What is User Virtualization and is it worth $70 million?

User Virtualization makes your user’s information manageable and portable. With User Virtualization the components of a desktop relating to the user are decoupled from the operating system and applications. Goldman Sachs investment is not to gain market share per se, but to allow AppSense to rapidly expand to meet the demand that their product has generated and helps drive a rapidly expanding desktop virtualization and management market.

The See-Saw Effect: To Scale-up or Scale-out

One of the very first questions presented to the Virtualization Architects when planning and designing a new deployment, for as long as I have been working with virtualization technology. To scale up or scale out, that is the question and philosophy that has flip flopped back and forth as the technology itself has improved and functionality increased.

Licensing VDI for Microsoft Desktops – is it rocket science?

Given all the past ingenuity and accomplishment why is it, in 2011, the mere task of assigning valid licenses to desktop virtualisation should appear an arcane process?
How do different virtualization models impact how you license your desktop services? What are the current licensing models and do they apply in all instances of desktop virtualisation? Do the models impact on provisioning of services be they laptops, thin clients, Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC), or mobile devices?
Is desktop virtualization licensing an intentionally complex process and what other options could there be?

VMware sends mixed message with View 4.6

When VMware first announced that it was going to license Teradici’s PCoIP protocol for inclusion in View 4.0, its most visible shortcoming was that VMware did not plan to update the View Security Server at the same time. Setting aside any debate as to the performance characteristics of PCoIP on the WAN, the lack of support for the View Security Server was a significant obstacle to widespread adoption of View in enterprise environments. So the inclusion of direct support for PCoIP tunneling through the View 4.6 Security Server comes as a most welcome update. Also included with View 4.6 are new USB enhancements, as well as support for Windows 7 SP1.

Trouble with Memory Page-Sharing

In my last post I was Exploring a Limitation of VMware DRS and I have encountered another situation that had similar symptoms but the resolution was quite different. This problem was occurring on a VMware ESX 3.5 cluster that was specifically affecting Windows 2008 R2 64bit virtual machines that were configured with four processors and eight gigabits of RAM. These virtual machines were taking an extreme amount of time to perform a reboot. During the reboot ESXTOP was showing insane %RDY with spikes climbing over 200. When the reboot would finally finish several services would have failed to start.