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.

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.

Is VMware trying to remake itself? To Compete with Microsoft?

With all the rebranding going on with VMware, I find it interesting that the new logo for VMware is similar to Microsoft’s logo. A single name instead of the cool boxes they used to have. Did VMware’s brand loose its focus while we were not watching? Is this why VMware is rebranding everthing? Is VMware really trying to remake itself to be more like Microsoft?

Hail the Microsoft RDS CAL-more than just a renamed TS CAL

The Microsoft TS CAL has become the Microsoft RDS CAL. The change is not only in name, but in functionality and price. The most important new offering is the inclusion of an App-V license. This will make introducing Application Virtualization in Presentation Server more cost effective and may also impact on the choice of Application Virutalization for the desktop.