April 20, 2009 • 8:48 am 0
Citrix is rebranding Citrix Access Essentials into:
The Fundamentals product will become full part of the XenApp family.
Filed under: Uncategorized , Access Essentials, Fundamentals, XenApp
April 14, 2009 • 11:54 am 0
Citrix has just opened the beta program for the next version of XenServer.
The new product is codenamed Project George (but the final name will be XenServer 5.1 according to our sources), and features some interesting capabilities:
Citrix says that the RTM code is expected for the end of April. It’s clear that the company is anxious to have it ready for the Synergy 2009, to be held in Las Vegas in early May.
You can download the beta via MyCitrix.
Filed under: Server Virtualization , Citrix, virtualization, XenServer
April 9, 2009 • 2:35 pm 0
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , BlueCat, Cisco, Citrix, Devon IT, ESX, StorMagic, Tidal Software, Veeam, Vimware View, XenDesktop
April 8, 2009 • 8:54 pm 0
In March Citrix announced some major changes in the XenServer productline. We provide the following information, so that everything becomes a clear for those active installations and for future installations.
Changes in products:
No much changes within the products on feature-level, although that VM Lifecycle Management, LabAutomation, extended historical performance reporting, StorageLink and workflow orchestration have been added in the new versions of XenServer: Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise and Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum.
Full product-feature-overview
Products have been rebranded and have some met the end-of-life date:
For product information we kindly refer you to a Citrix Solution Advisor. Of course you can always reach us for more information through this blog.
Pricing
Citrix Essentials for XenServer (ENT/PLAT) is available in an ‘annual license’ and a ‘perpetual license’. Seen the fact that XenServer is cloud-ready, annual licenses can be best positioned within cloud-computing environments with a volatile usage. As soon as you are looking for an implementation that will run more than 12 months go for the perpetual license.
The perpetual license includes 1 year ‘Subscription Advantage’ which enables you to connect to the latest version of the Citrix Essentials for XenServer during the SA period. If your edition falls out of SA, you always have the opportunity to move your license again under SA with a small additional fine.
There is a pricing promotion on Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum: 3.000 USD instad of 5.000 USD, probably till the end of June, 2009. The financial uplift from Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enteprise to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum has ben reduced to a minimum, one would be ***** not to go for the Platinum edition of Citrix Essentials for XenServer.
The S.A.R-program for Citrix Solution Advisor remains in effect, but only when this partner has been certified.
Support
The free version of XenServer will not be supported by technical support of Citrix without a technical support contract. The contracts are available through Citrix Solution Advisors. For those customers running an old version of XenServer (Std, Ent, Plat) and who migrate to the last version of Citrix Essentials and have an active technical support contract, can get technical support under the old contract for the new Citrix Essentials version.
Upgrades
from Citrix XenServer Standard (purchased before 23/2/9) with SA to Citrix Essentials: can migrate for free to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise. If you are not interested in the upgrade to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise you can always opt for the free XenServer edition. For those Citrix XenServer Standard editions purchased after 23/2/9, there is a free upgrade path to the free XenServer edition or a payable upgrade to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise. There is no direct upgrade path from Citrix XenServer Standard to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum.
from Citrix XenServer Enterprise with SA to Citrix Essentials: are eligible to receive a Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise
from Citrix XenServer Platinum with SA to Citrix Essentials: are eligible to receive Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum, there is no downgrade-path to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise
from Citrix Essentials for Xenserver (Ent/Plat) Annual to Perpetual: not possible
from Citrix Essentials for XenServer Enterprise to Citrix Essentials for XenServer Platinum: yes
We will try to post more on these changes in the following weeks.
Filed under: Server Virtualization , Citrix, Citrix Essentials for XenServer, XenServer
• 1:43 pm 0
Filed under: Uncategorized , iCloud, VDI, Xcerion
April 7, 2009 • 9:50 pm 0
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , Apple, Linux, OpenGL, OVF, Snow Leopard, Solaris, Sun Microsystems, VirtualBox
• 9:37 pm 0
Data Center Pulse released their proposal for the Data Center Stoack, an OSI-model a-like stack to describe the involved architecture. As the OSI-model the proposed Data Center Stack has seven layers.
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , Data Center Pulse, Data Center Stack, OSI
• 2:34 pm 0
Filed under: Server Virtualization , Citrix Essentials for XenServer
• 1:59 pm 0
Now that VDI is top-of-mind, more an more people ask us about design consideration, architecture, who can we VDI (if VDI would be a verb), … Most VDI vendors have some sort of guidelines or handbook and now Citrite Daniel Feller (senior architect) and Thomas Berger are “writing” the Encyclopedia Brittanica on XenDesktop: “the XenDesktop Design Handbook”.
The first part (of a multi-chapter handbook) has been released to the support-site of Citrix. This part focuses on ‘operating systems’, application and virtual desktop delivery design decisions. Over the coming months they will expand the series into different design dicision areas.
Some recommendations:
Filed under: Data Center Management, desktop virtualization , Citrix, Daniel Feller, Marathon Technologies, SQL, Thomas Berger, VDI, XenDesktop, XenServer
• 8:40 am 0
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , Amazon, Desktop Analysis Pack, EC2, FastScale, Lanamark, Server Virtualization Design Module
April 6, 2009 • 9:00 pm 0
• 2:47 pm 2
The initial public release of the Hosted Xen project (KXen) is now available. KXen lets you run the Xen core as a Type-2 VMM, on top of a regular operating system. This release supports 32-bit Windows XP, Vista and Win7 as the host operating system. This release uses a snapshot of the Xen core used in Citrix’s XenServer product. Future releases will be based on open source xen-3.4 and xen-unstable. This release is in the form of a snapshot of the latest working sources (kxen-preview-090323-src.tar.bz2) and an archive of binaries built from those sources (kxen-preview-090323-windows.zip).
Filed under: desktop virtualization , virtualization, Xen
April 3, 2009 • 4:14 pm 0
Filed under: Data Center Management , everRun 2G, Marathon
• 12:02 pm 0
When “cloud computing” became the buzz phrase of the moment in IT sometime in the past year or two, you could probably have been forgiven for having no idea what those two words meant, or for questioning whether they meant anything at all.
But as a major cloud computing conference in New York made clear this week, analysts and vendors are converging on a standard definition of cloud computing, and agreeing that the cloud approach to technology is gaining traction in the minds of service providers and customers.
Cloud computing is not really a technology by itself but an approach to building IT services that harnesses several converging factors in the IT world, including the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers and virtualization technologies that unleash power by combining many servers into large computing pools and dividing single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will.
Led by companies such as Amazon, vendors are building massively scalable server farms to offer compute power, storage, business software and application building platforms over the Internet, using self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources at any time they want and get rid of them the instant they are no longer needed. Private clouds deployed by enterprises for their own users are built along the same principles, but done so completely within the firewall.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, delivering a speech at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Conference & Expo this week, showed a slide featuring an early 1900s beer brewery that contained its own power generators. “They had to be experts in electricity to brew beer. Something is off there,” he said. “These guys couldn’t wait to dump their own generators and start to use electricity from other companies.”
Just as electricity became a shared service, or utility, so too will computing power, Vogels and other commentators say. If you are the founder of a start-up that is building an application for Facebook, you have to prepare for the possibility of becoming immensely popular overnight, Vogels says. But you might also fail. That’s why you need on-demand access to the power of 5,000 servers at any time, without having to spend the money up front. Or if you run a seasonal business, you may need huge amounts of computing power one month out of the year, but very little during the remaining 11 months.
“There is a shift from infrastructure being a capital expense to a variable cost,” Vogels said..
Cloud computing borrows concepts from grid computing, namely the ability to harness large collections of independent computing resources to perform large tasks; and from utility computing, namely the metered consumption of IT services, according to speaker Kristof Kloeckner, the cloud computing software chief at IBM. But perhaps the real impetus for cloud computing are failings within the current IT infrastructure, he says. Seven out of 10 IT dollars are spent on maintaining current systems, and perhaps 85% of capacity in distributed computing environments sits idle at any given time, he said. Storage requirements are escalating too quickly for many data centers to keep up.
The basic message from vendors: Cloud computing, while still in its infancy, is the solution to these problems.
Sys-Con’s conference coincided with the formation of the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group urging common best practices in on-demand, Web-based computing. Separately, this week saw the release of the Open Cloud Manifesto, a document urging vendors to agree on basic principles related to cloud computing and the interoperability of competing cloud services. The manifesto drew criticism from Microsoft, but has a long list of supporters including major industry players such as AMD, IBM, Rackspace, Sun and VMware.
Reuven Cohen, the founder and chief technologist for cloud computing start-up Enomaly, and one of the people responsible for bringing the manifesto to the public, said Tuesday that he has met with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Intel and other players and found some common ground. “We basically agreed that we have more in common than we have differences. I would describe it as ‘we’re friends again,’” Cohen said.
Cohen is scheduled to speak at the Cloud Computing Forum Wednesday and said he plans to advocate the creation of an industry association focused on marketing a cohesive picture of what cloud computing is.
While many vendors are still defining cloud computing in different ways, Cohen argues that “we can still compete but we don’t necessarily have to tell different stories about what the cloud is. There is an opportunity to come together and grow the market.”
Still, many questions remain to be answered about cloud computing. Customers want data security, performance, availability, and service-level agreements guaranteeing minimum standards for all three.
While companies like Amazon and Rackspace offer computing power over the Web, and the Salesforce.coms of the world deliver software-as-a-service, a whole crop of third-party vendors who layer services over the cloud are starting to emerge.
Security and customers’ ability to control their own resources are among the top concerns, says Patrick Kerpan, CTO of Cohesive FT, a vendor whose technology helps customers shift workloads to virtualized platforms and external cloud services with a standard interface. Cloud computing may be an improvement over existing systems in many ways, but “it’s definitely not a panacea for bad design,” he says.
Cloud vendors will be judged on five points: security, scalability, availability, performance and cost-effectiveness, Vogels said. While there are shortcomings today, he predicted huge advancements in the next few years.
“It is still day one,” Vogels said. “We’ve just begun widespread deployment of these services.”
Source: networkworld.com
Filed under: Cloud Computing
• 9:48 am 0
Virtualization Leader to Discuss Technologies, Benefits of Today’s and Tomorrow’s Virtual Desktop Implementations
AppSense, the leading provider of user environment management solutions for the enterprise, announced that it will be a featured speaker at the 2009 Sys-Con Fifth International Virtualization Conference and Expo, being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, March 30-April 1, 2009.
AppSense’s VP of Strategy, Martin Ingram, will address attendees during two sessions at the conference. In “Making Sense of Desktop Virtualization,” on Monday, March 30th at 5:20pm, he will discuss the key virtualization technologies (hardware, operating system, application and user), and how to evaluate them for various enterprise uses. On Tuesday, March 31st at 1:45pm, Ingram will lead a general session called “Why VDI,” which explores where desktop virtualization is headed and the role that existing and evolving technologies will play in driving VDI forward.
“The technologies required for successful VDI are evolving rapidly, and keeping current on what they are, how to best use them, and how to ensure user acceptance of VDI is tremendously challenging,” Ingram said. “I’m pleased to be able to explore these topics at such an important event, and share insights into how isolating and dynamically applying key desktop components can deliver the cost savings, business agility and superior user experience that enterprises require.”
AppSense helps enterprises cut costs today using their existing client infrastructure, while enabling further savings through dynamically composed virtual desktops. By personalizing standardized desktops and simplifying management of large-scale, complex environments, AppSense customers—which include more than 3,500 organizations globally—respond faster to changing needs, improve user productivity and deliver a stable, secure working environment. The company’s solution decouples the user environment from the desktop, stores and manages it independently, and automatically applies it to the desktop on–demand.
Source: http://www.appsense.com/thecompany/article.aspx?Id=125
Filed under: Uncategorized
• 8:54 am 1
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , Branch Repeater, Citrix, Netscaler, SAP, VMware, vSphere, WANscaler
April 2, 2009 • 10:05 pm 0
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , brokers, Cloud Computing, Cloud Security Alliance, ESX, ESXi, IBM, LotusLIve Engage, SaaS, VMware
• 9:57 pm 0
Doug Brown released episode 78 of DABCC Radio, completely focused on virtualization personalization and runbook automation, how they work, how to install, what problems they can solve offered to the general public by RES Software. (listen)
Filed under: Data Center Management , desktop management, PowerFuse, RES, virtualization personalization, Wisdom
• 9:29 pm 0
MDOP 2009 has been released by Microsoft to SA customers. The 2009 version includes the first release of MED-V, an update to App-V 4.5 and an update to the Asset Inventory Service (AIS). (more)
A quick reminder :
Filed under: Application virtualization , MDOP
• 1:11 pm 0
One of the more perplexing things about IT is that in all the rush to embrace server virtualization, there has not been a corresponding amount of increased interest in storage virtualization.
That isn’t to say that storage virtualization isn’t a big trend; it’s just that it’s not being embraced with the same level of enthusiasm.
The folks at DataCore, which makes software that allows IT organization to turn existing storage arrays from multiple vendors into a shared pool of disk storage, have two theories about why storage virtualization is evolving much more slowly than server virtualization.
The first theory is that most storage hardware vendors require customers to buy new storage arrays that support storage virtualization. In these difficult economic times, it’s hard to make an argument that basically says an IT organization should spend a lot of additional capital now in order to save money later.
The second theory is that when IT organizations introduce storage virtualization, they are worried about performance penalties. Too often there are database and e-mail applications that don’t perform so well when virtualization is introduced. To specifically deal with storage virtualization performance issues, DataCore is now adding 1TB of cache to a new 64-bit implementation of its SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 software.
There are a few other benefits to a software-only approach to storage virtualization, such a built in disaster recovery capabilities and a more efficient approach to thin provisioning. But at the end of the day, server virtualization is popular because it helps IT organizations get more out of their existing hardware investments…
Filed under: Storage Virtualization & Storage , Datacore, SANmelody, SANsymphony, virtualization
• 1:06 pm 0
Is commodity storage good for the enterprise and if it is who should be delivering it?
…The question is a fair one to ask. The ability for virtualization products either through software and/or an appliance to manage disparate storage systems has been around for years now and many of them made the same claim; “The disk doesn’t matter”, buy your storage from anyone you want and then use our virtualization tool to bring it all together. On a whiteboard that strategy makes a lot of sense. How about in the real world?
We have seen these vendors come and go, the true survivors of this concept would also be the early pioneers of it; DataCore and FalconStor.
…The point is that virtualization is about more than just enabling you to buy cheap disk. While some vendors really can and want you to be able to use inexpensive disk arrays, virtualization solutions like these, to be successful, have to do more. They for example can enable you to increase redundancy beyond what is available internally as we discuss in our recent article “Serious about HA?”
Read more.
Filed under: Storage Virtualization & Storage , Datacore, FalconStor
• 1:00 pm 0
DMTF Releases OVF 1.0 Standard (more).
Intel releases new CPUs and NICs with nested page tables and I/O virtualization (more).
5nine Software today announced 5nine P2V Planner for Microsoft Hyper-V (more).
VKernel Ships Virtual Data Center Modeling Tool for VMware ESX Environments (more).
Virtutech Defines Full Systems Virtualized Development With Simics 4.2 (more).
Filed under: Data Center Management, Server Virtualization, datacenter , ESX, Hyper-V, Intel, VKernel, VMware
• 11:57 am 0
Microsoft has the best definition as they have been in this business for years now. They define a SPLA in the following way, “A licensing program that enables service providers and ISVs with a hosted offering to license Microsoft products on a monthly basis to provide services and hosted applications to their end customers.”
Some qualifying questions for entry into a SPLA program might be the following:
1. Do you provide software services and hosted apps on a rental, subscription or services basis?
2. Are you a hosting provider, an ASP, a SI or an ISV that provides software as a service?
3. Is one of your primary objectives to avoid up-front license fees and minimum commitments?
4. Is your goal to maximize the number of end-user served from the same underlying software?
5. Will your customers accept not owning the software or having it located at their site?
If you can answer YES to most of these questions then most likely a SPLA program would fit your business model.
According to Microsoft there are many benefits to using a SPLA. Because the license is subscription based over time it will often cost more than a perpetual license for the same software. However, the benefits far outweigh the cost if the business model is structured correctly.
The following is a list of benefits Microsoft uses for their SPLA program:
• No Upfront Costs
• Most Current Product Versions – You have access to the most current versions of the products available in the program
• Pay Based On Usage – Monthly usage-based cost means you pay only for what was made available the previous month
• Worldwide Distribution – Use Microsoft licensed products to sell your services in any part of the world
Please take a look here and vote!
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, datacenter , Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, virtualization, XenApp
March 31, 2009 • 9:50 am 0
ThinPrint has released .Print RDP Engine 7.6 optimized for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and will provide automatic reconnect to all available printers for the user.
Keep in mind that the solution is bit-sensitive … there is a version for 32bit and one fro 64bit. Licenses are available with 12 up to 60 months support. (more)
Filed under: Data Center Management , RDP, ThinPrint
March 30, 2009 • 8:43 pm 0
Altough Citrix XenApp has already an enormous number of graphics acceleration tools onboard, sometimes a user got stuck with an application (not only by the graphics, but a lot of these apps are not multi-user, multi-session).
With the recent ‘boom’ in virtual desktops, a lot of companies looked at XenDesktop as a solution to centralize all these graphic-intensive applications. Within XenDesktop, Citrix has also done a lot for an optimal graphical experience, but one factor remains an issue: the graphics card in the server.
Wouldn’t it be great when you can offload all these graphic calculations to the graphical card within the server. It would be great, but no card was ready… till today … Nvidia announced Nvidia SLI Multi-OS Technology which supports multiple OS at the same moment using a virtualization technology, so two users can connect to a server and the server will provide each user with a maximum of graphics, as graphic-resources can be allocated to a user.
At present the technology is only available for workstations with Intel VT-D, but during last Citrix Summit there were talks about an appliance with 4 graphical cards offering maximum graphic performance to XenDesktop users, this might be it. There is a great market out-there for desktop virtualization when using off-the-shelf servers with this card.
(more on the NVIDIA website)
Filed under: Application virtualization, desktop virtualization , NVIDIA, SLI Multi-OS, XenDesktop
• 9:21 am 0
Citrix released the technical preview kit for the Apple ICA client to the Apple iPhone App Store, if you are looking for more technical information visit the following review by Michael Keen or go get your ICA client at the Apple Store.
Parallels is launching “Parallels Workstation Extreme”, a desktop workstation virtualization offering developed jointly with HP and NVIDIA (more).
Neterion Launches Third Generation I/O Virtualized X3110 10 GbE Server Adapter to the World-Wide Channel (more).
HP SNMP Agents for Citrix XenServer Retail Available (more).
Gartner predicts that the hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013, reaching 49 million units (read the report)
Filed under: Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization , Apple, Citrix, Gartner, HP, ICA, iPhone, XenServer
• 9:07 am 0
Quitely Citrix education has rebranded the ‘certificzation namings’, they name it … “Introducingthe next generation of Citrix certifications … with the IT professional in mind …” …
There are three certification tracks: administrator series, engineer series and architect series. The major changes are to be found in the ‘administrator series’. Next to the Citrix Certified Administrator a new certification has been added: Citrix Certified Advanced Administrator (CCAA). These changes primarely influence the personal certification level of IT specialists.
The CCAA focuses more on advanced topics an additional tasks like monitoring, optimizing and troubleshooting XenApp, while the CCA holds the basic skills to install, cofigure and manage a single product.
In short …
One little catch … the new certifications for XenApp 5.0 are only available for XenApp 5.0 on Windows 2008
Within the ‘engineering series’, there is an update-path to Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for XenApp 5 from Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator (CCEA) for Citrix XenApp 4.0. The CCEE is currently still under development and the release is foreseen hof 2H/09. Personally I strongly believe that the CCEA will be discontinued as soon as the CCEE is fully up and running.
For those companies that are Citrix Solution Advisor and enjoy the benefits of a partnership, nothing much changes at present. A recent check on www.citrix-channel.com (which holds the certification requirements) showed no changes for Silver or Gold partners.
Minor change for Silver & Gold partners : CCSP 4.0 is no longer accepted for the ’sales-part’
Probably the new certification levels will be integrated in the partner requirements, only questions is .. When?
Filed under: Uncategorized , CCA, CCAA, CCEA, CCEE, CCIA, education
March 27, 2009 • 9:52 pm 0
IBM on Monday announced that it’s partnering with Wyse to get a thin client product line into its end-user computing strategies and services.
Filed under: Application virtualization, Data Center Management
• 9:34 pm 0
Bernard Golden on the economics of cloud compouting: when keep the server in your own data center and when in the cloud?
His reaction to the missing factors in a lot of research on cloud economics:
… the actual cost of internal data centers vs. external cloud. Comparing the monthly cost of an EC2 server against a putatively similar piece of hardware in a data center is simple-minded, because it overlooks:
1. The direct costs that accompany running a server: power, floor space, storage, and IT operations to manage those resources.
2. The indirect costs of running a server: network and storage infrastructure and IT operations to manage the general infrastructure.
3. The overhead costs of owning a server: procurement and accounting personnel, not to mention a critical resource in short supply: IT management and its attention.
(more)
Filed under: Cloud Computing , capex, cloud economics, opex
• 9:27 pm 0
IT infrastructure and services delivered over the cloud will be ubiquitous within five years, and vendors that ignore the shift from on-premises software to Internet-delivered technology will be left in the dust, IDC analyst Frank Gens predicted at the IDC Directions conference in Boston (more)
Filed under: Cloud Computing , Cloud Computing
