VDIworks now a featured Microsoft Virtualization Solution Partner
Posted on December 2, 2008
Filed Under General & Informational, VDI News | Leave a Comment
For a long time now, we’ve been very bullish on Microsoft’s Virtual Infrastructure. VDIworks was the first Desktop Virtualization company to fully integrate our solution with Microsoft’s flagship System Center Operations Manager platform.
As many of you know, we’ve been supporting Microsoft Virtual Server for years. We had our product integrated with Hyper-V since the day the hypervisor was launched. Before I go on I do want to clarify what I mean by “integrated”. It’s clearly one of those terms a lot of people throw around. In the latest Orwellian twist, it turns out some animals are indeed more equal than others! While other connection broker vendors support Hyper-V to the extent of brokering a connection to a VM hosted by it (yawn..), we actually integrate with it to discover VMs on your network as Hyper-V hosted (as opposed to ESX or Xen), we power manage the physical host running the Hyper-V hypervisor, provide full health and alerting on all Hyper-V VMs in-band, provide management of the physical host out-of-band, implement WMI sensor based self-healing AND provide remote control of the Hyper-V host as well as hosted VMs… Read more
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VDIworks2Go combines Endpoint Virtualization with Hosted VDI
Posted on November 24, 2008
Filed Under User Experience, VDI Architecture, VDI News | 5 Comments
We wouldn’t have led with that headline on the press release to avoid the ‘huh?!’ effect, but I can take liberties here. We’re coming out with an awesome product called VDIworks2Go and it’ll be shipping before the end of the year. This is an extension to our current Virtual Desktop Platform (VDP) which already provides full end-to-end management in a hosted VDI environment.
With VDIworks2Go, we’ll be able to support seamless virtual machines check-in and check-out. In effect, VDIworks2Go installed, VDP’s connection brokering interface will let you inform the system that you are about to disconnect from the network and hence need a checked out copy of your VM. The VM gets streamed over to you and executes locally using a virtual machine player. When you reconnect to the network, you can check the VM back in so that it can execute on a fast server, without taking up your local resources. Read more
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Redlands wins the Infoworld 100 award for their VDIworks Virtual Desktop implementation
Posted on November 18, 2008
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We’ve been working with the wonderful folks over at Redlands Community Hospital for over a year now. When we initially met with them to chat about their vision for the future of IT at their hospital, we knew their plans were both exciting and cutting edge. Just the kind of project we like to be involved in! After the initial exchange of ideas, it was very clear that this was a wonderful fit; Richard Gagnon and his team possessed both the vision and a deep understanding of business specific issues their IT infrastructure had to contend with. And we had the Virtual Desktop technology that would allow Redlands to implement their next generation IT infrastructure. Fast-forward a year and Redlands’ innovation with the VDIworks Virtual Desktop Platform* has won them an Infoworld 100 award for being a “shining example of [an] IT project undertaken by tech leaders committed to pushing their organization forward”. We couldn’t agree more!
Microsoft announces they’ll have their own connection broker… in 2010
Posted on November 6, 2008
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We’ve all been wondering exactly when Microsoft would finally come out and validate the virtual desktop market by announcing their own connection broker. Well, no need to wait anymore, it just happened. We have an announcement for sure, but we’ll still need to wait until 2010 to actually buy and deploy the product.
So what does this mean for the other connection broker vendors? Well, for one, they need to get moving with the innovation, which, at the end of the day, is the only real way to stay ahead. Clearly, the announcement is great validation for virtual desktops in general, because Microsoft wouldn’t be investing in an enablement component if they didn’t see promise. Any lingering doubts in that area should now evaporate. Virtual Desktops are a reality and they present a tremendous opportunity for vendors and customers. Read more
VDIworks going live on 5,400 seats at Donna Independent School District
Posted on October 23, 2008
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VDIworks just won the largest real-world Virtual Desktop deployment announced thus-far! That’s pretty big news for us. We’re immensely pleased that Donna Independent School District (ISD) in Texas have selected our solution for over 840 of their classrooms and 64 labs. Students and Teachers will be using next generation Virtual Desktops enabled with VDIworks’ Virtual Desktop Platform.
It’s satisfying to win opportunities like this under any circumstances, but when you’ve also competed hard in technical bake-off against some of the largest names in the industry and come out on top, well, that’s plain priceless.
Here’s the press release for more details on the win:
Donna ISD selects Virtual Desktop Solution from VDIworks
VDIworks Interview with Virtual Strategy Magazine
Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under General & Informational, Industry Analysis, Learning about VDI, VDI Architecture | Leave a Comment
Carryl Roy of Virtual Strategy Magazine recently spoke with us about VDIworks technology, our plans for the future, differentiation and pricing. If you have a few moments, you might find this podcast interesting. Perhaps somewhat compulsively, I say some controversial things, such as Virtualization being an architectural necessity in a world where multicore CPUs are proliferating…
The podcast can be accessed at: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/All-Podcasts/VDIworks-No-Longer-Bound-To-The-Box.html
The audio index and topics covered are as follows: Read more
Are cloud-based Web desktops the future of computing?
Posted on August 16, 2008
Filed Under General & Informational, Industry Analysis, User Experience | 3 Comments
If you’ve been involved with VDI (Virtual desktop infrastructure) for more than the blink of an eye you will probably be wondering what good VDI does in an age when applications are all running in the cloud. After all, if applications are being designed to be cloud aware - and hence, multi-user and network resource aware - then what value could a Hypervisor possibly bring? Isn’t a Hypervisor just a short term stop gap until all applications migrate to the cloud and the notion of separating the OS and the application’s execution environment from the hardware ceases to be of relevance? Come to think of it, if everything’s running in the cloud, does the local operating system installed on the client really resemble today’s OS?
This happens to be a set of particularly important questions. There are multiple points of view that exist in the industry today concerning these, but at the end of the day, the shape of behemoth software and hardware companies will be influenced - nay, will be determined - by who is right and who is wrong on this subject. Now, the really large (and somewhat smart) companies will try to bet on multiple possible outcomes but the real winners will be those who get it right and who have developed their strategic roadmaps and direction not by hedging bets, but simply by being correct. Read more
XenSource acquisition not doing too well for Citrix… so far.
Posted on July 25, 2008
Filed Under Industry Analysis | 1 Comment
The most recent Citrix earnings call was an eye opener for those tracking the success of Citrix’ foray into Virtualization. At one level - as far as marketing hype goes - Citrix has clearly focused/realigned heavily around Xen. To the extent of renaming its legacy, bread-and-butter Presentation Server product, “XenApp”. At another level - pertaining to real, tangible business benefits of the acquisition - the merits of the Xen buy and the value it has driven to shareholders can be seriously questioned.
Here are some interesting extracts from the earnings call: Read more
Implementing VDI? You might as well use a free Hypervisor!
Posted on July 18, 2008
Filed Under Learning about VDI, VDI Architecture | 2 Comments
That’s what we find ourselves saying to an increasing number of customers looking to deploy small pilots, or who are just more acquisition cost sensitive than the typical F500 enterprise. While this may be considered heresy by server virtualization experts, let me walk you through our logic here.
First, free hypervisors are pretty functional. And there’s plenty of them. They cover pretty much every base OS permutation you could be interested in. Microsoft’s Virtual PC can run 4-6 users comfortably on an inexpensive Windows system with XP Pro as the host OS. VMware Server 2 is now available as an alternative that would happily handle an even larger number of desktop VMs, and it runs on both Linux and Windows. Sun’s openxVM Virtual Box (obtained via their innotek acquisition) is pretty decent performance wise and relatively easy to install on Linux. Finally, Xen on Linux comes pretty close to ESX functionality… for free. Read more
Sun to lay-off 1,000 employees. What happens to their virtualization push?
Posted on July 13, 2008
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First, the facts: Sun has announced that they will be cutting about 3.5% of their workforce, or roughly 1,000 people. This comes at the heels of reports that they might be looking at cutting as much as 65% of their marketing department. Just about 10 months ago, Sun had released about 1,500 employees. This smells a little less like well thought out restructuring and a little more like an inability of management to stem the rot. In the meanwhile, Sun’s stock has also lost half of it’s value in just under a year.
What’s going on here? Several things. Quite clearly, the market is not demonstrating too much confidence in Jon Schwartz’s strategy of acquiring open source companies like MySQL and continuing to build an open source portfolio without a clear way to make money off this mountain of open software. This is an old problem for Sun. Java is probably the most widely used application that has been as poorly monetized. Read more
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