Since VDI came on the scene, there has been a lot of noise touting VDI as cheaper to maintain than traditional PCs. This cost of maintainability is often referred to as Operating Expenditure (or, OpEx for short). No one really argues with the statement that VDI lowers OpEx, but traditionally, VDI has been more expensive to initially buy into (Capital Expenditure - or, CapEx for short). Brian Madden recently wrote an article titled “Is VDI finally cheaper than traditional PCs for CapEx?” In this article, Brian explores a couple of use cases where VDI could actually cost less than traditional PCs to purchase. Albeit, these use cases are a little specialized, VDI could actually be a cost saver for both CapEx and OpEx.
VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop compete head to head in the VDI space. But, when it comes to value, which product is better? A lot of people have attempted to answer this question. Bridget Botelho voiced some eloquent points on this question recently in an article. In the article, Bridget explorers the following points:
Flexibility for IT shops
End-User Experience
Delivering personal settings
Deployment
Pricing and TCO
What’s interesting about Bridget’s article is that each of these topics is explored with commentary from people implementing VDI in the field with hands-on experience. So, there is some experience to back up opinion.
VMware vSphere 4 supports storage thin provisioning. Thin provisioning for VMware vSphere is a technology that redefines how storage space is allocated to virtual disks. Previously, administrators needed to estimate ho much storage space their virtual disks would take up to support current usage and future growth, and pre-allocate that entire storage space for each disk. Thin provisioning, in contrast, allows virtual disks to use only the amount of storage space they currently need. It is kind of like memory over commit for disk storage.
Anyway, thin provisioning *could* have a possible negative performance impact due to the overhead of allocating more disk space as the VM needs it. VMware recently released a white paper surrounding the performance of VMs when using thin provisioning in a production environment. The white paper talks about I/O-Intensive workloads, file copy workloads, and performance recommendations.
Microsoft Hyper-V first showed up on the scene with Windows Server 2008. Since then, Windows Server 2008 R2 has been released with some improvements with Hyper-V. Several of these new features were documented by Daniel Petri in a recent article. Some of the new features highlighted in the article are:
VMware recently released VMware View 4.0. Several new features are available in this release which, of course, brings several questions. Brian Madden wrote an article detailing some of the most common questions and their answers. Questions include:
What platforms does the software PCoIP client run on?
VMware said that vSphere 4 ups the density from 8 to 16 desktop VMs per core. Is this due to software improvements to ESX 4 itself, or to the fact that it’s running on faster hardware such as Intel’s Nehalem chips?
Is ThinPrint or TCX supported when brokering a connection to a blade or TS session? If not, why not?
Any ETA on Win7 support (i.e. Moving it out of “experimental” mode?)
Right now the View 4 Connection Server must be installed on Windows 2003, i.e. Win 2008 is not supported. When will this change?
What are the multi-monitor support options?
Is there built-in SSL-VPN support?
How is the software PCoIP different from the hardware PCoIP?
Can View broker a PCoIP connection to a blade with a hardware PCoIP card?
VMware has officially released VMware View 4.0. VMware View is VMware’s desktop virtualization product line. View 4.0 includes the following new features:
Software version of PC-over-IP (licensed from Teradici)
vShpere 4 support
Enhanced Single Image composition (View Composer)
Restricted Entitlements
User Principal Name (UPN) support
Mixed Active Directory/Kerberos authentication support
Certain versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 have Hyper-V built in. Hyper-V is a good choice for a lot of Windows administrators because it has a familiar iterface for management. Although the interface is familiar and relatively intuitive, problems can still occur. Fortunately, the Microsoft Enterprise Support for Windows Server Core Team put together a list of top issues and resolutions for Hyper-V. The list includes categories like:
One of the cool new things you can do with Citrix XenApp 5.0 is called VM Hosted Applications. VM Hosted Apps address compatibility issues with problem applications in a XenApp environment. Imagine you have an application that will only run on a workstation OS in a single user mode. Since Microsoft Remote Desktop Services only work in a Server OS in multi user mode, some applications can have problems. So, what VM Hosted Apps allows an administrator to do is publish applications seamlessly from virtual desktops alongside applications published seamlessly from XenApp servers. It’s a pretty cool way to address compatibility issues. Wilco van Bragt wrote a step by step guide on how you can get VM Hosted Apps up and going in your environment.
Teradici makes a protocol called PC-over-IP. PC-over-IP comes in a software and hardware platform VMware recently licensed the software version of PC-over-IP for use in their VMware View product line. Anyway, VMGuru.nl recently did an interview with Scott Murnan from Teradici about the protocol. The video highlights differences with RDP and ICA, bandwidth, latency, etc.
Layering is a emerging technology in the VDI space. Layering helps manage VDI environments by compartmentalizing the different functional areas like the base OS, corporate applications, user applications, user data, etc into “layers”. These layers can be merged into a final usable virtual desktop for the end user. Gabe Knuth did a nice job explaining layering in detail in a recent article. In the article, Gabe talks about:
