has come. Microsoft released Hyper-V Server 2008 as a free download on their website. Keep in mind you need x64 hardware with virtualization technology processors in order to utilize Hyper-V Server 2008.

See a demo of Hyper-V Server 2008 here…

Download Hyper-V Server 2008 from Microsoft…

For a list of supported Guest Operating Systems, check out this article…

Technorati : Bare Metal, Hyepr-V, Hyper-V server, Hypervisor, Microsoft
Del.icio.us : Bare Metal, Hyepr-V, Hyper-V server, Hypervisor, Microsoft
Ice Rocket : Bare Metal, Hyepr-V, Hyper-V server, Hypervisor, Microsoft