PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.
TVP Tag Archives
GestaltIT Tech Field Day: Virtualization Line Up
I participated in GestaltIT’s TechFieldDay which is a sort of inverse conference, where the bloggers and independent analysts go to the vendors and then discuss the information they have received. We visited the following virtualization vendors:
* vKernel where we were introduced to their Predictive Capacity Planning tools
* EMC where we discussed integration of storage into the virtualization management tools as well as other hypervisor integrations
* Cisco where CVN and CVE were discussed in detail.
Microsoft and Citrix offer a "Rescue for VMware VDI"
On March 18, Microsoft embarked on a major offensive to focus the desktop virtualisation market away from VMware View. Microsoft announced updates for their desktop virtualization technologies and solutions, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The question is, are these announcements marketing hype or do they actually help deliver an improved VDI experience? Indeed, are you a VMware View in peril? The announcements from Microsoft and Citrix to little to impact on this marketing statement especially when we consider that, licensing changes aside, this announcement is an announcement of things to come, not an announcement of things available now.Perhaps an effective rescue for VMWare’s VDI will be to for VMware to deliver their client side hypervisor first and offer a single management environment for a business desktop delivery, regardless of device.
Is Running Terminal Services on a Hypervisor Viable?
Project Virtual Reality Check have released their Phase 2 white paper on Terminal Server/RDS workloads running on the latest generation Intel processor: the Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem). Besides providing some great figures to support the adoption of Intel’s Nehalem to drive high demand virtualized workloads, this is an interesting and important comparison document for those considering centralised desktop virtualisation.
Virsto Promises More than Linked Clones for Hyper-V
Aimed for those who use medium sized storage for virtualization loads, Virsto will add quite a bit of needed functionality to Hyper-V to reduce disk space requirements, improve general disk IO performance, as well as provide faster high availability failover. The disk space saving Linked Clone technology available for VMware ESX and ESXi has been missing from Hyper-V, Virsto provides this.
Hyper-V: Free or Licensed the Choice is Yours
Which is better Hyper-V version deploy for production environments? For a traditional server based virtualization project, it makes financial sense to deploy Datacenter, and this is most likely the case for a hybrid deployment of Server and Desktop devices. However, for raw VDI and Open source deployments, it is obviously more fiscally prudent to utilise the free version which has been available for over a year.