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IBM making moves towards private cloud with Tivoli Updates

Carl Brooks of searchCloudComputing.com just put out an interesting piece on IBM’s updating as Tivoli as a complement and perhaps a replacement for VMware in the building of private clouds. The industry seems to be taking some notice of IBM’s approach to the cloud, finally.

IBM

Did IBM just change the game in private cloud?

By Carl Brooks, Senior Technology Writer

02 Mar 2011 | searchCloudComputing.com

Does IBM have the wherewithal to compete in the commodity hardware cloud?

Say “IBM” and “cloud computing” in the same breath and many IT managers will roll their eyes. The IT leader’s cloud strategy has been seen by many as a mess.

But that may be about to change. IBM recently revealed a beta program of updates to its Tivoli software that may breathe new life into the company’s private cloud ambitions.

The new capabilities include support for VMware’s VIM APIs in a variety of Tivoli tools, including image repositories, automated provisioning, application deployment and Tivoli Storage Manager (integrating TSM and VMware heretofore has not been pretty). Enhancements to Tivoli Provisioning Manager may include booting VMware images directly from block storage instead of having them preloaded into memory. IBM claims that images can be booted in seconds.

Read the rest here.

Carl Brooks is the Senior Technology Writer for SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at cbrooks@techtarget.com.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, IBM, security, SOA, strategy, virtualization, VMware

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 1:17 am and is filed under application virtualization, cloud, Linux, Open Source, security, virtualization, VMware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Intel and the G-Dudes Publish the Hype Around Cloud 2010

Cloud Computing H-cycle july 2010 (c) Gartner Inc.

Intel recently worked out deal with Gartner Inc. which allows them to post one one of their most the up to date and detailed version of the famous Gartner Hype Cycle as relates to Cloud Computing. You can find the file here:

http://premierit.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/5910-1-4916/Hype%20Cycle%20for%20Cloud%20Computing%2C%202010.pdf

The analysis reminds me a bit of Carl Pagans famous old saw “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the cloud hype world, I think this means that the hype is deep and long, but the potential is extraordinary. Not how much already has been on, and they claim were are just at the peak. As an aside, the analysts do a nice job with definitions of terms.

This little fellow is (c) Gartner Inc., so you will need to download it right from Intel’s site to have a closer look.

Tags: application virtualization, cloud, cloud computing, Cybersecurity, desktop virtualization, Grollman, VMware, XenServer

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 11:38 am and is filed under application virtualization, cloud, desktop virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Google, Hyper-V, intel, Linux, Open Source, privacy, Risk Management, security, virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Virtualization Speed Traps: Five Ways to Drag Apps Down

As you virtualize more of your company’s applications, avoid these five mistakes that could kill application performance for users. One piece of bad news: Your IT staff will have to learn to play nicely.

By Kevin Fogarty, CIO.com

Computacenter – CIO — What has driven the market for virtual servers more than the potential to squeeze several servers worth of performance out of just one physical server? It’s the relative ease with which most applications can move from a physical infrastructure to a virtual one.

But make the move without planning, run into a few of the major performance “gotchas”, and your apps sitting on a brand-new virtual infrastructure will run like they’re locked in an old box that’s sitting around because it’s too much trouble to throw out. Here are five virtualization performance points to keep in mind.

1. Skimpy Hardware

Sure, one main purpose of virtualization is to make physical servers disappear, but that doesn’t mean the hardware itself doesn’t matter, says Ian Scanlon, IS operations manager for Computacenter (CCC), a datacenter and IT services company based in London but covering most of Europe.

Computacenter migrated the 700-plus servers running its internal IT operations to VMware beginning in 2007, and has had very few performance problems, even with applications very demanding of either I/O or computing resources, Scanlon says. All the VMs run on relatively high-end HP blade servers, with 48 GB of RAM and plenty of SAN space each. Without that elbow room, the data warehouse, SQL Server-based applications and other demanding systems might not pass muster with the business units, he says.

2. Weak Supporting Characters

Virtual servers definitely save money, but if you focus too much on cost savings when you’re setting them up, you’re not going to save money or get decent performance, Scanlon says. High-bandwidth network connections, fiber rather than copper, for example, and powerful SAN gear make far more sense than saving a few bucks in capital costs upfront, he says.

“We went into this [migration] with the goal of saving costs, initially, which we haven’t really done,” he says. “The benefits really are in agility, the amount of time it takes to stand up a new server or expand something, and making management easier and issues like that. We’re not really saving much, but I don’t think anyone here would say it was the wrong decision.”

According to CIO research, plenty of companies do see substantial savings from virtualization efforts, but they value agility gains just as much.

3. Downsized Support Plans

Everyone likes getting “free” servers by running several VMs on one physical box, but that doesn’t mean you’ve actually gotten rid of any of the load on your infrastructure, says Chris Wolf, analyst at the Burton Group. In fact, you’ve probably increased the load on your power, network and storage resources.

Five VMs on a physical host use the same amount of bandwidth and disk space as five physical servers, and require the same amount of configuration, security, management, licensing, patching and all the other work that goes into keeping one application or a whole data center running, Wolf says. Cutting your support plans or failing to plan increases to accommodate new VMs may not make a difference on day one of a migration, but software rot will quickly drag down performance.

4. Finger-Pointing Instead of Troubleshooting

In many companies with IT silos, people who don’t handle shared responsibility well will pass responsibility for anything running on a virtualized server to the “virtualization guy,” says Bob Quillan, senior director of marketing at EMC’s (EMC) Ionix division, which focuses on management of virtual infrastructures.

By creating another silo responsible for something that touches every other department in IT, companies set themselves up for extended rounds of finger-pointing—rather than troubleshooting when something goes wrong. Traditional IT groups aren’t used to the speed with which a virtual infrastructure changes (a condition EMC techs refer to as “V-Motion Sickness”) so they tend to blame problems first on that. Breaking down silos and working out triage and response procedures that work within a virtual environment as well as a physical one, is the only way to keep a small breakdown from becoming a big one, Quillan says.

5. Overcrowding Your Applications

The hypervisor, OS and hardware may all be the same between two VMs running on the same machine (or identical machines): but the applications running on them change the dynamics so completely that you have to continue planning capacity according to the demands of each application on each server, Scanlon says.

It’s easy to put half a dozen VMs running a normal application on one physical server, but only two VMs running an I/O-heavy SQL Server app or power-consuming data warehouse, he says.

Running Citrix virtual-application servers on a VM isn’t a problem either, unless you forget that the Citrix app itself is a virtual server whose resource demands will skyrocket when everyone who uses it logs in, if you haven’t tested it under real-world conditions, he says.

“We’ve had relatively few problems in performance since we migrated, but I think that’s mostly because we started with really good [hardware],” Scanlon says. “It kept us out of a lot of trouble.”

Get more story here.

Tags: application virtualization, cloud, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, Grollman, Michael Grollman, TopLine Strategies, Virtualization Speed, VMware, Xen

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 11:23 am and is filed under application virtualization, cloud, desktop virtualization, IT Service Management, VDI, virtualization, VMware, Xen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

SeaMicro Uses Intel Atom Chip in Server Architecture

Startup SeaMicro is unveiling its SM10000 server, which takes advantage of the small and highly energy-efficient Intel Atom processors and its own I/O virtualization technology to create a computing architecture that is highly scalable and drives down server power and space costs by as much as 75 percent over traditional systems. The SeaMicro server is aimed at Internet companies and HPC organizations.

SeaMicro is coming out of three years of stealth mode with a new server architecture that offers significant power and space savings through its use of Intel’s Atom processors.

SeaMicro on June 14 unveiled its SM10000, which can scale to 512 Intel Atom chips, which Intel initially designed for use in netbooks and now is aiming at a host of mobile and embedded devices.

However, SeaMicro officials saw that the highly power-efficient chips could be used in servers targeting the burgeoning cloud computing and Internet workloads.

There is a shift in computing away from large data center workloads to environments where there are significantly more—but smaller—tasks, according to SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman.

Other systems makers—including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell—are still making servers designed to handle those larger workloads, and use up too much power and space running the smaller ones, such as checking e-mail, social networking and viewing Websites, Feldman said in an interview with eWEEK.

The Atom chips are much better designed to handle such workloads and in the process save businesses money in power and space costs, he said.

“On the Internet, the problems that need to be solved are much smaller problems,” Feldman said. “Atom is really good at these ordinary problems, but doesn’t do as well with the harder problems.”

Today’s Internet-based traffic also tends to be “bursty” – it rises and drops quickly, he said. The result is underutilization of traditional servers. However, the design of the SM10000 makes it much easier to scale, Feldman said.

SeaMicro is using the Atom platform and a patented I/O virtualization technology to shrink the motherboard by eliminating about 90 percent of the components from it. The capability not only drives down the size of the motherboard but also the power consumption.

Feldman said the motherboard is shrunk from the size of a pizza box to that of a credit card.

An interconnect technology links 512 of these motherboards to create a single clustered systems that offers 1.28 terabits-per-second of throughput. The architecture also can support a variety of processor instructions sets, such as ARM, x86 and RISC, and protocols that include Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

SeaMicro offers server management through its DCAT (Dynamic Compute Allocation Technology), which through dynamic management and load balancing ensures that the myriad chips in the system are run at their most energy efficient.

SeaMicro can put all of its compute, storage, interconnect and server management technologies into a 10U (17.5-inch) server.

The result is a server that can offer high performance in a form factor that is a quarter of the space and power of traditional servers, Feldman said.

SeaMicro is rolling out the SM10000 at a time when businesses are becoming increasingly concerned about power, cooling and space costs. Feldman said that for Internet companies, power is 30 percent of its IT operating expenses. He also pointed to an Environmental Protection Agency report that said data centers now account for almost 1.5 percent of the power consumed in the United States.

Chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are looking to increase the performance of their processors while driving down the energy consumption, and OEMs are looking to integrate power saving capabilities their systems not only through the use of such chips, but also through other server technologies.

There also is a push to use other chip technologies, such as low-power processors from the likes of Via Technologies, and graphics technologies from AMD, Nvidia and others in servers.

Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with The Yankee Group, said SeaMicro’s offering is an interesting concept that, if proven, holds a lot of promise.

“You have the computing power of a regular server, but it’s just a bunch of smaller processors,” Kerravala said in an interview. “But at any moment, you can scale up or down to the exact number of processors needed. It makes so much sense, you kind of wonder why no one has thought about it before.”

Now the challenge for SeaMicro is to prove its architecture in the field. Kerravala said the offering initially will have particular appeal in environments such as Internet companies and HPC (high-performance computing) organizations, where there’s a high demand for compute power at lower power and space costs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Cost Cutting, desktop virtualization, virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Survey: Developers to Focus on Hybrid Cloud in 2010

By: Darryl K. Taft, e-week

2010-01-13

According to a recent Evans Data survey, more than 60 percent of IT shops plan to adopt a hybrid cloud model over the coming year.

Results of the Evans Data Cloud Development Survey show that 61 percent of the more than 400 developers polled said that some portion of their organizations’ IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year. However, over 87 percent of the developers said half or less than half of their resources will move to the public cloud. As a result, the hybrid cloud is set to dominate the coming IT landscape, Evans Data officials said.

“The hybrid Cloud presents a very reasonable model, which is easy to assimilate and provides a gateway to Cloud computing without the need to commit all resources or surrender all control and security to an outside vendor,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. “Security and government compliance are primary obstacles to public cloud adoption, but a hybrid model allows for selective implementation so these barriers can be avoided.”

Evans Data conducted its survey over November and December of 2009 to examine various aspects of cloud development including: timelines for public and private cloud adoption, obstacles and perceived benefits of cloud development, collaborating and developing in the cloud, tools and architectures for cloud development, virtualization in the private data center and more, the company said.

Meanwhile, also according to the Evans Data survey, nearly two-thirds or 64 percent of the developers said they expect their cloud applications to extend to the mobile space.

Other highlights of the survey include that MySQL is the preferred database for use in the public cloud cited by more than 55 percent of the developers. And more than 28 percent of developers said they preferred VMware as their favored hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud, followed by Microsoft and IBM.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 9:44 am and is filed under cloud, databases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Virtual desktop alternatives to Citrix and VMware

By Bridget Botelho, News Writer

21 Dec 2009 | SearchVirtualDesktop.com

The big fellas want you to forget that other VDI choices are out there

The big virtual desktop vendors — Citrix Systems, VMware and Microsoft — get all the attention, but individual requirements may lead an IT manager to choose from among the many other companies that sell this software — often at lower prices and with good results.

The desktop virtualization space is still muddy, but the market has reached a point where enterprises that don’t have an overly complex set of requirements can adopt server-hosted desktop virtualization with little risk, said Simon Bramfitt, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah.

“There are some interesting alternatives that are worth looking at if you are willing to look a little further afield,” he said.

Multiuser computing

One option comes from NComputing in Redwood City, Calif. NComputing’s access device and built-in software plug into a PC and divvy up that PC’s resources among multiple simultaneous users.

Basically, when a user signs into his desktop, a UXP communications protocol sends the desktop images, video and audio to the access device, which is a small, low-watt, lightweight box that plugs into the user’s peripherals on one end and to the shared PC on the other.

Jim Rich, an IT director at an automotive sales company in Redding, Calif., is testing NComputing’s gear. His take so far? “It isn’t too bad,” he said. “It makes basic computing and Web surfing an easy task for a virtual system. The ease of setting up the client is great.”

Rich said he likes that the product is for computers that are located geographically close to one another. After all, NComputing users are tied to their terminals, whereas with some other hosted desktop offerings, such as XenDesktop, users can sign into their virtual desktops from any PC or device.

But the acquisition cost is far lower than options from Citrix or VMware, at just around $70 per device.

Desktop as a service

Another option comes from Desktone Inc. in Chelmsford, Mass., which claims to have coined the term “desktop as a service” (DaaS). The service lets companies circumvent infrastructure requirements by delivering virtual desktops as a subscription. IBM started selling the service a few months ago.

A basic offering includes a specific number of hosted virtual desktops normally priced between $50 and $75 per month, per desktop. The service provider supplies the physical resources on which the virtual desktops run, and the enterprise brings the operating system images, licenses, applications and data, according to Desktone.

“We have a compelling model for companies that are looking at VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] and considering spending millions of dollars in infrastructure to support it,” said Jeff Fisher, Desktone’s senior director of strategic direction. “Instead of going to their CFO to get the funds and then have to manage it, they can go to a service provider like IBM and let them pay for the infrastructure. It eliminated the worry about capex [capital expenditures] and management.”

One expert said the DaaS concept is a good idea but hasn’t yet taken off.

“The idea that a cable provider can offer a thin client and they take care of all the administration and infrastructure sounds enormously appealing,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. “No one seems to have pushed on it very hard, and I’m not entirely sure why. … It seems like a promising business model.”

IT managers are hesitant to choose Sun Microsystems’ virtual desktop software because of uncertainty regarding Sun’s unfinished acquisition by Oracle, Bramfitt said. That said, Sun continues adding to its line of desktop virtualization products and new versions of its Sun VDI software. Recently, the company launched the Sun Desktop Access Client, which lets employees use their existing Windows laptops or desktop PCs instead of Sun Ray thin clients.

Quest Software in Alisa Viejo, Calif., sells vWorkspace, which is probably one of the more visible and mature products in the market. Virtual Bridges, LeoStream and RingCube Technologies are other names in the game.

Quest Software’s vWorkspace was a Best of VMworld 2008 finalist for its desktop virtualization offering, which uses VMware Virtual Infrastructure to create hosted desktops, including VM management and monitoring capabilities, application delivery and more.

Virtual Bridges is an Austin, Texas-based company that uses open-source standards to provide virtual desktops and managed desktops, using a client-side hypervisor.

LeoStream provides a vendor-agnostic Connection Broker that connects end users to physical and virtualized desktops, Terminal Server sessions and applications.

Mountain View, Calif.-based RingCube’s vDesk is a “workspace virtualization” product that sits between application virtualization and hypervisor-based virtualization. It encapsulates an entire computing workspace, which includes everything above the operating system kernel — applications, data, settings and any nonprivileged OS subsystems to deliver a Windows desktop.

And while any of those hosted virtual desktop offerings will improve desktop management, IT managers should be wary of any vendor claims at achieving huge cost reductions. “Unless they are transitioning from an unmanaged or only lightly managed desktop environment, they should not expect to see the dramatic ROI figures that some vendors are claiming,” Burton Group’s Bramfitt said.

Read the full story here.

Tags: application virtualization, cloud, cloud computing, DaaS, desktop virtualization, Grollman, NComputing, RingCube, SUN, Sun Desktop Access Client, UXP, vDesk, VMware, vWorkspace, Xen, XenServer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under application virtualization, cloud, desktop virtualization, VDI, virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

VMware vs. Citrix virtual desktops — what’s the better deal?

By Bridget Botelho, SearchVirtualDesktop.com

VMware may rule the server virtualization market today, but its VMware View 4 virtual desktop software falls short when compared with Citrix Systems’ XenDesktop 4 in terms of flexibility, capabilities and delivery, according to many experts.

Here, desktop virtualization consultants and users provide clarity on some of the major claims that Citrix Systems and VMware have made about their offerings and explain which gives IT pros the most value.

Flexibility for IT shops
At this point, some say that XenDesktop 4 is better option for big IT shops because it provides many different flavors of desktop virtualization, and it can run on any hypervisor, among other things.

Citrix recently released its Flexcast technology to let IT deliver any type of virtual desktop that end users need — not just the server- hosted version of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that VMware offers, said Jim Sanzone, a practice director for desktop and application virtualization at New York-based virtualization consulting firm Virtera.

“Citrix has recognized that there is no one silver bullet with desktop virtualization; you won’t solve all of your problems with just VDI,” said Sanzone, who offers both XenDesktop and VMware View. “There are elements — app streaming, presentation server, provisioning server – that don’t fit into a hosted desktop solution. So people like XenDesktop’s flexibility.”

Chris Wolf, a Burton Group virtualization analyst and consultant, concurred. “VMware needs to offer similar functionality to Citrix FlexCast, with the View broker able to connect users to a virtual desktop or XenApp/RDS session based on policy.”

Also, while XenDesktop runs on any hypervisor, VMware View 4.0 supports only VMware’s own vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure 3.5. VMware representatives claim that since more than 90% of the virtualization market runs VMware, this isn’t a problem. But enterprises may feel differently.

“VMware’s solution turns people off because of the lock-in factor,” Sanzone said. “Some organizations are OK with it, but others are interested in Hyper-V and, down the road, may want to use that. If they use VMware View, they can’t. That was a complaint from a very large customer recently.”

Wolf said he believes that VMware will support VMware View on other hypervisors when the market grows and people ask for it. But VMware has not indicated interest in this.

End-user experience
Since the end-user experience is critical to selling desktop virtualization to users, both companies improved their delivery protocols in the most recent versions.

VMware View 4 will offer a better end-user experience than before, thanks to integration with Teradici’s PC-over-IP protocol (PCoIP); a remote display protocol that creates the best-case performance for any network condition.

More on desktop virtualization:

VMware View 4: An improvement, but still a ways to go

Special series: What’s new with virtual desktop infrastructure?

Freakonomics: How H1N1 boosts desktop virtualization adoption

Symantec and Quest’s desktop virtualization suites hit the big leagues

Citrix to combine desktop virtualization products, lower costs

Prior to this, VMware was using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which was designed for Terminal Services, Sanzone said.

“Before, whenever a big company came to us with certain latency requirements, we knew View wouldn’t be able to handle that, but with PCoIP, [VMware] is on the table,” Sanzone said. “The expectation out in the field is that PCoIP will level the playing field against Citrix.”

Citrix also improved its protocol performance with HDX, which is built on Citrix’s well-regarded Independent Computing Architecture (ICA).

While there aren’t any nonpartisan, published comparisons of PCoIP vs. HDX available yet, the people interviewed for this article said Citrix’s HDX outperforms PCoIP on the wide area network.

“For simple, high-speed LAN desktops, in many cases you can’t really make a wrong choice because both perform well enough,” said Shannon Snowden, a consulting partner at Louisville, Ky.-based IT consultancy New Age Technologies Inc. “However, when the requirements include remote sites with more graphic-intensive applications, XenDesktop is hard to beat.”

Landon Winburn, a Citrix systems administrator at the University of Texas Medical Branch, agreed. Winburn uses VMware ESX on servers but chose Citrix’s XenDesktop 2 over VMware View 3 last year, in large part because Citrix’s ICA protocol was better for large deployments. He said that’s still true.

“Citrix has a tried and true protocol that works great on the WAN, where Teradici’s stuff just doesn’t work as well,” Winburn said. “It’s fine over a LAN, but that’s for smaller shops.”

Delivering personal settings
Another part of the end-user experience is personalization — being able to deliver desktops with all of an end user’s settings, images and desktop applications so the desktop looks and acts like a traditional PC.

Citrix includes personalization tools, or user profile management software, within XenDesktop 4 via sepagoPROFILE, but VMware does not include personalization software — yet. Instead, VMware has an OEM agreement with RTO Software for VMware View 4 today and plans to include it in a future version.

That said, Citrix’s personalization software is basic compared with available third-party offerings, and so many companies buy third-party software. Winburn, for instance, uses AppSense‘s personalization technology with XenDesktop.

Deployment
Desktop virtualization has a bad reputation for complexity, not just because it still requires IT shops to stitch together various software packages to get everything they want, but also because installation requires communication and cooperation among various IT departments.

“I have seen very high interest but very low adoption of desktop virtualization, and I attribute that to the technology being so across the board in terms of the disciplines required to put it all together,” Sanzone said. “The desktop, server, and application guys all have to come together and agree on something to make it happen.”

Although one could assume that VMware shops would lean toward VMware desktops, that isn’t necessarily the case. “So far, in the deployments we have done, Citrix has dominated the desktops — even though those customers use VMware in the data center,” Sanzone said.

That said, deploying XenDesktop in a VMware shop might take longer than VMware View — a point VMware emphasizes.

Patrick Harr, VMware’ s vice president of desktop marketing, said, “Citrix takes three times longer to install and integrate into an existing environment, and it requires up to six different management consoles compared to one easy-to-implement virtual desktop solution with one single management console with VMware View.”

But deployment times are subjective. “The difficulty in deployment argument is a relative thing,” said New Age Technologies’ Snowden. “For those familiar with XenDesktop, it’s no more difficult to deploy than View.”

Sanzone said XenDesktop may take a longer to deploy, “but that is because there are not as many features in VMware View.”

Pricing and TCO
VMware View 4.0, which will be available on Nov. 19, comes in two versions. VMware View 4 Enterprise Edition includes the Enterprise Edition of VMware vSphere 4 for free (for desktop use), together with VMware View Manager 4 for $150 per concurrent connection. The Premier Edition also includes VMware vSphere 4 for desktops and VMware View Manager 4, VMware ThinApp 4 and VMware View Composer for $250 per concurrent connection.

Citrix changed its licensing with XenDesktop 4 by integrating a full version of XenApp 5 into the product and moving from “per concurrent user” to “per named user” or “per-device” licensing. *The per-user model gives each end user an unlimited number of connected or offline devices at no additional cost, while the per-device model allows any number of end users to use one licensed device.

Whether the licensing change is good or bad depends on the company and how they use the technology.

The two editions of XenDesktop 4 that include XenApp are Enterprise and Platinum, and will be available Nov.16. Enterprise Edition costs $225 per user and includes secure remote access and application streaming. Platinum Edition costs $350 per user and includes secure remote access, application streaming and virtualization, Citrix Password Manager, virtual desktop performance monitoring, WAN Quality of Service, and remote user support.

XenDesktop also comes with XenServer, but the majority of XenDesktop users run it on VMware hypervisors, and they have to pay for ESX or vSphere separately. But vSphere’s memory-overcommit capability offers greater virtual machine (VM) density, so it makes a lot of sense to run XenDesktop on that hypervisor, Wolf said.

Both vendors make big claims surrounding total cost of ownership, but IT pros should not take the data at face value. For instance, Citrix claims that XenDesktop reduces desktop TCO by up to 40% and saves up to 90% in storage costs. VMware claims that View reduces desktop TCO by up to 60%, but that percentage is based on an IDC white paper paid for by VMware.

Burton Group’s Wolf said some of the big TCO savings numbers vendors tout are “laughable,” though desktop virtualization certainly does lower desktop management costs.

To get the most value out of either desktop virtualization offering, Wolf said he recommends buying packages that include application virtualization at a minimum.

And even though Citrix offers more today, the desktop virtualization space continues to evolve. Both Citrix and VMware plan to introduce client hypervisors by mid-2010, and VMware is experimenting with offline VDI capabilities. Citrix plans to release a self-service desktop application portal, Dazzle, by the end of this year that could reduce the number of IT help desk calls, Wolf said.

In the meantime, enterprises should base their decisions on their individual needs — not on biased vendor claims.

“There’s not a concrete answer as far as which is better; it all depends on the requirements. I find value in both offerings,” Snowden said. “So the best choice is really going to come down to the project requirements, complete with a detailed discovery of the desktop use profile, to determine which one is the best fit.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under application virtualization, desktop virtualization, security, virtualization, VMware, Xen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Cisco, EMC, VMware Join Forces for New vBlock Cloud Systems

Sharing the equity?

The coalition — along with processor maker Intel — also announced that it is starting up a new, shared-equity company called Acadia to handle the specifics of marketing the new vBlock systems. vBlocks are preintegrated, preconfigured computing systems consisting of networkware from Cisco, storage/security/system management from EMC, and virtualization software from VMware.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under application virtualization, Cisco, intel, virtualization, VMware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Virtualization don’ts: Neglecting VM resource allocation

neglected

Rob McShinsky has a point or two worth checking out — Virtualization is not as simple as loading up a hypervisor and then pressing go. Check out his work with Hyper-V:

Below are the results for a physical host with two quad-core processors, 64 GB of RAM and approximately 1 TB of disk space, connected by 4 GB Fibre Channel.

	Tier A virtual machines (VMs)	Tier B VMs	Tier C VMs
VMs per host	31 (1/2 RAM 2 GB host reserve)	20 (1/3 RAM 4 GB host reserve)	15 (1/4 RAM 4 GB host reserve>
CPU average utilization	5%	10%	20%
RAM utilization (max)	2 GB	3 GB	4 GB
Disk space utilization (max)	35 GB	50 GB	100 GB
Disk I/O	Low	Medium	Medium
Network average utilization	15%	15%	15%
Example workload	Web, print, file, small application servers	Low transactional databases,larger file servers, medium resource application servers	Database, terminal/Citrix, larger application servers, domain controller

Note: These tiers emerged from my work with Hyper-V. If you use another hypervisor, the results may differ. Regardless, the assertions are still valid.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Hyper-V, security, VDI, virtualization, Xen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.