Earlier this week, Teradici updated their PC-over-IP technology for WANs. Remember, PC-over-IP is a chip-based technology, so this upgrade requires flashing existing hardware or upgrading hardware. PC-over-IP provides great LAN performance (with lots of available bandwidth), so it will be interesting to see how these WAN optimizations work. Brian Madden has written an article detailing this release as well with a little more detail and insight. There is also a YouTube demo video out as well.
Barry Flanagan recently recorded a presentation about Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V. The video focuses mainly on the StorageLink technology. StorageLink “… lets your virtual server infrastructures fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink supports all third party storage architectures and delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms allowing you to switch seamlessly between XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V™ platforms.”
VMware recently released their latest version of VMware View - version 3.1. Some of the new features in VMware View 3.1 are:
Performance Improvements - Login times are significantly improved and server utilization is reduced.
Automated LDAP Data and View Composer Database Backup - You can now configure automated backup of LDAP data and View Composer databases in View Administrator, enabling disaster recovery.
Client Information - Information about the client device that the end user is connecting from is now provided for the desktop session as registry settings. This enables customers to use third party tools or create custom scripts to map local printers to devices. The information available includes the device name, IP address, and MAC address.
Improved Logging - Debug logs are now enabled by default. Logging has been improved to provide more informational messages with minimal performance impact.
Edit Desktop Wizard Navigation - Improved wizard navigation enables you to quickly modify existing desktop pools.
USB Improvements - View 3.1 offers more reliable and broader device support with reduced bandwidth consumption. A separate TCP/IP stream is used.
Multimedia Redirection (MMR) for Windows Vista - MMR is now supported in Windows Vista environments. MMR technology delivers the multimedia stream directly to the client using an RDP virtual channel instead of decoding and rendering it with RDP. This enables full fidelity playback in View Client.
Adobe Flash Bandwidth Reduction - The Adobe Flash bandwidth reduction feature improves end-user productivity when browsing Adobe Flash content.
Multi-Protocol Support - View Client can now use HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) as the display protocol when connecting to HP Blade PCs, HP Workstations, and HP Blade Workstations. The connection is brokered by View Manager. HP RGS is a display protocol from HP that allows a user to access the desktop of a remote computer over a standard network. VMware View 3.1 supports HP RGS Version 5.2.5. VMware does not bundle or license HP RGS with View 3.1. Please contact HP to license a copy of HP RGS software version 5.2.5 to use with View 3.1. This release does not support HP RGS connections to virtual machines.
Oracle is on a roll diving in to the virtualization space. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Virtual Iron, Oracle is starting to build a nice virtualization portfolio. Is Oracle going to try to acquire an entire stack for VDI? Maybe the angle is to compete with Amazon EC2 in the Infrastructure as a Service space. Either way, it will be exciting to see what happens.
A while back, Citrix and Intel teamed up for a new project called “Project Independence”. Project Independence is a joint effort to produce a client-side hypervisor. This project was later given an official name of XenClient (so, there’s XenServer, XenApp, XenDesktop, and now XenClient). Citrix showed off this client hypervisor at Synergy 2009, on several platforms including Macintosh.
StarWind recently made available a free iSCSI Target software solution that converts any Windows server into a SAN. This is a pretty interesting announcement. Now, companies that want to use hardware virtualization that do not have a hardware SAN back-end can implement StarWind’s software based iSCSI target software to create a suitable back end for VMs. Combine this free iSCSI target software with free hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer and you can get into a pretty nice virtualization environment (including live migration and availability) for next to nothing.
VMware has had VMotion capabilities for a long time. Citrix XenServer followed suit and implemented XenMotion in the XenServer platform. Microsoft’s Hyper-V has not yet implemented any type of live migration - Microsoft Hyper-V does have “Quick Migration” and is planning on releasing Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2 slated to release at the end of the year. But, is all this live migration/VMotion/XenMotion even a critical feature? That point seems to be up for debate. Helge Klein recently published a blog entry about this topic. Helge paraphrases a Microsoft employee that claimed “Hyper-V’s lack of Live Migration a.k.a. VMotion is not relevant at all… only people vigorously demanding such a feature are consultants, never customers.”
What do you think? Live Migration - hype or necessity?
I recently attended Citrix Synergy 2009 in Las Vegas. While there, I was able to get some exclusive video demonstrations of some cool virtualization products. One of the vendors that allowed me to do a video recording was Leostream. Leostream makes a heterogeneous connection broker for VDI (VMware and Citrix), physical machines, and XenApp applications. It is pretty cool that their interface for management and user connections is web-based. Check out the video below for more:
I recently attended Citrix Synergy 2009 in Las Vegas. While there, I was able to get some exclusive video demonstrations of some cool virtualization products. One of the vendors that allowed me to do a video recording was eG innovations. eG Innovations makes a monitoring product to find the root cause of error/performance issues in your virtualization infrastructure. Often times the root cause of an issue may be a component on the back end of the infrastructure (like a back end database). eG Innovations allows you to drill down graphically to find where the problem lies. Check out the video below for more:
I recently attended Citrix Synergy 2009 in Las Vegas. While there, I was able to get some exclusive video demonstrations of some cool virtualization products. One of the vendors that allowed me to do a video recording was Neocleus. Neocleus makes a client-side hypervisor that allows you to run multiple virtual machines on a client (like a laptop). What this affords you is the ability to separate the personal computer from the corporate computer on the same physical machine. Some benefits of this is security and stability. Check out the video below for more:
