History

By now every virtualization.info reader knows that VMware and Citrix are completely focused on competing in the VDI space rather than on “simple” server consolidation.
For now most of the discussion is mostly around their connection brokers (and their remote desktop protocols), but in a matter of months it will be extended to their application virtualizations solutions and their upcoming client hypervisors.

Now, a question: What is one of the most viewed threads on the VMware VMTN forums dedicated to the connection broker View?

Answer: A thread titled “What made you chose VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop”, which was started at the end of April and so far collected almost 3,000 views.

The thread is full of interesting comments. Of course it’s impossible to say if all of them come from real customers. For sure many come from well-known VMware users.
Also, not every comment, even the genuine ones, reports correct information. Nonetheless the sum of them contributes to clarify the customers sentiment about both products, and most of all about VDI as a technology.

Some of the things they said so far are well worth a mention here and should be considered along with the architectural reference blueprints that both VMware and Citrix released so far (our emphasis):

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Last week Microsoft and Red Hat announced the certification of their operating systems, Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), on each other virtualization platforms, Hyper-V and KVM.

It is a major announcement in many ways.

First of all, customers that have Windows/Linux mixed environments finally have a decent choice. 
Side by side with Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, now Hyper-V (both R1 and R2) supports RHEL 5.2, 5.3 and the new 5.4.

More importantly, Microsoft and Red Hat validated the use of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 as guest operating system on the KVM implementation that comes with RHEL 5.4.

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In 2007, when Citrix, one of Microsoft’s strongest allies, acquired XenSource, a startup whose success depends on an open source product (the Xen hypervisor), nobody really believed the move would benefit the community in any way.

The major concerns were that, over time, Citrix would abandon the development of Xen to focus on a proprietary hypervisor, that Citrix could try to influence the Xen development to provide an indirect advantage to Microsoft and/or that Citrix could use its influence on the Xen project to damage all the competitors that were relying on it (at that time Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Oracle).

After the XenSource acquisition, some major vendors (Red Hat and IBM for example) and individual contributors lost interest in the Xen project and started to focus on KVM (IBM effort, Red Hat effort). Possibly because of this relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, possibly because Citrix has never been an open source champion.
Of course VMware did all its best to facilitate the exodus from the Xen project.

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At the end of September Microsoft launched the public beta program for Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 (codename Zinger).

DPM 2010 beta introduces support for Hyper-V R2 (both the Windows edition and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server edition).

More importantly, the product finally introduces the capability to backup virtual machines running on the Windows Server 2008 Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs), a technology that is used to perform the VMs live migration with Hyper-V R2.
At the moment virtualization.info is not aware of any disaster recovery product that works at the host level (rather than at the SAN level), that is in GA, and that is officially certified by Microsoft to perform such operation (if any different let us know in the comments and we’ll update this article). 
Without DPM 2010, and similar 3rd party solutions, the only way to backup Hyper-V virtual machines in CSVs is by running the backup agent inside the guest operating systems.

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During the summer Quest lost both founders of its Provision Networks subsidiary, as confirmed by CRN.

Paul Ghostine (former CEO) and Peter Ghostine (former CTO) sold Provision Networks to Quest in November 2007.
The leadership of the VDI division is now in the hands of Simon Pearce, who worked at Quest for 12 years as Vice Presidents in charge for the business in Western Europe.

Meanwhile the Ghostine brothers already founded a new company called cloudWORX where, according to their LinkedIn profiles, they keep the positions of CEO and CTO.
Easy to guess the company, still in stealth mode, is focused on cloud computing (not clear which architecture anyway, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS).

Provision Networks is one of the very few companies that virtualization.info rated as Outperforming in its Virtualization Industry Radar. Whatever these guys are going to do we’ll keep a close eye on it.

At the end of August, Sybex published the first book authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead at ePlus Technology, and one of the most popular experts in the virtualization community.
His must-read website has been named Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info and he even presented as speaker at our own Virtualization Congress 2009.

Scott’s book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4, is a generous 700-pages tome that gives a lot about planning, installing and configuring the newest VMware virtualization platform.

One of the biggest challenges in writing a technical book about a product like this one, is writing something that can complement the official documentation and that is worth reading. And it may be a real hard challenge when the product documentation is as rich and extensive as the VMware’s one. 
This book accomplished the task by including tangible proofs of the Scott’s first hand experience in many chapters (mostly the ones about planning).
It’s not an architectural reference guide, it’s not meant to be, but it still provides guidance.

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Just before the launch of XenDesktop 4.0, Citrix released a 42-pages reference architecture on how to build a VDI environment for 10,000 seats with the following characteristics:

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Over the last few months virtualization.info tracked a growing number of leaders that are leaving VMware and are being replaced by seasoned executives coming from Microsoft, Borland, Oracle, IBM and CA.
But the reality is that, despite our effort, the number of departures we tracked is just a fraction of the real number. We simply can’t keep up the pace at the current rate.

This silent turnover is now further accelerating and morphing into a massive re-organization.

A number of trusted sources informed virtualization.info that VMware recently laid off up to 40 people in the IT department and no less than 65 senior engineers in the Global Support Services (GSS).

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After an endless saga started in 2005, Parallels is finally ready to ship its bare-metal hypervisor: Parallels Server 4.5 Bare Metal.

Compared to the hosted version of Parallels Server, launched in June 2008, this edition (which jumps from version 1.0 to 4.5) actually installs on bare metal like competing hypervisors VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM Server.

The hypervisor architecture is interesting and created a lot of confusion so far, to us and to other people that compare it to others type-1 VMM platforms:

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Yesterday Citrix announced the forthcoming release of XenDesktop 4.0, which will be available November 16.

The Citrix answer to the upcoming VMware View 4.0 (and its software version of Teradici PCoIP protocol) is more aggressive than ever.

First of all, the XenDesktop 4.0 Enterprise and Platinum editions are going to include a full, unrestricted edition of XenApp.
The new strategy at Citrix, called FlexCast, is to make no distinction between a desktop deployed on a virtual machine (what we call today VDI), one on a bare metal machine, or one served by a terminal services farm.
XenDesktop plus XenApp are going to allow remote access to all these desktops or to some of their applications, along with application and OS streaming where applicable.

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