Eric Sloof recently posted nice video from VMworld Europe 2009 where Viktor van den Berh demonstrated how to deploy VMware Infrastructure 3 in an unattended fashion. As you know, unattended installations help save time and reduces the risk of inconsistent or mis-configured installations. In Eric’s video, you will learn “…how to automatically deploy your ESX servers and how to connect these fresh installed ESX servers to a vCenter server. After the introduction of a step-by-step plan for unattended deployment, this session will focus on some useful scripting techniques used in a unattended deployment scenario. Expect some bash and powershell scripting in this session.”
At VMworld, VMware
started to demonstrate PC-over-IP (via the VMware and Teradici co-development agreement). A lot of what was shown during keynote
sessions was the Teradici hardware chipset solution. But, Brian Madden was able to catch up with Warren Ponder later to get a video
demonstration of the early alpha state of software-only PC-over-IP. This video can be seen in Brian's latest "Brian Madden
TV" program. The demonstration starts at 16 minutes and 32 seconds in to the video (but the whole video is good).
Citrix and Microsoft recently announced an extended relationship in regards to Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Now you can hear more about how this is going to play out in the future by attending the Microsoft and Citrix joint webinar titled “Microsoft + Citrix: Virtualization 360˚, from the Datacenter to the Desktop”. This webinar will take place Tuesday, March 10th at 1:00 PM EST. The presenters will be David Greshler, Director of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft Corporation, and Gordon Mangione, VP Emerging Virtualization Products at Citrix Systems, Inc.
Don Jones over at Concentrated Technology recently wrote a series of articles about Microsoft App-V (SoftGrid). This is an 8 part series that covers the following topics:
Microsoft and Citrix have had a “unique” relationship, I guess you could say, over the years. Citrix and Microsoft have walked a fine line of partnership/competition in regards to Terminal Services and Presentation Server (XenApp). It looks like this dance is continuing in to the hardware virtualization sector as well. Citrix has a set of tools (called XenServer) to manage the Xen bare metal hypervisor (Citrix doesn’t actually own the Xen hypervisor itself). As you know, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is a bare metal hypervisor (like Xen or ESX) and Microsoft has a set of tools to manager Hyper-V called Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Now, Citrix has a set of tools called “Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V” that will add more functionality on top of Hyper-V. Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V adds:
Late last year, VMware announced a co-development deal with Teradici to “…enable VMware View to deliver true PC experience with high resolution graphics and rich multimedia.” Teradici provides a hardware-based presentation protocol that requires a special chip on the server and client. This called PC-over-IP and provides a very high-end user experience. Things have been quite on the co-development announcement made by VMware and Teradici for a while. That is until VMworld. At VMworld Europe, VMware started to clarify some of the details of how PC-over-IP will impact VMware View’s delivery. Brian Madden is at VMworld Europe where PC-over-IP was addressed/demonstrated during the second day keynote. Brian sheds a lot of insight on the use cases and demonstration (and how the demonstration may have been a little “misleading”).
Not too long ago, Citrix announced a partnership with Intel on a client side bare metal hypervisor. This partnership was part of a new project from Citrix called “Project Independence”. Well, today, VMware announced that they too are partnering up with Intel to create a client side bare metal hypervisor. VMware is calling this CVP for Client Vitalization Platform. What is interesting about this announcement is that it is almost exactly the same for VMware and Citrix. In fact, Brian Madden posted a neat exercise where he took each announcement from Citrix and VMware and replaced each vendor name with <vendor> and each project name with <client hypervisor name>. It is next to impossible to tell which excerpt came from which announcement.
Ever since the initial release of Citrix XenServer, there has always been a free “trial” version of XenServer called XenServer Express. This was a fully functional bare metal hypervisor, but you couldn’t do a whole lot with it - for instance, you could not perform live migrations of running VMs, or join resource pools. Citrix announced today that a lot of that has changed. Citrix is giving away these enterprise for free.
Mark Bowker of Citrix states, “Free hypervisors with limited functionality have been around for a long time. We see this move as substantially different because it offers a competitive, enterprise-ready virtual infrastructure platform with full centralized management, live motion and support for unlimited virtual machines and servers - with no strings attached…”
Citrix recently announced the release of XenDesktop 3. XenDesktop is Citrix’s VDI solution. Some of the new features include:
HDX “High Definition Experience” - this accelerates multimedia performance by sending compressed streams to endpoints and playing them locally. This feature is called RAVE (Remote Audio and Video Extensions) in XenApp, and now this feature has made it to XenDesktop.
Desktop density enhancements. XenDesktop 3 includes several enhancements that dramatically improve virtual machine density and efficiency in the datacenter, allowing customer to host up to twice as many hosted virtual desktop per server as previous versions.
Provisioning Server enhancements - With version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first solution on the market to deliver both hosted virtual desktops and local streamed desktops from a single image store, leveraging the same delivery infrastructure.
User Profile Manager 2 - this is Citrix’s profile management solution purchased from Sepago.
Also, remember that you do not have to use the Xen hypervisor to use XenDesktop. You can use XenDesktop with VMware ESX as well.
Hugo Peeters has been posting several useful PowerShell scripts to help manage you VMware environment. One of the really cool ones I noticed is a script to check configuration inconsistencies. This script will compare configurations on your ESX hosts and output a nicely formatted HTML document letting you know where configuration differences occur. This is especially useful in making sure your environment is optimal for VMotion and High Availability. This is also useful for documentation purposes as well.
