Robin Wauters

VMware Releases VMware View 3 For Virtual Desktop Environments

December 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

VMware today announced the general availability of VMware View 3. With VMware View 3, IT organizations can “decouple” a desktop from specific physical devices or locations to create a personalized view of a user’s desktop, applications, and data – called “myView” – that is securely accessible from almost any device, at any time. By hosting these virtual desktop images in the datacenter using the industry-leading virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware View 3 enables IT personnel to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops simply, securely, and with substantially lower operating costs.

VMware View 3 is a major step in VMware’s vClient Initiative, announced at VMworld 2008 in September, to solve the “desktop dilemma.” As described by VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz, the desktop dilemma is the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. Thick clients, or fully loaded PCs, give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment, but are a management nightmare because applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually.

Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call center staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment. VMware View 3 solves this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches – delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter.

VMware View 3 is a family of products available in two editions:

VMware View 3, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition and VMware View Manager 3, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access.
VMware View 3, Premier Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp for agentless application virtualization and VMware View Composer, a new product that enables IT staff to create multiple virtual desktops from a single image, increasing the speed of provisioning desktops and reducing storage requirements.

With the following new products and technologies, VMware View 3 is the only enterprise-class solution that delivers simple, end-to-end management of virtual desktops and virtual applications from the datacenter to the client:

VMware View Composer is a new product that uses Linked Clone technology to create virtual desktops rapidly from a master image while consuming up to 70 percent less storage space. Automated image preparation and provisioning take only seconds and are centrally controlled by View Manager. In addition, View Composer can reduce management costs by enabling IT to update thousands of individual virtual desktops by simply updating the master image with a patch or application update and then applying the changes to each desktop cloned from the master image. View Composer provides this one-to-many image updating while preserving user data, settings, and preferences so patching is seamless to end users.
VMware ThinApp is bundled with VMware View 3 to enable simplified application packaging and deployment to a virtual desktop environment. ThinApp and View Composer work together to provide streamlined virtual desktop image creation and updating. ThinApp enables applications to run independently of the host operating system version or patch level. This simplifies updating and patching applications, and provides additional storage reduction for virtual desktops by centralizing and compressing applications. ThinApp’s unique architecture does not require an agent on the user’s desktop, a major advantage compared to other techniques for virtualization applications.
Offline Desktop, an experimental feature, provides the flexibility to intelligently and securely move virtual desktops between the datacenter and a local laptop or desktop, increasing user productivity while providing secure mobility. Users can “check out” a virtual desktop onto an ordinary PC, such as a laptop, run the virtual desktop locally and then check it back in to the datacenter. Offline Desktop allows a user to keep using his virtual desktop when no network is available, or simply to take advantage of local resources for the best virtual desktop user experience available.
Unified Access, a new feature of VMware View Manager 3, provides desktop administrators with a single management platform for multiple types of sessions. VMware View Manager 3 connects to desktop environments hosted on VMware Infrastructure, or user sessions running on Windows Terminal Servers or even physical PCs such as a blade PC. Individuals have a single point of access to seamlessly connect to their desktop environment, while administrators have a single point of administration.
Virtual Printing provides end users the ability to print to any local or network printer without installing specific printer drivers. Virtual Printing technology provides compression for print jobs and auto detection of local printers from the client. This eliminates printer driver issues and the need for printer configuration. End users get high quality printing with enhanced performance across the WAN.
Multimedia Redirection improves the user experience with rich multimedia playback capabilities. The multimedia processing tasks are intelligently redirected from the server to the end user device where the multimedia stream is decoded, taking advantage of the local processing power.

VMware View 3 is available immediately through VMware sales and the company’s extensive network of OEM partners and more than 20,000 channel partners. VMware View 3 Enterprise Edition is priced at $150 per concurrent connection and the VMware View 3 Premier Edition is priced at $250 per concurrent connection.

Fujitsu Releases Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition

December 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced the North American availability of Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition (RCVE), software that provides enterprise data centers and cloud computing providers with improved management control, rapid reconfiguration capabilities, and fully automated failover for both physical and virtualized blade servers.

Key features include:

— Recovery for high availability – RCVE is more affordable than clustering – enterprises can choose the same lower cost, highly available, highly reliable Fujitsu PRIMERGY(R) blade servers for use in their physical and virtual environments. A single spare can be shared between the two, with RCVE working in concert with VMWare’s VMotion(TM).

— Uniform interface – The single management view of physical and virtual environments simplifies system administration and reduces the number of errors; hierarchical system views help pinpoint hardware problems, enabling faster recovery and minimizing service disruptions.

— I/O virtualization – Leveraging embedded virtualization features in Fujitsu PRIMERGY blades, the software automates SAN reconfiguration when switching over servers, solving a common virtualization recovery complaint. The feature works with nearly all market-leading SAN storage systems.

— Fast provisioning – New blades can be added or recovered faster and automatically, increasing hardware availability and service levels while lowering administration costs.

— Backup and restore capabilities – RCVE increases ease of back-up and recovery for both virtualized and native environments through unified views and storage of three “golden image” versions.

The Fujitsu RCVE software is available now. Pricing starts at $7,600 per PRIMERGY chassis, including management software and agent software for either Windows or Linux blades.

Neptuny Releases Caplan 3.0, Capacity Management Solution

December 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Neptuny today launched Caplan 3.0, a business-aware Capacity Management solution for large data centres and networks. The new version of Caplan facilitates successful implementation of virtualization and consolidation initiatives as well as the production of future scenarios to enable the alignment between IT resources and business initiatives.

Rationalizing IT resources while still being able to support the business is imperative for all corporations. Also, with a slumping economy it becomes even more important to optimize the use of resources and to reduce operating and capital costs. The new version of Caplan 3.0 reduces overcapacity by its ability to determine the amount of capacity required at any given time leading to a more cost effective and greener IT department. Caplan 3.0 can also predict capacity shortages, thereby reducing the likelihood of any performance or capacity-related incidents as well as ensuring that the minimum capacity required to keep the business running is available in the event of any IT failure.

Caplan™3.0 can be leveraged for virtualized environments as well. The latest release of Caplan v3.0 now supports several virtualization technologies including VMware ESX Server, AIX Micro partitions, HP nPartition/vPartition, Solaris Dynamic System Domains, and MS Virtual Server 2005. For all these technologies, Caplan has the ability to identify systems to be consolidated and to safely perform consolidation and virtualization initiatives as it can simulate both physical consolidation and virtualization. Once initiatives have been undertaken Caplan will automatically monitor the infrastructure behaviour to notify whether its behaviour does not differ from detected baseline. Therefore, Caplan™can help customers to reduce risks involved in overloading the virtualized infrastructure in their data centres.

Additionally, Caplan 3.0 provides specific features enabling Capacity Management to be easily integrated with ITSM tools and workflow platforms, thus allowing external third-party application to leverage Caplan services (via SOAP Web Services and HTTP/XML calls) and to asynchronously push data into Caplan Capacity Database (via J2EE JMS Messages). This allows Caplan to promote an improved IT culture through the introduction of a structured capacity management process that complies with ITIL v3 best practices regarding Capacity Management.

HP Takes Next Step To Support Future Growth

December 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HP today outlined the results of its three-year IT transformation and laid out the company’s IT strategy to support future growth for fiscal year 2009 and beyond.

As a result of the effort, HP has reduced its IT operating costs by approximately half; provided more reliable information for executives to make better business decisions; and, established a more simplified and dependable IT infrastructure that provides improved business continuity and supports the company’s future growth.

The initiative began shortly after Mott joined HP in July 2005. Starting in fiscal year 2009, the transformation will lower IT costs by more than $1 billion per year from fiscal year 2005 levels. This cost reduction is even more impressive considering HP added more than $25 billion in revenue during the three years since the transformation began.

The transformation focused on five major initiatives: next-generation global data centers, portfolio management, workforce effectiveness, building a world-class technology organization and a true enterprise data warehouse. Through aligning its entire global organization on these five initiatives, HP has reduced complexity and added significant capability and quality of service.

The HP IT organization now operates under a strategic framework in which teams are deployed to deliver more business innovation through a smaller number of global and common applications. These applications are running in the next-generation data centers, where the technology is constantly refreshed in modular-designed white space.

By creating global and common applications, HP IT is able to focus on new capabilities and devote 80 percent of IT employees to innovation that is aligned with business strategies and future growth opportunities.

DataCore And Promark Set Up A Distribution Partnership

December 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore Software and Promark Technology today announced a new distribution relationship under which Promark Technology will distribute DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions in the United States.

DataCore storage virtualization software removes physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that frequently slow down, interrupt or endanger computer operations – making it practical for organizations large and small to get the fullest utilization, highest availability and fastest performance from their disk storage assets by consolidating and automating essential data protection measures and storage management practices.

Ideally suited for VMware and other virtual server customers, DataCore is unique in providing true high-availability, auto-failover/failback business continuity and DR solutions that are perfect for SMB customers, but perform to meet the needs of enterprise customers – at prices starting under $10,000.

DataCore Software is manufacturer-independent software that runs on any industry standard server or virtual server. It is certified on all the major virtual server platforms, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, and supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections. As a result, DataCore provides a persistent solution that survives hardware obsolescence and under DataCore’s unique “Carry-forward” Value Protection Program is fully upgradeable without penalty.

Ulteo Delivers Open Source Virtual Desktop Solution

December 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Ulteo announced today that they were releasing the first installable version of their Open Virtual Desktop solution for enterprises. Delivering faster deployment times and ease of management for the IT department, this first release can be integrated easily into an existing professional Linux or Windows IT environment. The solution can be up and running in a few minutes, delivering rich desktop applications to corporate users.

Ulteo enters the corporate market as a pure Open Source player, and leverages the experience it acquired during the past two years with virtualization products & services that were previously offered on their own servers.

The Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop is a great solution for corporations who want to reduce the Total Costs of Ownership of the end user desktop, a cost that cripples IT budgets. Moreover, the Ulteo open source business model remove the typical upfront licence fee and replace it with a much more affordable subscription support plan instead.

Ulteo’s solution has been designed with a radical approach: in particular, no installation is needed on the Desktop client, and nothing has to be replaced or modified in the existing infrastructure.

Advanced features include a full administration console, desktop sharing, application server replication and many others. The product has already served more than 140,000 desktop sessions over the last few months.

We’ll have a closer look at the Ulteo platform soon!