Desktop Lifecycle Managment and what Novell has to offer

Mainstream virtual desktop solutions have focused their efforts on providing the best platform for hosting virtual desktop environments. Hypervisors, image management, and connection brokers are the top feature sets that companies have looked at during their comparisons. Moving up the stack, these vendors are now focusing on user personalization management, but do not have what is considered to be a full desktop management solution. So are our end-to-end virtual desktop solutions really complete?

Digging out after a Snowstorm: Similar to our virtual environments?

Sooner or later that perfect landscape of white is marred by new mounds of snow and clear-cut paths through it to the various locations on the property. When you look at these paths and the snow is high enough, they look like tunnels. The large tunnels (driveway) meet smaller and smaller ones. The perfect landscape of snow is now marred. This is just how a firewall looks when you put holes in it to let through various services. The more services, the more tunnels and paths will be cut. When speaking about the cloud or virtual environments, the increase in paths and entry points becomes a serious issue.

Desktop virtualization, a year in review

The desktop virtualization year opened with a bang at CES with the explosion of vendor announcements introducing the next generation of mobile tablets. The obvious winner this year being Apple and the iPad but with many more vendors showing off Windows-based tablets including HP, Archos and Pegatron, as well as Android tablets from manufacturers such as Archos (again), Compal, Dell, HP (again), and Motorola. The key challenge of course being the delivery of existing enterprise applications onto these platforms, something that’s desktop virtualization and presentation virtualization is ideally suited for. The inescapable consequence of this was a steady stream of announcements from Citrix, VMware, and Wyse as they leapfrogged each other’s announcements on availability, functionality, and usability of their respective mobile tablet client offerings. The level of competitiveness here producing major benefits for potential adopters as each strove to outdo the other in terms of user experience innovation and performance.

Virtualization Review 2010

It is the last few days of the year and time for a review of virtualization 2010. Although VMware was founded in 1998 it was not until 2001 that I first heard of VMware and played with the workstation product to be able to run different flavors of Linux. So for me, 2010 closes out a great year in virtualization as a whole as well as a decade of virtualization and what a ride it has been.

VMware take next steps towards mobile virtualization platform

VMware is continuing its on again off again relationship with mobile hypervisors, inching slowly towards a decision points on whether or not to truly embrace technology. VMware acquired French mobile hypervisor develop Trango Virtual Processors 3 years ago and has been working to incorporate Trango’s code into its own mobile virtualization platform (MVP) ever since. VMware has demonstrated MVP on a number of phone platforms in the past and wheeled it out again at VMworld last month and is actively recruiting enterprise customers to partake in a beta program, but so far hasn’t made any announcements about the possibility of a commercial release.