Year: 2008

In May Citrix released its first fully-featured VDI platform combining together a hypervisor, XenServer, a connection broker, Desktop Deliver Controller (DDC), an OS streaming solution, Provisioning Server, its blockbuster presentation/application virtualization & streaming plaform, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and a bunch of other applications.

Only the most skilled Citrix customers know that this rich suite, called XenDesktop, has a limitation: the remote desktop protocol it uses (internally called PortICA) it’s not exactly the same ICA that powers XenApp.

The reason behind this difference is that the ICA protocol is built on top of the Microsoft Terminal Server platform that is missing in the Windows XP and Vista guest operating systems that populate VDI environments.

Citrix has rebuilt many of the features in the new PortICA and it’s working to have the same feature-set across the two protocols. But for now there’s a gap.
Martin Maierhofer, Product Architect at Citrix, details the missing capabilities on his corporate blog:

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As most of our readers know by now, the Virtualization Congress 2008 planned for October in London didn’t take place as planned.

While waiting for a second chance in Europe, our team decided to postpone the first edition by several months and move it to the US.

The result is that the Virtualization Congress 2008 becomes the Virtualization Congress 2009, taking place in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, from May 5 to 7.

There are other three important changes:

First of all, for this first US edition, the event is co-hosted with other two events: the Citrix iForum and the Network World Live!
Along with them, the Virtualization Congress 2009 will benefit the event coordination and logistics that Citrix calls Synergy.
This will give virtualization.info enough resources to deliver the great event that we have planned.

The fact that the Virtualization Congress is under the umbrella of Citrix Synergy doesn’t impact the independence of the event.
virtualization.info is still in charge of the whole agenda and has no constrains.
Citrix will not have any special benefits in terms of exposure during the event.
Every vendor, including the Citrix competitors, are more than welcome as sponsors.
Delegates will be able to attend all the three events if they like, otherwise they are totally free to just attend the Virtualization Congress 2009.

In other words, the Virtualization Congress remains “the independent stage for virtualization technologies”.

Secondarily, the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda will become much more technical, specifically designed for virtualization architects and engineers.
We ditched the “Reseller Day” planned in Europe, and extended the main agenda up to 2.5 days.
We are working to include in the schedule every possible topic about virtualization, such as:

• Application virtualization & streaming
• Benchmarks
• Cloud computing
• Hosted virtual desktops infrastructures (connection brokering, thin clients, etc.)
• Software development & testing through virtual lab automation
• Storage virtualization
• Technology adoption challenges
• Technology ROI
• Virtual infrastructures maintenance  (operational frameworks, best practices, etc.)
• Virtual machines disaster recovery / high-availability  (backup / restore, hosts synchronization, P2V migrations, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructure security (platforms hardening / patching, intrusion detection, permissions, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructures automation / orchestration
• Virtual infrastructures capacity planning
• Virtual infrastructures design
• Virtual Infrastructures performance monitoring / troubleshooting
• Virtual machines lifecycle management (provisioning, inventory, tracking, etc.) 

The third and most important change in the Virtualization Congress 2009 is that we finally accept session submissions from anybody in the industry. No more sponsored sessions only.

If you are an independent professional or a solution provider that wants to unleash some deep knowledge on stage about the topics above, then you are welcome.
We are looking for unbiased speakers that want to present breakthrough sessions through one the following formats:

• Best practices
• Case history
• Research analysis
• Designing
• Implementing
• Introduction / Overview

We’ll accept submissions until the end of December 2008.

In the first week of January the submitted sessions will be published on virtualization.info and the audience will be able to vote for ones that they like the most.

Submit your sessions here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm

There’s no doubt that hardware virtualization has a chance to significantly reduce the power and cooling usage in most companies thanks to remarkable server consolidation ratios. But some vendors are trying to use automation to make the IT greener (as marketing people love to say).

Virtual Iron and VMware now offer the capability to consolidate into a single server the virtual machines served across a bunch of virtualization hosts.
The VMs are live migrated and the empty virtualization hosts are powered off until there is an actual need for them.

While this sounds a great thing it may have some side effects that few companies are considering.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, is wondering if this dynamic power management has a concrete impact on the hardware mean time between failure (MTBF).

Interesting enough the major IHVs that he contacted didn’t perform any test to find out.

The ClearCube spin-off VDIwork announced an upcoming extension of its connection broker that promises to introduce the much wanted offline VDI (sometimes dubbed mobile VDI) capability.

Expected for the end of this quarter, VDIwork2Go will allow the mobile workforce to check-out the hosted virtual desktop, run a local copy on the laptop of choice (through VMware Player) and leave the network.
Once the user checks-in again, the changes made inside the local VM will be synchronized back to the virtual desktop infrastructure.

The VDI approach is certainly something that many customers are evaluating these days but the implementation still implies some major challenges. This is one of them and many vendors are working to solve it so to boost the confidence in the solution.

VMware is working to offer offline VDI as well: the company previewed the technology for the first time at VMworld Europe 2008 in February, and then formally announced it as a feature of the upcoming VMware View.

Just few months after the first release, Microsoft is back with its patch management solution for offline virtual machines.

As virtualization professionals and security expert know, one area where virtualization can become a security issue instead of a security enabler is the operating system patching.
VM library templates and offline virtual machines in production may skip the patching process in those companies without a strict operational framework.
This happens also in the physical world, but inside a virtual infrastructure an administrator can clone tens or thousands of virtual machines in minutes, making the offline server patching a much bigger issue.

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Recently both Microsoft and VMware released their papers about running SQL Server in a virtual machine for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads:

• Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment – Best Practices and Performance Considerations
  Microsoft – 37 pages
• Benchmarking Microsoft SQL Server Using VMware ESX Server 3.5
  VMware – 16 pages

Microsoft, that is supposed to know its own product better than anybody else concludes:

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In September 2007 VMware acquired one of the few companies busy in the virtual infrastructure orchestration market: Dunes Technologies.

After more than one year, the company has yet to unveil how Dunes products will be integrated into VMware Infrastructure, but at least we now know where a part of the knowledge is going: Dan Mitchell, former Technical Director of Dunes left VMware to join the startup DynamicOps in June 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage here). 

DynamicOps is busy in the VM lifecycle management segment and Mitchell certainly has some experience to share because of the powerful VS-O orchestration framework that Dunes developed in the last five years.

Performing a virtual machine live migration across different vendors’ CPUs is probably one of the most wanted feature for several customers that can’t just replace their entire hardware set every time that a new generation of CPUs hits the market.

The topic is so hot that a recent demonstration of its feasibility performed by AMD in collaboration with Red Had immediately became a point of discussion.

VMware (and its investor Intel) commented the effort saying that a cross-CPUs live migration is a too risky operation for the stability of the virtualized workloads.

True or not the virtualization professionals that decide to take the risk may achieve the goal through the so called CPU masking technique.

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Just five days ago Symantec went under fire for its supporting policy about VMware VMotion.

Basically the company refused to support two of its core products in a VMware environment where VMotion was used because some of its customers reported several kind of problems.

Thanks to the power of the blogosphere, to the massive negative PR, or more likely to the powerful influence that VMware can exercise, Symantec immediately changed the offending knowledge base article, taking the responsibility of any odd behavior for its products after a VMotion:

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At its PDC 2008 Conference Microsoft hinted at a list of features expected with Hyper-V 2.0.
The second version of the hypervisor should appear in 2010, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (even if many rumors of these days suggest that the OS may arrive a little earlier than the virtualization platform).

Now Microsoft formalizes the list of features through a whitepaper: the Windows Server 2008 R2 Reviewers Guide.

Additionally, the document exposes the upcoming strategy about VDI, unveiled just few days ago:

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