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.
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Citrix and VMware face-off over client hypervisors
Last month at VMworld, VMware took a major step forward in its desktop virtualization vision with the introduction of View 4.5. On hand for the launch was Gartner Research Vice President Chris Wolf who confirmed that View 4.5’s improved scalability coupled with the addition of role-based delegated administration change auditing features and the ability to support Windows 7 meant that View 4.5 joined Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 in fulfilling Gartner’s requirements for an enterprise-class server hosted virtual desktop platform. Although, View 4.5 is more notable for a feature that is not required to obtain Gartner’s blessing.
Presentation Virtualization: what can VMworld do for me lately?
If you’re from a Presentation Virtualization (PV) background (although maybe you know it as Terminal Services (TS); possibly even a Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS); heck lets go on an old school ‘server based computing’ perspective) what vendors should you be looking out for at VMworld?
Terminal Services for Mac – OS X gets virtual
The Virtualization Practice’s Presentation Virtualization Comparison Whitepaper discusses PV in relation to business’ application and desktop delivery needs. This updated release adds Aqua Connect’s Terminal Services for Mac Series 3 to those products from Citrix Xenapp, Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect RemoteView, Geniut’s ThinWorx, GraphOn’s Go-Global, Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services, Propalms’ TSE, Quest’s vWorkspace, Systancia’s AppliDis Fusion and 2x ApplicationServer.
More on OpenStack – Cloud.com, GPL, Citrix, Oracle and the DMTF standards.
Cloud.com had lined itself up with Citrix by using only XenServer in the commercially-licensed version of its IaaS product, and now is being used by Citrix to ensure OpenStack supports XenServer (which it doesn’t at the moment), presumably to keep Red Hat’s KVM under control and VMware out. We’ve also been trawling through the available OpenStack documentation to understand why NASA thinks its cloud is more scalable than Eucalyptus. It seems to be all to do with how the state information is passed amongst the various servers that make up the system. GPL-based Open Core models break down when you move to multi-vendor foundations because the cross-licensing of IPR under GPL immediately infects the recipient codebase, and precludes commercial licensing of the resulting combined work. The result is that the GPL Open Core business model doesn’t work in the same way, and both Eucalyptus and Cloud.com cannot apply their current business model in these multi-vendor foundations. It is a big blow for Eucalyptus. They have turned their biggest potential customer into a massive and credible competitor, built in their own image (only – at least from a PR perspective – much more scalable).
In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external http requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture. In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external HTTP requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture.
OpenStack, an IaaS Platform from Rackspace, NASA and Citrix
Whilst I have been away on vacation, something fairly interesting has happened in the area of Open Source initiatives for Infrastructure as a Service in the form of a new initiative from NASA and Rackspace called OpenStack. You may remember in our last post in this area, we noted that there was a proliferation of offerings in the IaaS space, and it was in the customer’s best interest for there to be effective migrateability (or even mix and match) amongst public and/or private clouds. However, the API standards to support interoperability are proving elusive.