What is the Netbook’s place in the Universe? And what does it mean for VDI? - Part I
Posted on June 12, 2009
Filed Under General & Informational, Industry Analysis | 2 Comments
A host of netbooks based on the NVIDIA Tegra are about to hit the market
The netbook form-factor is doing insanely well. It’s probably the only ray of light in an otherwise challenged PC industry. In fact, in just under 2 years, Netbooks now count for about 20% of the overall mobile PC (aka Laptop) shipments. This is very significant. The popularity and rapid proliferation of this form-factor begets a number of questions. For example:
- Are netbooks cannibalizing PCs and Laptops, and hence destroying the PC industry?
- Are PC ASPs (Avg. Selling Price) going to be altered for ever? And if so, what does this mean for large PC businesses that were built on $1,500 ASPs… not $299 ASPs. Are they done for?
- Are netbooks a ‘step back’ in terms of being about as powerful as a ten-year old desktop? Is the popularity of the netbook going to constrain application innovation? (The argument goes something like this: developers want their apps to run on the largest number of devices. Netbooks being the lowest common denominator, will require apps to be ‘dumbed down’ so that they can run them?)
- What do netbooks mean to alternate desktop delivery models, such as VDI? Are they complementary? An alternative? Irrelevant? Mutually exclusive?
I’m thinking about desktop virtualization. How much bandwidth do I need for VDI?
Posted on June 7, 2009
Filed Under Learning about VDI, User Experience | 5 Comments
56Kbps? 100Kbps? 512Kbps or a 1Mbps link? How fast do you need it to go?
This is a question we get often from customers and partners implementing Virtual Desktops. The truth is, in a hosted VDI scenario where you are connecting to your VM over a network, bandwidth can be an extremely important factor in determining the end-user experience. However, there are many facets to be considered so there is unfortunately no single answer to this question. What’s more importan than throwing out a number is to understand the tradeoffs involved and then arrive at the bandwidth numbers and quality of experience that suit you best.
At the low-end, you can get away with a 56Kbps connection (RDP), while at the high-end (RGS, PCoIP) you may require a 100Mbps LAN connection. In order to provide support for the widest range of network characteristics, VDIworks’ Virtual Desktop Platform supports over half-a-dozen protocols that have each been tuned to work best in different circumstances. It is important to understand the tradeoffs between, bandwidth, latency, colour depth, sound quality, screen frame rate and cost for your specific environment. Read more
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Is VMware View really THIS slow?
Posted on May 29, 2009
Filed Under Learning about VDI, User Experience | Leave a Comment
YouTube is great for remoting protocol comparison videos! Search the site and you’ll find tons. Including, ahem, a few VideoOverIP videos we’re fairly proud of. Since our VDI management product, VDIworks Virtual Desktop Platform, supports well over half a dozen protocols from a variety of vendors, we obviously test these experience remoting technologies in our own labs extensively. We support and integrate with products from Microsoft, Teradici, ClearCube, HP, Wyse and others, so we have a fairly good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each. And as George Orwell very rightly observed, some animals are more equal than others. Far more equal! If you require evidence of this truism, take the short trip over to YouTube and watch the following VMware View remoting demo. Compare it with VideoOverIP and tell us what you think… happy VDI’ing!
The remoting protocol for virtual desktops you’ve been waiting for…
Posted on May 10, 2009
Filed Under User Experience, VDI Architecture | 2 Comments
Our engineering teams have been super busy lately, working on a new remoting protocol that solves many of the problems that plague VDI today.The end-user experience, solution cost and customer choice are all tied to the remoting protocol. If you choose RDP, you may have a low cost solution, but the performance just isn’t there. If you pick another, relatively higher performance protocol, it’ll be tied to particular hardware. And then there are protocols that only perform selective acceleration and are reliant on codecs on the client device itself. Problem, problem and problem.
So, in order to advance VDI enablement technology and make the paradigm a more cost effective, open and higher performance alternative to legacy PCs, something has to be done about remoting protocol constraints!
And we’re fully on board with that mantra… while we haven’t released the product to the public yet, we have provided it to several strategic partners and are far enough along to where we’re happy to share a very simple demo video with you. None of the advanced features of this new remoting protocol are highighted in this video… just the basic stuff. But we think you’ll find it interesting.
So here goes:
Get your Virtual Desktops installed, nothing down!
Posted on March 18, 2009
Filed Under General & Informational, VDI News | Leave a Comment
VDIworks has partnered with CSI Leasing, a technology leasing company with a long history of serving technology buyers, to deliver leased Virtual Desktops. If you need the manageability, security and ease-of-use our Virtual Desktops deliver, but want to avoid the associated hardware/software acquisition cost, the CSI Leasing solution may be perfect for you.
Nothing Down Virtual Desktops: VDIworks partners with CSI Leasing
Is “Virtual” truly optional for VMware?
Posted on March 5, 2009
Filed Under Industry Analysis | Leave a Comment
Virtualization.info has an interesting post today about the future of troubled virtualization giant, VMware. Having pioneered the virtualization industry, the long-term prospects for VMware now look to be increasingly questionable. The issues VMware is contending with are significant: the commoditization of the Hypervisor, the emergence of multiple significant competitors, top-level management troubles, the good old downturn, the alienation of erstwhile ecosystem partners and finally, the inability to innovate as quickly as necessary. With this as the backdrop, Virtualization.info proposes that VMware is finally moving beyond its old virtual haunting grounds into the physical realm. It seeks to reinvent itself as a company looking to provide physical (and virtual) systems management.
The questions must be asked: Is VMware finding the commoditization and competition from Microsoft and Citrix too hot too handle? Is VMware simply rushing into another battle with an even greater number of significant incumbents? What will Tivoli, CA, BMC, Symantec and others think of VMware, the Systems Management Company? Partnerships, one fears, will begin to crumble. The lack of focus will be a challenge. So will the fact that not much of the Hypervisor/VM management skillset directly translates into physical systems management. Where is the leverage of established core-competencies? Read more
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Brazil leads the charge with Linux VDI - is this the beginning of a trend?
Posted on March 2, 2009
Filed Under General & Informational, Industry Analysis, User Experience, VDI News | 1 Comment
We read with interest a Slashdot news item that discusses a 350,000 Linux-based virtual desktop deployment in Brazil. The approach is a little bit different to the hosted VDI model, or even endpoint virtualization. In order to cut costs, a PC sharing approach is being used where the PC, in some sense, is a ’server’ catering to several users. There are some limitations to this approach, i.e. the distance between the PC and the end-user, performance etc. But with industry wide innovation, those limitations are ultimately addressable. What’s really interesting and promising about this initiative is the large scale deployment of Linux as a mainstream, virtualized, desktop OS.
Is this a one of a kind situation, or are we witnessing a trend where inexpensive, virtualized desktops can viably run Linux and a modern Web browser and still measure up to a typical user’s needs? If so, it would certainly alter desktop economics drastically! Read more
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VDIworks and ClearCube collaborating on a really simple, really inexpensive Virtualization Bundle
Posted on February 26, 2009
Filed Under Ease of use, VDI News | Leave a Comment
One of the biggest issues with deploying desktop virtualization can be the end-to-end solution complexity. You’ve got to get the thinclients in place, source the servers, get a hypervisor up and running, management, protocols… as the King of Siam used to famously say in “The King and I”, “Etcetra, etcetera, etcetera!”
And right behind the complexity, of course, can be the price. If you don’t architect the right solution, put the optimal number of users on a server, and ensure that the correct thinclient choices are made, your costs can balloon. Read more
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VDIworks now a featured Microsoft Virtualization Solution Partner
Posted on December 2, 2008
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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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