TechAgility

The best piece I have read from the IT Industry in the last two weeks or so is:

Why desktop virtualization projects fail

Desktop virtualization is one of the hottest topics of interest and a major initiative of many companies. Touted benefits include lower operating costs, simpler management and desktop mobility. Below we’ll explore what the barriers to wide-scale adoption of desktop virtualization solutions are and some approaches to deal with them. It’s not a fit for everyone in a company but it can be for many.

Challenge #1: Assuming desktop virtualization makes sense because thin clients are cheap - Many people assume that virtualizing desktops is going to be magnitudes cheaper because thin clients can be found for approximately $300-400 whereas a PC can cost $500-$1200.

Tip: Client costs are only part of the picture. Desktop virtualization can reduce capital expenditures but do not expect that to be the case in the first year. Building the infrastructure is expensive (storage, servers, licenses, etc.) and may be the same in the first year. Think about using existing PCs as clients instead of replacing them with thin clients. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs but the reduction in hardware costs may not be seen for a couple of years due to the infrastructure needing to be built. More importantly, operational expenses will be seen immediately and that is where the true cost savings can be found.

………   more at source

I have also collated below some of the details I have discovered around the latest news on PCoIP and HDX-3D

From Brian Madden:

Look out PC-over-IP! Citrix announces new host-side GPU-based encoding for HDX 3D

For me the most crucial part of this post is explaining this:

How HDX 3D works

On the remote host side, Citrix is releasing a custom VDA for the environments where you want to use HDX 3D. (The VDA, or “Virtual Desktop Agent,” is the software agent you install on your remote workstation OS that lets it participate in a XenDesktop farm and gives the ICA hosting capability to a desktop OS.) Having a separate VDA shouldn’t be a problem for anyone since this is a physical workstation host solution anyway, so it’s not like you’re sharing the same disk image with remote desktop VMs.

On the client side, HDX 3D is just another plug-in for the Citrix Receiver. (That’s newspeak for “it’s just another virtual channel for the regular ICA client.”)
HDX 3D lets you configure the image quality, so you can balance the bandwidth-to-user experience. (PC-over-IP lets you do this too.)

From a technical standpoint, the HDX 3D engine replaces the existing ICA progressive display capability. It lets the OpenGL or DirectX stuff render on the host, and then it scrapes them and makes what’s essentially like an M-JPEG movie which is streamed down and played on the client. In many ways this is similar to the way HP RGS and Teradici PC-over-IP.

……….    more at source

What this tells me is that this is right in the zone for HP’s Blade Workstation’s as they have Nvidia based GPU, and that the BladePC’s would not be in at all as they are AMD/ATI based hardware. It’s also interesting to note some more details coming out via this Citrix Community Blog HDX 3D – What Happened to Projects Pictor, Apollo and Prism? and the subsequent comments from Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Product Manager:

Though the first release is available for only XD customers, future releases will enable XA customers to get HDX 3D using VM Hosted Apps technology. And with GPU virtualization and related technologies in the future, we will enable support of HDX 3D on virtual machines as well.

And for VMware Brian Madden had this commentary…

After VMworld, VMware still has to prove they "get" desktops. 13 questions about their desktop strategy they need to answer.

The irony of this is that I really, really want VMware to be successful with desktops. Competition from VMware has caused Citrix to put more innovation into their desktop delivery products in 18 months than they have in the past ten years combined. If VMware rolls over on the desktop, I hope that the Symantec or Quest can step up to apply pressure to Citrix or else we’re going to have another decade of innovation ice age.

But back to the main topic: VMware’s lack of desktop vision.

At last year’s VMworld, we got all these great indications of what VMware was capable of in the desktop space. (Here’s my article from then where I could hardly contain my excitement about six desktop announcements.) And how did VMware follow up at this year’s VMworld?

• We got demos of the PC-over-IP and the client hypervisor. (This has a lot of promise and looks to be really great.)
• We learned that VMware will OEM RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles technologyfor some future release of View. (Not View 4 though, from what we can tell.)

So those were two great things. (Tactical, but still great.) Unfortunately that’s kind of where the good news from VMworld stopped:

• VMware demoed their client hypervisor known as CVP. (yay!) But we learned that it won’t be available until 2H 2010! Last year they said their client hypervisor was going to ship by the end of 2009, and now it’s another 8+ months away!?!
• The View futures session was just about View 4. VMware still hasn’t announced a release date, although the rumor is it’s still coming at some point this year. View 4 will have PC-over-IP, but little else new. (Oh, it will have vSphere 4 support.)

  …………    more at source

from Citrix Community blog:

• Desktop Virtualization is not Server Virtualization  (This title pretty much tells it like it is)
• Setting the Record Straight on XenDesktop (there’s not that much difference between XenDesktop and View apparently? )
• Interesting comment towards the bottom – Lastly, while I differ with most of what one VMware Community member, Rkelly, posted re View vs. XenDesktop, I have to say I agree with his final point for the IT team in any VMware shop:  "Download the trial versions of both products and see for yourself" . You just can’t beat a “Try before you buy”

From Alessandro and Virtualization.info

Virtual Computer partners with XenoCode

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization. Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio. It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

And lastly….  I haven’t see this before? The AppFactory, based in UK from the looks of it and promising to Virtualize your Apps from 149 pounds an App?
I wonder how well these guys will do? Very slick and professional web site, so it will be interesting to hear how well they do?

written by dcaddick