Licensing your Private Cloud

Both Microsoft and VMware have revamped their product suites and therefore their licensing once more and how you buy will dictate how you license (as always). It has taken a bit of time for all the information to percolate through to each corporate site and all the issues to be addressed. As we did before, let us look at licensing. We will look at first the old model of Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere vs Citrix Xen vs RedHat KVM. Then in a follow-on article we will look at the new cloud suite models.

News: Piston Cloud and Gridcentric Partner to Deliver First Commercial OpenStack VDI Platform

Piston Cloud Computing raised a few eyebrows on Tuesday with the announcement that it was extending its Piston Enterprise OS (PentOS) to provide a platform for hosting virtual desktops (VDI) through an exclusive licensing deal with Toronto-based Gridcentric for its innovative Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology.

Gridcentric aims to shakeup VDI with Virtual Memory Streaming

Toronto based start-up Gridcentric, is developing a technology that it refers to as Virtual Memory Streaming that has the potential to reshape the economics of VDI, and deliver the holy Grail of a VDI desktop for less than the price of a PC.

Atlantis ILIO Pimps Virtualized Citrix XenApp: who needs VDI?

Virtualizing Presentation Virtualization Workloads is increasingly seen as beneficial and more acceptable. As Citrix XenApp customers move into 2013 it is likely they’ll move more physical instances to virtual. To enhance RDS VM workloads with shared storage – Atlantis release ILIO for XenApp, the first solution designed specifically to accelerate provisioning, boot time and application response time

Citrix and Dell team up to deliver VDI-in-a-Box

Dell has joined the the highly competitive and technically diversified single box desktop virtualization market in partnership with Citrix to package VDI-in-a-Box as a virtual appliance. The somewhat awkwardly named Dell “DVS Simplified 1010” appliance is built on the Dell PowerEdge R710 rack server that comes pre-installed with Citrix XenServer 5.6 and VDI-in-a-Box 5.0.

Citrix VDI-in-a-Box vs XenDesktop – does size matter?

The challenge for Citrix is to position their VDI portfolio effectively. At the very least there should be a standardised license plan and migration path from (or to) the grid and non-grid solutions. There is potential to remove the reduced functionality versions of XenDesktop. Most importantly – to have a license model that allows organisations to make a choice of technology that fits their need, not their size. Can Citrix FlexCast be truly flexible if it ignores the value that having a grid technology can bring not only to the SMB market – but to any sized enterprise?