The Virtual Desktop Design Maxim: Start With User Requirements

When considering a Virtual Desktop Design a good architect needs to ask “what is the best solution for this environment?” For many, once you’ve considered the needs of your users, it is a combination of desktop delivery models – some virtual, some physical. Ideally the user is unaware of which model is being delivered to them, they consume that service on an appropriate device, at an appropriate time. Ringcube perhaps first to market for this type of solution with their Workspace Virtualization Engine.

Cisco Pushing More vNetwork into Hardware

In the first Virtualization Security Podcast of 2011, we had Brad Hedlund with us once again. Not to talk about the Cisco Virtualization Security Gateway (VSG), but about the security of what I call physical-virtual devices that provide network virtualization within the hardware. Or what Brad Called Network ID Virtualization (NIV). Cisco has taken its VN-Link technology to extend the networking of a VM directly into the core switch when using vSphere.

Desktop Lifecycle Managment and what Novell has to offer

Mainstream virtual desktop solutions have focused their efforts on providing the best platform for hosting virtual desktop environments. Hypervisors, image management, and connection brokers are the top feature sets that companies have looked at during their comparisons. Moving up the stack, these vendors are now focusing on user personalization management, but do not have what is considered to be a full desktop management solution. So are our end-to-end virtual desktop solutions really complete?

Digging out after a Snowstorm: Similar to our virtual environments?

Sooner or later that perfect landscape of white is marred by new mounds of snow and clear-cut paths through it to the various locations on the property. When you look at these paths and the snow is high enough, they look like tunnels. The large tunnels (driveway) meet smaller and smaller ones. The perfect landscape of snow is now marred. This is just how a firewall looks when you put holes in it to let through various services. The more services, the more tunnels and paths will be cut. When speaking about the cloud or virtual environments, the increase in paths and entry points becomes a serious issue.

Ericom welcomes the desktop virtualization year with new release

Ericom has has won the race to deliver the first new product release of the “Year of Desktop Virtualization” with the launch of Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect 5.7.

WebConnect (sorry Ericom, but “PowerTerm WebConnect 5.7” takes too much space on the page to type out every time) is Ericom’s answer to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, plus or minus a few bells and whistles. On the plus side WebConnect includes mainframe and midrange terminal emulation software to provide access to legacy systems, as well as offering support for mixed environments consisting of servers running Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008 R2 grouped together in a single farm, and manages to do all this with a single product where Citrix still requires two.