Virtual Desktop (VDI)

Virtual Iron and Provision Networks Introduce New Bundled VDI Solution to Streamline the Management and Support of Desktop Computing Infrastructure

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:17:39 GMT

Virtual Iron Software and Provision Networks today introduced a new bundled, server-hosted, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that targets the challenges of managing, securing and maintaining today’s Windows-based, enterprise desktop infrastructure. The joint solution, which is available immediately, simplifies desktop management, shortens refresh cycles, and reduces hardware and software costs. It delivers all the benefits of server virtualization to desktop infrastructure and provides the first economically attractive alternative for desktop virtualization.

Desktop computing makes up an increasingly large part of the enterprise computing infrastructure today. As distributed end points, desktops are among the most difficult to secure, manage and maintain. Refresh cycles, compliance, ongoing maintenance and user support are huge undertakings. These challenges put IT resources under tremendous pressure and significantly increase total cost of ownership. The Virtual Iron/Provision Networks Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution hosts individual Windows desktop PCs inside virtual machines running on servers in the data center. This thin-client architecture is significantly easier to secure, maintain and support and it enables an organization’s complete Windows desktop environment to be securely accessed and serviced centrally.

“Heartland Financial has adopted several virtualization technologies with tremendous success and we expect server-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to provide similar ROI as part of our long term virtualization strategy,” said Marti Vandemore, CIO at Heartland Financial. “We have engaged RapidApp, a leading service provider in the virtualization space, to deliver their QuickStart service offering and a server-based, hosted VDI environment utilizing Virtual Iron and Provision Networks' technologies.”

The joint solution enables a fully isolated, customizable and secure environment where users are able to work with standard desktop operating systems and applications. Virtual desktops can be user-customized and provisioned on demand instantly, providing performance and user experience that are comparable to a desktop personal computer. This allows enterprises to replace physical desktops with virtual desktops for many usage scenarios such as call centers, offshore development, and secure, remote access. The benefits of VDI are numerous and include:

reduced hardware and software costs
reduced IT support costs
streamlined upgrade path for faster adoption of new software; i.e. Microsoft Vista
increased IT staff productivity and reduced employee downtime
reduced power and cooling requirements
increased data and IP security

VDI also provides capabilities not available in standard PCs, such as the infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery that can further reduce downtime and improve end user productivity.

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Charles Aunger
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ClearCube Unveils Industry's Most Powerful and Customizable Desktop Virtualization Solution with Sentral v5.5

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:23:00 GMT

ClearCube today announced ClearCube Sentral™ version 5.5, part of the industry's only solution that manages virtualized PC desktops and dynamically delivers the required level of PC resources to end users. Building on the industry's first connection broker technology, Sentral v5.5 manages mixed physical PC blades with VMware-enabled virtual machines to seamlessly incorporate virtualization technology into centralized desktop computing without sacrificing end-user performance. This flexible management software enables organizations to maximize the value of their investment in virtualization by providing corporate users with the exact computing power needed to effectively conduct their jobs.

"When considering the adoption of client-side virtualization, organizations need to consider the extent to which the chosen technology will impact the end user experience. ClearCube has designed a PC blade solution that is focused on delivering the performance of dedicated, physical PC blades, while leveraging the benefits in efficiency provided by virtualization software." says Michael Rose, associate research analyst, Enterprise Virtualization Software, IDC.

Features and Benefits
ClearCube Sentral is the industry's first software platform to offer connection broker technology for efficiently managing centralized physical and virtual computing resources from a single console. Sentral v5.5 adds a number of new features designed to enhance the end-user computing experience and reduce IT management costs, including:

Virtualization Support–In addition to support for VMware ESX3 Server and VMware Server, Sentral v5.5's virtual abstraction layer can scale for future virtualization deployments with other technologies such as those provided by Microsoft and XenSource.
Microsoft Vista Support–Sentral v5.5 offers support for Microsoft Vista, enabling organizations to manage virtual and physical machines using the new operating system.
Expanded Internationalization Support–Sentral v5.5 features support for more languages, including Spanish, Japanese, German and French.
Scalability–Sentral v5.5 is a true enterprise software product, offering support for active directory environments encompassing multiple tens of thousands of users and for very large mixed physical and virtual installations (thousands of machines and virtual machines).
User-friendly Features–Sentral v5.5 incorporates a number of new tools to make the management console easier to use, including setup and configuration wizards, a more intuitive set of workflows for common management tasks and integration of previously separate test utilities into a comprehensive console diagnostic function.

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Charles Aunger
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Citrix announces Desktop Delivery with New Citrix Desktop Server 1.0

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:20:00 GMT

Citrix Systems announced Citrix Desktop Server™ 1.0 (previously code-named Project Trinity). The debut of this new technology marks the entrance into the burgeoning virtual desktop market for Citrix . With Desktop Server, Citrix is creating a new approach for IT organizations to deliver and manage desktops.

Citrix Desktop Server will be important to IT managers who want to deliver an entire desktop in secure fashion to office workers who sometimes work from alternative locations, such as a home or a branch office, Citrix officials said. Since the server is located in the data center, IT workers can provide additional CPU, memory or storage to virtual desktops as the needs change for the business or the end user.

"With the power of Desktop Server, IT can provide users with powerful, personalized desktops while protecting corporate assets and maximizing the use of IT resources," said Mick Hollison, vice president and product line executive for Desktop Server at Citrix , based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Desktop management costs in large businesses can reach Rs 225,000 per user per year, and Citrix said it can cut that cost by 40%, according to a statement from Citrix .

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Charles Aunger
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Citrix Buffs Up For Web 2.0

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:50:00 GMT

Citrix Systems (Quote)upgraded its application delivery software today and entered the market for desktop virtualization software.

NetScaler is Citrix 's network management suite, providing high-speed load balancing and content switching along with traffic management, data compression, content caching and security features.

The product, acquired in Citrix 's purchase of NetScaler nearly two years ago, is positioned in front of application servers to improve performance, availability and security for application servers.

With a jazzed-up GUI, better management and tighter application security, Citrix NetScaler 8.0 is designed to handle the high volume and sometimes complex demand of Web 2.0, including enterprise mashups and service-oriented architectures (SOA) (define).

This is important because, as Morgan Gerhart, senior product manager for Citrix 's application networking group, said, Citrix has significant penetration into Web-based companies, including Google (Quote), eBay (Quote), Amazon (Quote)and AOL.

"Most of these organizations are all over Web 2.0, so we have very detailed insight into how those types of applications behave and the impacts they're going to have on the underlying network infrastructure and what's going to be necessary to deliver those applications going forward," Gerhart said.

Some of those requirements, he continued, include performance monitoring, Web application firewalls and a SSL VPN, which are all new in NetScaler 8.0.

Citrix inherited the monitoring technology, Citrix EdgeSight for NetScaler, when it purchased Reflectent last year. This software helps administrators watch specific Web pages and individual application transactions executed by end users.

Mick Hollison, product line manager for Citrix 's virtualization systems group, said Desktop Server pipes Windows sessions from the datacenter to desktops, laptops or handheld PCs.

Desktop Server will allow users to tap into their corporate Windows environments from any machine. For example, workers using Desktop Server may access all of their work sessions from a home PC, an important perk as office workers who occasionally work from home, or even do so full time.

The goal of this product is to create user and economic efficiencies as alternatives to traditional enterprise desktops, which Gartner claims may cost $5,000 per user per year to manage.

Hollison, who noted that Desktop Server is timed to coincide with the mass migration to the Microsoft Vista operating system, said the software is built with DynamicDelivery, a technology that connects the user to the right desktop and tailors it to meet their requirements.

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Charles Aunger
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Provision Networks Showcases Version 5.8 - Virtual Access Suite @ VMware TSX in Nice

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:32:00 GMT

Thanks to Michel Roth of ThinComputing.net

Provision Networks provider of Server Based Computing software and VDI software showcased today at VMware TSX in Nice, France the version 5.8 of the Virtual Access Suite (VAS).The features of the Access Suite (VAS) 5.8 are:

• Support for physical machines, including Blade PCs from HP, IBM and Dell
• Non-Power-Managed Operational Mode:
• Enhanced Management Console:
• Enhanced Discovery Modes: Multiple discovery, enumeration, and import mechanisms of physical and virtual machines, including:
      - 1. Enumeration of desktops in an existing Windows domain infrastructure.
      - 2. Enumeration of virtual machines from the VMware VirtualCenter inventory.
      - 3. Manual import of physical/virtual machines by name, name range, IP address, or IP address range.
• Unprecedented Levels of Scalability and High Availability:
• Upgrade Automation:

• Expanded Client and Device Support:

Provision RDP client for Linux
- support for Novell SLED 10
- support for HP t5125 and HP t5725 thin clients
Provision RDP client for Windows CE
- support for HP t5520, HP t5530 and t5720 thin clients
- support for ComputerLab International MT1200c, MT1500g and ET4500g thin clients
- support for IGEL CE thin clients
- snap-in for Neoware CE thin clients
Virtualized VAS web client
- access the Provision Networks infrastructure from a kiosk or any 32-bit Windows client
device without client installation or administrative privileges. The Virtualized VAS client is powered by Thinstall and can be taken along on a USB stick, iPod or cell phone / PDA with a hard dirve.

VAS 5.8 will be released into GA and available for download through our website, or purchase on April 16, 2007.

Provision Networks DYNAMIC DESKTOP DEPLOYMENT (D³) architecture

Read the details in the press release.

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Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Computer Lab International's Thin Client Products enhances products for expanded VDI use

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:32:00 GMT

Computer Lab International (CLI), a leading provider of thin client products, announced expanded product capabilities that build on their ability to work within virtual desktop environments.

All CLI thin clients products support VMware and Citrix environments. CLI thin clients support Microsoft RDP, which provides the basic compatibility to VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), as well as Citrix ICA, for compatibility with Citrix 's Desktop Broker for Presentation Server, a component of Citrix Dynamic Desktop Initiative (DDI).

And now, all CLI Windows CE thin client products come complete with support for the Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite for more comprehensive Dynamic Desktop Deployment capabilities, enabling on-demand access to VDI-based published desktop and applications.

"Flexibility, security, manageability, accessibility and lower cost of ownership are just a few reasons that CLI thin clients work so well together with desktop virtualization," says CLI's Director of Marketing, Michael Oliva. "These are the same benefits we have always touted with our thin clients, but now with the VDI market emerging at such a pace, we are delivering more efficient and more extensive solutions to meet our customer's needs."

The powerful CLI Windows CE thin client terminals with expanded VDI capabilities include:

MT1200c: Value-Priced Mini Thin Client
MT1500g: General Purpose Mini Thin Client, With Options For Internal Smart Card Reader and Built-In Wireless
ET4500g: High-Performance Expandable Thin Client

Under a new CLI promotion designed to let customers take the first steps toward VDI, prices start as low as $249, and the products are all available immediately through CLI resellers worldwide.

Over time, CLI will be adding additional connection broker client support to their Windows CE thin client products, as well as expanding the VDI capabilities of their Linux and Windows XP Embedded thin clients.

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Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Microsoft Enables New Ways to Deploy Windows Vista

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:20:00 GMT

Microsoft Enables New Ways to Deploy Windows Vista
Q&A: New options to license desktop virtualization and diskless PCs give Windows Vista Enterprise customers more choices, says the director of Microsoft's Windows Business Group.

For many IT professionals within large organizations, maintaining control over their desktop environments is becoming an increasingly tall order. The cost of deploying and administering PCs – sometimes tens of thousands of PCs – across an enterprise can be significant, especially without the proper infrastructure in place to aid in the automation of these tasks. Add to that the growing complexity created by more mobile and temporary workers as well as new data security and compliance requirements – such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the United States – in regulated industries, and it is little wonder that some large enterprises are exploring alternative approaches to traditional desktop management.

With the combination of Window Vista Enterprise Edition and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, customers can secure PCs, centralize applications and increase productivity while decreasing deployment costs. In addition, the advent of fast networking and virtualization has opened the door for large enterprises examining new architectures that centralize Windows. Last week, at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007 (MMS 2007), Microsoft detailed the upcoming availability of licensing for two new centralized architectures based on Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. For details on the new offerings and what they mean to customers, PressPass spoke with Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate, director in the Windows Business Group.

Scott Woodgate, Director, Microsoft Windows Business Group

PressPass: At MMS 2007, you disclosed additional deployment options for Windows Vista. What are these changes designed to address?

Woodgate: Some of our larger, more highly managed and heavily regulated customers have been asking us for more new Windows Vista deployment models and licensing so they can see how well nascent architectures based on virtualization and fast networking function within their environments. We are responding by adding two more options to the numerous ways customers can deploy and manage Windows Vista Enterprise. These two new options will enable our customers to begin testing centralized desktops and diskless PCs in their production environments alongside their existing deployment model and determine which combination provides the right mix of centralized IT control and end-user flexibility for their respective businesses.

PressPass: What exactly are the changes you announced?

Woodgate: For Software Assurance customers using Windows Vista Enterprise, we’re adding two new ways to license and deploy the operating system. They are:

1) The license right to use Windows Vista on diskless PCs

2) The availability of a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware.

PressPass: What are diskless PCs? How do customers benefit from running Windows on a diskless PC, and how does it work?

Woodgate: We think of a diskless PC as simply a PC that runs Windows but does not store Windows or data locally because it does not have a hard drive. The customers that have been requesting diskless PCs tell us they want the ability to move their Windows data and applications to centralized storage hardware such as a Storage Area Network (SAN), while still maintaining the local computing characteristics and experience of a PC.

We are working with our partners so they can provide the software to enable diskless PCs and they will likely enable two different scenarios for customers. In the first scenario, each employee’s hard drive is stored individually on centralized storage hardware. In the second scenario, shared images are used by a group of users. Our licensing enables both of these scenarios so that customers can work with our partners to determine if these are valuable architectures within their desktop environment.

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Charles Aunger
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Citrix Whitepaper - Accelerating Microsoft Windows Vista Migrations with Citrix Presentation Server 4.5

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:06:00 GMT

Citrix Whitepaper - Accelerating Microsoft Windows Vista Migrations with Citrix Presentation Server 4.5

For many organizations, it is not a question of “If” they will migrate to Windows® Vista™, but “When”. This is causing companies to start asking the difficult questions such as: When will their mission-critical applications support Vista? When will enough of their PCs be upgraded to meet system requirements? When can they complete regression testing and workarounds for any uncovered compatibility issues? When can they get the budget and IT cycles to make all of this happen?

What if there were ways to circumvent these challenges and deliver any application to any client? What if the same applications in use today could be delivered to users of Vista machines –without requiring native Vista support? What if clients that did not meet the system requirements for the 2007 Microsoft Office system could access all the newest applications anyway? What if DLL conflicts and other compatibility challenges became non-issues? Migration would be much faster, easier, and more affordable.

Recent developments in the application virtualization and application streaming capabilities of Citrix Presentation Server™ 4.5 can be leveraged to accelerate adoption of Windows Microsoft Vista.

This white paper describes how Presentation Server 4.5 can be used to help companies simplify and accelerate their migration to Windows Vista by using Presentation Server to deliver both older legacy applications which are not Windows Vista compatible, as well as newer applications that are being introduced with the Vista rollout, such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system. This paper will explain how Presentation Server can be of benefit for both sets of applications to ensure that your Vista deployment is as fast, cost-effective and painless to the company and end-users as possible. This paper explores the new features of Presentation Server 4.5 which enable applications to be delivered to end-users for both online and offline use. Additionally, this paper will discuss how Presentation Server applications integrate with the Windows® desktop to allow users to work seamlessly between both locally installed and Presentation Server applications, whether they are virtualized or streamed.

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Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx

Citrix plans three flavors of Desktop Server

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:58:00 GMT

Citrix Systems plans to expand its Desktop Server product into three different offerings, including one where OS components are streamed on demand to a PC or thin client over the network, using technology from its acquisition last year of Ardence.

Lou Shipley, VP and general manager of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based ISV's management systems group, said that today, Desktop Server is a connection broker between Microsoft's RDP and Cirix's ICA. In the next version of the product, however, he said it will be able to run multiple virtual, hosted desktops.

These represent the first two flavors of Desktop Server, which Shipley referred to as "Physical OS" in which there is a single instance of the operating system delivered to the endpoint machine, and "Virtual OS" where multiple versions are delivered via a virtualization layer from companies like VMware.

He said the third variety, "Diskless OS," will appear further down the road, once Citrix has incorporated some of the technology from the Ardence acquisition into the product. "The Ardence Streaming Server will remain a standalone business through 2007," he said, "but we're working of integration, with some of the functionality going into Desktop Server."

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Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx

DeNamik releases the free LoadGen 1.1

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:49:00 GMT

Dennis Damen and Daniel Nikolic have just released version 1.1 of their LoadGen tool. This tool is completely free for simulating loads of up to 150 users per server. (You can buy licenses for more users if you want to go higher than that.) The idea behind LoadGen is that it is a dirt-simple tool that can run and manage user simulation scripts against Citrix , Provision Networks, or Terminal Server server-based computing environments.

Tim Mangan wrote an in-depth review of an early version of this product almost a year ago. The product was released shortly thereafter, and now this version 1.1 update adds several new features, including:

Native RDP support
Native Provision Networks support
Vista LoadBot Support
More control of the individual client LoadBots
Major simplification of the freeware licensing and activation
Support for .NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0
An online check for updates;
Dozens of minor usability improvements and bugfixes

The user load simulation space is starting to heat up after almost ten years of stagnation with one of the only affordable / free products being the Citrix Server Test Kit (CSTK). Citrix recently bought a company called thinGenius for their TLoad load testing tool. LoadGen is similar to TLoad in the tests that it can simulate and the way it simulates tests, although TLoad has some better reporting capabilities. Time will tell how these two tools will shake out.

click for source on Brian Madden

click to download

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx