1. June 2009 by Tony.

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21. May 2009 by Tony.

Citrix recently announced XenClient, their client side bare metal hypervisor. VMware announced their client hypervisor back in February and I would not be surprised if Microsoft was also developing a product. A bare metal (or type 1) hypervisor is a visualization layer which is installed directly on your hardware. Most of us are familar with server visualization, well client hypervisors are simply applying the same technology to desktops and laptops. A client hypervisor is more challenging to develop though due to the much broader hardware support needed: think graphics, audio, USB, firewire etc.
So what’s the point? Why the race to bring out a client hypervisor? Because the client hypervisor could be the missing piece of the VDI puzzle. Today, if you implement a VDI solution what do you do with your mobile users or power users who need more resources than VDI can provide? Nothing, you leave them running a locally installed OS which is a different image (or possibly several images to accommodation hardware flavours) to the VDI users. This means greater management effort and costs as well as more difficult and complex troubleshooting.
In the client hypervisor world everyone in your organisation can run the same OS image whether connected to a server based VDI instance or on a physical laptop or desktop. This will drastically simplify environments with follow on cost savings.
Bring it on I say! I can’t wait to try out a client hypervisor.

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6. April 2009 by Tony.

While searching for some information on VMware, I found this solid concise reference card on VI3

• Updated the details to the latest Confuguration Maximiums PDF.
• Updated it to include 3.5 update 3 release notes.
• Changed the versioning to include the latest VMware release, so its more obvious how up to date (or not) your card is.
• Some minor additions (NAS maximums) and corrections.

Many thanks to all the readers who have written in with comments.  Always welcome.

Go and grab it here: http://www.vmreference.com/downloads/vmreferenceVI3card1.3for3.5U3.pdf

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24. February 2009 by Tony.

The posts are abuzz this morning with new thaton on Feb. 23 Citrix will announce that it will be offering free licenses to its full XenServer virtualization program and new partnering with Microsoft to provide system management, Citrix Essentials, for Hyper-V and, in return, Microsoft’s System Center will support XenServer

Steven Vaughn-Nichols detailed the Citrix plans on his personal blog. Apparently Citrix briefed a bevy of bloggers about its plan under embargo, but the presentation is flying around in various in-boxes. Vaughn-Nichols notes that Citrix won’t open source XenServer, however.

I can’t wait to see VMwares stock price today…..

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10. February 2009 by Tony.

VMware has open sourced its View Client software which enables connections from Linux clients to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View. VMware would like to see their partners developing the client for non-x86 devices using operating systems other than Windows XP or Linux.

You can get the sources from Google code site. The sources are licensed unde LGPL v2.1

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