Citrix XenServer Creedence Tech Preview

Citrix has announced the availability of the “Creedence” tech preview of the next version of XenServer, building on the open-source Xen Project’s Creedence alpha.4 release. The biggest change in Creedence is the move to an all 64-bit implementation. While the Xen hypervisor has always been 64-bit and can run both 32 and 64-bit guest operating systems, …

Public Cloud Reality: Do we Stay or Do We Go?

Soon the backup power will be available for our new datacenter and the redesign to make use of VMware vCloud Suite is nearing completion. Soon, our full private cloud will be ready for our existing workloads. These workloads however now run within a XenServer based public cloud.  So the question is, do we stay in …

How Good an Idea to Virtualize XenApp?

How good an idea to Virtualize XenApp? There were a number of benefits identified way back then: hardware abstraction allowing easier image management and OS upgrades; options for higher availability and faster recovery; even fail-over. Virtualization enabled silo consolidation and importantly enabled better management of user capacity on servers. However, there is a price. Reduced density and performance. Not all applications will benefit. That said, the flexibility that virtualization of XenApp offers is likely of greater benefit to many organisations.

Windows 2012 Hyper-V – the hypervisor for your Cloud? Part III

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V in your private cloud, specifically in a Microsoft Windows VM environment, can be delivered for cost effectively. With 2012 Hyper-V, any Microsoft edition has the exact same virtualization and fail-over clustering features & scalability. The key market play here is in the increased functionality that Microsoft has introduced however, Microsoft not only have to convince embedded and seasonsed VMware houses to move to a new release, but to convince those who saw Hyper-V in 2008 and 2008R2 that the product has a viable business maturity.

Windows 2012 Hyper-V – The Hypervisor for your Cloud? Part I

In this first installment looking at the features of Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 features compared to VMware vSphere 5.1 and XenServer 6.0 we consider how Hyper-V is priced, scalability and performance and storage.