Posts Tagged citrixsynergy

My Sessions at Citrix Synergy 2010

Posted by Chris in Citrix, Cloud, Desktop Virtualization, Licensing and Support, Server Virtualization on May 6th, 2010

If you’re attending Synergy this year and wanted to stop by one of my sessions, I thought I would post them here. I’m participating in four sessions at this year’s conference:

Geek Speak Tonight!

Date / Time: Tuesday May 11, 4:30 pm – 6:45 pm

Room:Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2000-2002

Speakers: Shawn Bass, Simon Crosby, Rick Dehlinger, Martin Duursma, Chris Fleck, Stephen Greenberg, Michael Harries, Alexander Ervik Johnsen, Harry Labana, Brian Madden, Brad Pedersen, Rene Vester, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

A series of open, lively discussions led by respected industry thought leaders will kick off Synergy, giving you a chance to start the conference with a breath of fresh, unfiltered air.
Topics include:

CTPs and CTOs on the future of desktops
4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
The desktop is primed for unprecedented change in the near future. Join a high-powered discussion and debate among CTPs and CTOs on exactly how that future will unfold.

Cloud computing: what makes it successful and what’s on the roadmap?
5:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Cloud computing is the term du jour in our industry. Where is the real activity happening? How will the cloud unfold over the next few years? How will the cloud affect you? Where are the opportunities for Citrix customers and partners? Join us for a discussion on cloud computing’s hot areas and risks, and what’s coming next.

XenDesktop 4: a new look at the VDI landscape
6:00 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.

Last year, Shawn Bass stirred the pot again by stating there were still some deficiencies in the various VDI solutions on the market. Twelve months have passed and Citrix has introduced XenDesktop 4. What does the VDI landscape look like today?

The Debate is Raging – Concurrent vs. User Based Licensing Models

Session Number:SYN512E

Track: Geek Speak Live!

Date / Time: Wednesday May 12, 1:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Room: Solutions Expo Hall – Lounge

Speakers: Stephen Greenberg, Joe Shonk, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

With the advent of application virtualization and cloud computing solutions, licensing has become a key factor in project cost modeling and technical implementations. A clear understanding of the available options, and how and where to apply them, are critical. This panel of industry experts will present and debate the various licensing models and use cases, and contrast their views with current industry practices. Topics will include the available types of license models and their relative merits, common challenges posed by licensing in planning and implementing products and the experts’ views on industry standards and their feedback to the major vendors.

Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: What the Vendors aren’t Telling You

Session Number: SYN313

Track: Desktop Virtualization

Date / Time: Wednesday May 12, 4:30 pm – 5:20 pm

Room: Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2003-2005

Session Type: Breakout

Speakers: Simon Bramfitt, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

Many organizations are planning or implementing server-hosted virtual desktop solutions. In the emerging client virtualization market, it can be difficult to assess vendor platforms due to a lack of defined and accepted standards. In this session, Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Simon Bramfitt share the Burton Group’s benchmark for evaluating server-hosted virtual desktop solutions, including criteria for evaluating deployment, management, performance, integration, and user experience. The session concludes with a breakdown and scorecards of popular solutions, including the current Citrix and VMware products.

Heterogeneous Virtual Infrastructures – Practical Solutions for Managing Multi-hypervisor Environments

Session Number: SYN207

Track: Datacenter and Cloud

Date / Time: May 13, 2:00 pm – 2:50 pm

Room: Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2014

Session Type: Breakout

Speaker: Chris Wolf

Session Description:

While standardizing on a single virtual infrastructure sounds ideal, many enterprises face the reality of managing multiple virtual infrastructures both inside and outside their datacenters. Multiple virtual infrastructures may reside across business units (i.e., server and desktop), departments, or sites. In addition, client hypervisors (e.g., VMware Player, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Sun VirtualBox) further compound hypervisor and VM image management.

In this session, you will learn:

  • Strategies, architectures, and tools for managing heterogeneous virtual environments
  • Common interoperability pitfalls and workarounds
  • About security, data protection and recovery

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Vendors Flying Under the Radar at Synergy

Posted by Chris in Citrix, Cloud, Desktop Virtualization, Microsoft, Server Virtualization, VMware, Virtualization Management, XenServer on May 6th, 2010

Over the past twelve months, the innovation in the client virtualization space has been pretty remarkable, and several  solutions will be on display at next week’s Citrix Synergy conference. Because of the sheer volume of vendors on the show floor, I thought I’d point out vendors that may be under your radar but are worth visiting. Granted, there are literally hundreds of vendors in the space and most offer some value to your virtual infrastructure. Rather than point out the obvious ones that you’d visit anyway (e.g., Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, HP, Wyse, AppSense, Symantec, Quest Software, and RES Software), I thought I would point out some of the not-so-obvious. I know… get on with it, so here they are.

Virtual Bridges

Virtual Bridges will be showing the 4.0 release of their VERDE suite. VERDE is a server-hosted virtual desktop solution that competes with products such as Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, and Quest vWorkspace. What’s unique about VERDE is that its backend infrastructure has no Windows requirements, which has appealed to cost sensitive organizations and service providers. VERDE 4.0 has some interesting features such as CloudBranch, which allows organizations or service providers to support low bandwidth WAN connections by deploying a proxy-like caching server to a remote site. This approach allows organizations to retain centralized management while serving up virtual desktops over the remote office LAN – key to satisfying user experience requirements. I had blogged about this type of approach last year. There’s quite a bit in the core architecture, including Windows, Linux, and Mac endpoint support and even local desktop support (like VMware View offline desktops or MokaFive) that can be booted from a USB drive. For more information on VERDE, take a look at Gabe Knuth’s review on brianmadden.com.

Kaviza

Citrix recently made an investment in Kaviza and since that time (April) Kaviza has been getting considerably more attention. Kaviza offers a VDI-in-a-box solution that is complementary to existing desktop virtualization solutions. With Kaviza, organizations can deploy a single on-premise server to host virtual desktops at a remote site. The solution is hypervisor agnostic and currently supports VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. The solution gives organizations or service providers a way to deliver virtual desktops to remote facilities without having to worry about WAN connectivity impacting performance. Kaviza was one of the vendors that participated in my Virtual Desktop NAS Vendor Challenge last year and you can read more about their solution in this post.

RingCube

RingCube was another participant in the Virtual Desktop NAS Challenge and has gotten considerable traction over the last twelve months (you can read their guest post here). Having large enterprises such as ING Bank using RingCube’s vDesk product in production, has helped to establish RingCube’s credibility. RingCube’s client-hosted virtual desktop solution allows users to run their virtual work space on their endpoint system, leveraging the local OS resources. This means that a separate VM isn’t needed. The vDesk architecture is closer to OS virtualization in its approach. Without the added overhead to run a separate full blown VM, organizations have liked the fact that they can use existing endpoint hardware (without having to upgrade memory, for example) for the vDesk solution.

Wanova

Wanova was one other participant in the VD-NAS Challenge and their guest post is available here. Wanova leverages some very intelligent streaming technology they call Distributed Desktop Virtualization. The solution centralizes desktop OS and application management and can be used to deploy user environments to physical or virtual endpoints. Wanova’s solution also allows IT to support a single base image for a desktop OS type while also supporting user-installed applications.

Unidesk

Unidesk is an interesting company that started making noise at last year’s VMworld North America conference. Unidesk positions itself as a complement to VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop (you can read about their architecture here), and prides itself on its layering technology. With Unidesk, IT can manage shared non-persistent golden virtual desktop images while still giving users the ability to install their own applications. User-installed apps with non-persistent images is an extremely difficult engineering challenge (both VMware and Citrix will admit this), and Unidesk claims to have the answer. Their booth is definitely worth a stop when you venture into Synergy’s expo hall.

Virtual Computer

There will be plenty of attention devoted to the bare metal client hypervisor at Synergy. While folks wait out the general availability of the Citrix XenClient and VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) solutions, they have the opportunity to look at a bare metal client hypervisor shipping today – Virtual Computer’s NxTop. Many of our large enterprise clients see the client hypervisor as a 2012 initiative, but that’s not to say the technology isn’t useful as a small business or department-level solution today. Also, even if your plans for client hypervisor are further down the road, it’s always good to begin building your knowledge base of the technology and to start thinking about the governance issues (e.g., treatment of personal user VMs on the corporate LAN) they create.

Server Virtualization and Cloud

Synergy is starting to pick up steam as a server virtualization and cloud event, and I didn’t want to ignore some of the innovative vendors in that space too. Vendor booths that I’ll be stopping by include:

Plenty Else to See

Like I said previously, there are plenty of other vendors that are bringing value to the industry. For example cruising by the McAfee, RSA, and Trend Micro booths is a good idea. All three vendors are brining considerable innovation to security and compliance in virtual server and desktop infrastructures. In the storage space, I recommend visiting the booths of the three winners of the Citrix Ready StorageLink Challenge: NetApp, HP, and GreenBytes.

Between the emerging solutions, excellent presentations, and always engaging hallway discussions, Synergy is shaping up to be a great conference. I hope to see you there. If I failed to recognize a particular product you find interesting, please post it as a comment.

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