virtualization.info Editors

Citrix yesterday announced the availability of the tech preview of Excalibur .

Excalibur is part of project Avalon and provides one install, one architecture and one console for both Citrix’s Desktop and Application virtualization platform XenApp and Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution XenDesktop. Avalon covers the integration of several products which were developed and acquired by Citrix in the last couple of years and its intention is to create a platform to deliver desktops and applications as cloud services as announced in May during Citrix annual Synergy conference by Mark Templeton.

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Dell has released a paper titled:"Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 5.1 on VMware vSphere 5.0 U1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage". The paper which contains 51 pages and describes best practices to design, size and deploy Dell EqualLogic storage used by the VMware hypervisor platform vSphere running VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution VMware View.

The primary objectives of the tests conducted for this paper were:

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Today Microsoft announced the release of version 1.0 of its User Environment Management (UEM) solution User Experience Virtualization, also known as UE-V. UE-V together with App-V 5.0 was first announced a public beta in April this year.

Up until now Microsoft’s solution for user environment management was called User Profile Virtualization, which was actually a combination of Roaming Profiles and Folder redirection. This solution isn’t very suitable though in environments where users access traditional desktops, terminal servers, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and other devices using the same account. Therefore Microsoft partners like Citrix, Appsense, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Quest, Res Software and others filled in this gap by providing UEM solutions. Most of them still have far more superior features compared to UE-V, but many customers can be satisfied with the UE-V solution.

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Microsoft today announced the release of version 5.0 of its Application Virtualization Solution, also known as App-V. App-V 5.0 together with UE-V was first announced a public beta in April this year.

App-V is the product which Microsoft acquired in 2006 after taking over Softricity which provided the product Softgrid.

App-V 5.0 provides deeper platform integration, which allows applications to work more like traditional installed applications, the so called Dynamic Suite Composition which allowed 2 or more Virtual Applications to interact with each other is now called Connection Groups.

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IBM has released a paper titled: "IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure: IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business on IBM Flex System". The paper, which IBM calls a redbook contains 15 pages and describes a Refrence Architecture using the VERDE solution from Virtual Bridges running on top of the IBM Flex System blade enclosure.

VMs are hosted on top of the VERDE VDI hypervisor, which is based on KVM. Clients access the architecture using the RDP, SPICE or NX protocol.

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Citrix has announced that at the end of this year it will release Project Accelerator, a new version of what used to be called the Desktop Tranformation Accelerator. Project Accelerator is now available as a beta.

Project Accelerator will provide guidance on Assessing, Designing and Deploying with improved Hardware Sizing functionality. Besides recommendations about sizing, the tool will also provide recommendations about which FlexCast model to deploy.

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HP has released a paper titled: HP Reference Architecture for Client Virtualization. The paper, which contains 43 pages describes how to setup Citrix XenDesktop on top of VMware vSphere 5 running on top of HP Hardware and using HP Storage. The document focuses on leveraging the Citrix Flexcast delivery technology of hosted or streamed desktops.

The reference architecture was tested using Login Virtual Session Indexer(VSE) version 3.5. The server under test was an HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 processors, Hyper-Threading was on, BIOS settings were for high performance, and 256 GB RAM. The server was configured with direct-attached storage using the HP Smart Array P721m controller and the HP D2700 Storage enclosure. A P721m was placed in the server, and using the SAS manager within the Onboard Administrator, 6 physicals drives of the D2700 are assigned to the blade server. The ACU (Array Configuration Utility) was used to set the drives in a RAID10 configuration and the drives are configured in the vSphere server as an additional data store to hold the PVS write cache files.

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On October 24 Citrix announced its financial results for third quarter of fiscal 2012, ended September 30, 2012.

Citrix has announced the availability of a Technology Preview for XenClient 4.5, the next version of its Client Hypervisor and the release of XenClient XT 3 a version of XenClient which supports advanced levels of security and isolation. Version 4.5 of XenClient will be the follow-up of version 4.1 which was released in July this year and is expected to be released in December this year, and XenClient XT 3 will be the follow-up of version 2.1 released in October 2011.

The XenClient 4.5 features builds further after the technology integration of the NxTop client hypervisor which Citrix integrated after the acquisition of Virtual Computer in May this year.

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HP has released a paper titled:"Microsoft SC-VMM 2012 and HP 3PAR best practices and reference architecture". The paper which contains 47 pages describes the use of System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to discover and manage HP 3PAR Storage using the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) management protocol.

Microsoft Partners who want their array and SMI-S provider to be supported by VMM, need to complete validation using a test harness and publish a best-practice document that captures the configuration of VMM, storage array, and SMI-S provider. This paper is HPs validation of the solution and also captures best practices, software and hardware configuration, limitations, and known issues and is intended for HP 3PAR customers who want to start using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager.

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