One thing I noticed while attending this year’s VMworld in San Francisco was how many people attending the event had iPads. Actually, it was the hottest item being given away by almost all the vendors in attendance at the show. I was lucky enough to get one of the iPads that EMC was giving away. I recently heard that the iPad is the hottest selling tech item in history so far. During VMworld I got a chance to see the VMware iPad application to control your virtual environment and was really impressed. I really think the iPad might have a chance to become the tool of choice for the IT admins to monitor and administrate their environment. I am hoping that by VMworld 2011 we will be seeing a lot more client applications written and ported to the iPad and/or other mobile devices.
TVP Strategy Archives
Can Citrix Project GoldenGate make it worth delivering virtualized applications to a smartphone?
Application Virtualization’s benefit is that your business application is no longer dependent on the operating system. Project GoldenGate is Citrix’s new offering to support application deployment to smartphones. Project GoldenGate may be a nice to have for some existing Citrix corporate customers, possibly for a SaaS vendor – but by the time Citrix mature this offering will either web applications work just as well on a smartphone, or will there be established development houses who can offer application that work directly on your company smartphone devices without the Citrix infrastructure and without the Citrix license cost?
Citrix to release XenDesktop 5
Last week during Citrix’s Synergy event in Berlin Germany, the company announced the up and coming release of the next edition of their virtual desktop platform, XenDesktop 5. Focusing on greater management and end user experience, XenDesktop 5 comes right on the heels of the latest feature release of the XenDesktop 4 line, which was the release of the client-side hypervisor product, XenClient.
Ubuntu edging towards OpenStack
Eucalyptus-based solution that is bundled into the Ubuntu installation from 9.10 onwards and allows you to install a IaaS cloud into which you subsequently install Ubuntu Server instances, rather than directly installing an Ubuntu Server. The Eucalyptus proposition is that the cloud you create is identical from an API – and therefore a tooling – perspective to an Amazon EC2 cloud, and the same Ubuntu instances can run inside it, and even can be cloud-bursted out to it. Canonical make a lot of this duality in their positioning of Eucalyptus and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It feels very-much like an “onramp” message that we hear from VMware.
Rackspace Hijacks OpenStack
Rackspace has got the OpenStack governance model spectacularly wrong, and as a result the whole initiative is in peril. Not only are the Chair and the Chief Architect appointed directly by Rackspace, but 3 additional members are appointed directly by Rackspace, meaning that the 4 independently-elected Community members (even if they could agree) could never form a majority. There is actually no need to gain control explicitly. You control by contribution. Since Rackspace contributes most it will gain most control. Rackspace doesn’t actually need control to satisfy its business objectives. ll it needs is to make sure the project is successful and retain enough control over the project to ensure its own needs are met. So our suggestion to OpenStack is to take their Governance model, rip it up and start again.
How Many VM’s Can I Run?
I saw a question get posted on twitter that kind of intrigues me a little. The question was pretty straight forward. “How many virtual machines should I be able to run on a host?” That is really a fair question in itself but what I find intriguing is that this is the first question he asks. Is this really the first thing administrators think to ask when designing their environment? After all there is no set formula on how many virtual machines you can run on a host. You can be a little more exact when working with VDI because for the most part all the virtual machines would be set up pretty much the same way and the numbers can be a little more predictable. That would not be the case when working with server virtualization. You are going to have servers all with different configurations and amount of resources provisioned to the virtual machines. This variation is what will change your slot count and the amount of virtual machines you can run on the host.