Seven Deadly Sins When Deploying Thin Clients

The traditional Enterprise Desktop PC can be said to be on borrowed time. With marketing machines re-heralding the benefits of centralisation removing that Enterprise Desktop PC for Thin Client appears to be a far more prudent use of refresh budgets. While Thin Clients can, and do, replace Enterprise Desktops, there are major considerations to be made in their deployment. Multi-media, local device access, network access and mobile support, through to user acceptance and printing are often overlooked at the start of a project. Focus on understanding where where your costs are now and how you can best use the investment in deploying a Thin Client solution to reduce those costs in the coming years to realise savings on your enterprise workspace spend.

The Hypervisor Wars, a 2000-year old story

In the fog of the datacenter virtualization war, it is difficult to see clearly who will end up on top, and yet the outcome is almost certainly determined, and the victorious generals are even now moving on to fight new battles. Here at the Virtualization Practice we too would like to think we can see through the fog to work out who has won, so here are our thoughts, take account of them as you wish. They concern, primarily, the big four protagonists: Microsoft/Hyper-V, Citrix /Xen, VMware/vSphere and Red Hat/KVM.

Citrix Enhances XenApp with Virtual Machine-based Delivery

Citrix have announced significant new enhancements to Citrix XenApp 5 as part of their new Feature Release 2, available on 29th September. These enhancements include VM Hosted Apps, Power Management and the introduction of HDX Technologies to XenApp. With these new features, Citrix continue to develop and enhance their XenApp product.

KVM in RHEL 5.4 – Red Hat leaps out of the virtual shadows.

The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) has been available for some time in, for example, Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS (Released April 2008). KVM is widely used and stable and it is high time that Red Hat who acquired KVM when they purchased Qumranet in September 2008, started to move their customers onto it – at least to remove the uncertainty in the customer base.

Disaster Recovery Maturity shown at VMworld 2009

Veeam, Vizioncore, and PhD Virtual all showed there latest released products as well as the future products that integrate with VMware vSphere at much deeper levels that previously available, ala the VMware vStorage API. Talk was also about expanding their products into Microsoft Hyper-V as well as Citrix XenServer. This space has become so important that even the traditional backup vendors such as Symantec (BackupExec) as well as HP (DataProtector) are getting into the act. This shows ecosystem as well as market maturity not seen at last years VMworld.