View 4.5 Availability and Enhancements

Anticipating the formal announcement was a widely leaked report that View 4.5 would ship without Virtual Profiles, the user profile management solution that VMware OEMed from RTO Software in fall 2009. VMware finally confirmed that the leak was correct on the first day of VMworld 2010, but even then held back from announcing its interim solution until after the formal product launch. Then rather than simply offer View customers a copy of Virtual Profiles as a standalone product, VMware chose instead to partner with Liquidware Labs to enable them to offer Liquidware Labs’ ProfileUnity to View customers at a substantial discount. While VMware’s position is that Virtual Profiles will ship with View 4.5 at some point in the future, the decision to offer ProfileUnity instead did nothing to address the concerns of potential customers, especially those who might finish up paying twice for a profile management system. The only good news for View customers is that ProfileUnity’s agent-less and database-less architecture should make the future migration to Virtual Profiles a simple matter when the time comes to move.

Running Internet Explorer 6 beyond Windows XP

How can you run IE6 in a Windows 7 or a Windows 2008 environment? Looking at how to use desktop and presentation virtualization in comparison to application virtualization to deliver choice and options to your users in the desktop environment

VMworld 2010 in Review

What seemed like forever to get here was over in a blink of an eye. VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was once again an incredible event with over 17,000 people in attendance. Now that I have had a little time to reflect on the past week, I wanted to share my thoughts on the week and the event itself. The weather in San Francisco was unseasonable warm for San Francisco standards during the event but as a person from Florida who enjoys warmer weather the temperature for me was absolutely wonderful. I arrived in town on Sunday afternoon and enjoyed taking advantage of the power of twitter from the San Francisco Airport. Once I landed I sent a tweet out to see who else may have landed and who might want to share a cab to the hotel. Denis Guyadeen (@dguyadeen) responded right back and once we grabbed are luggage we were off and on our way.

Virtualization Security Strategy from VMworld 2010

Virtualization Security was one of the BIG Deals at VMworld with several announcements:
* VMware vShield Edge, App, and End Point
* Trend Micro will have the first product making use of vShield End Point
* Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG)
* HyTrust and their growing list of technology partners
But the biggest news is that Virtualization Security is finally on the radar of most if not all C-level as it is now seen as the gate to entering the cloud. But before we can solve the cloud security issue we have to solve the virtualization security issues. VMware’s announcement has the most impact on the virtualization security ecosystem. At once they are competing head-to-head with some vendors while providing a platform to use for other vendors.

VMworld 2010: PPC-07 Lab Setup

I recently co-presented with William Lam a session on the vGhetto Scripts and Client at VMworld 2010. The PPC-07 talk was within the Technology Exchange for Developers sub-conference of VMworld 2010.  For an extra few hundred dollars you were able to sit in on sessions by Carter Shankln, William Lam, and other VMware vSphere SDK …