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Liquidware Labs Introduces Stratusphere 4.2

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Liquidware Labs recently announced the availability of Stratusphere 4.2, a software solution delivering focused visibility into network, user, application, and desktop activity dramatically reducing the technical and financial risks associated with migrating to VDI.

Adding Stratusphere to your environment provides physical and virtual desktop visibility, much like Layer 7 deep packet inspection, without the overhead, cost and complexity – while being easily deployed as an open format virtual appliance. The solution is compatible with all leading VDI platforms including those from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Stratusphere and Connector ID deliver network, user and, application visibility inside desktops, networks, and storage systems. Patented technology automatically inventories and tracks network connections, users, applications and devices, gathering critical metrics for assessment and diagnostics. Fingerprints placed into the header of each TCP/IP packet allow measurement of the network and application response times associated with each user and desktop for deep visibility, including RDP, ICA, PCoIP and other VDI streaming protocols. Within minutes Stratusphere’s patented process, combined with service level policies, delivers real-time visibility in a virtual desktop and datacenter environment and begins to deliver user experience focused metrics for physical machines, virtual machines and related infrastructure and endpoints.

The key features of Stratusphere include:

  • VDI and Physical Machine, Network, Infrastructure, and Application Assessments – move swiftly from proof of concept to production – while ensuring end user experience
  • User Tracking and Problem Solving – once virtualized identify users experiencing or contributing to unexplained systems slow down
  • Virtual Application Compatibility – assess application activity and profile application resource footprint
  • Support Physical Desktops and Servers – provides application and user visibility and detailed configuration information from the desktop to the SAN
  • ART/NRT Interdependency Maps – gain visibility into application response times (ART) and network response times (NRT), application network traffic, Resources Provisioned vs. Resources Consumed – visibility to fine tune your TCO and ROI
  • Proactive Trending and Capacity Planning – allowing projects to be successfully extended to scale
  • VDI FIT and VDI UX (User Experience) Ratings – identify which users should be considered for VDI and ensure a consistent and acceptable desktop SLA

Stratusphere is available now from a select group of virtualization partners and is priced at $49 per user. A desktop enterprise licensing agreement is available.

Industry Moves: IT Veteran Don Bules Appointed CEO At Unidesk

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Virtual desktop management software maker Unidesk today announced that Don Bulens has joined the company as President and CEO.

Bulens is known for building and scaling IT infrastructure companies, as demonstrated most recently at EqualLogic, where he led the company to success in the networked data storage market and its $1.4 billion acquisition by Dell, and, earlier, at Lotus, where his channel development leadership was instrumental in the success of Lotus Notes. Bulens’ expertise in guiding companies and bringing transformational products to the global market is ideally suited for Unidesk as it begins to build its leadership position in the desktop virtualization and PC life cycle management software categories.

Bulens fortifies an executive team that has an impressive track record of delivering innovative IT infrastructure management solutions. His appointment enables Unidesk Founder Chris Midgley, who had been the company’s acting CEO, to focus full-time on his CTO role leading the company’s technical strategy and product vision. Bulens has also joined Midgley on Unidesk’s Board of Directors.

Bulens was most recently President and CEO of EqualLogic, provider of networked data storage systems that simplify how IT organizations store and protect information. Under his leadership, EqualLogic achieved stellar growth, doubling revenue each year and achieving the second largest market share in the fastest growing segment of the storage industry. In November 2007, while in the final stages of filing for an IPO, EqualLogic was acquired by Dell.

Bulens arrived at EqualLogic with extensive experience in early-stage and industry-leading companies. He was CEO of Trellix, a leading provider of web site publishing tools, through its sale to Interland, the largest provider of web hosting for small businesses. Earlier, at Lotus, Bulens led the creation of the channel and developer community that contributed to the extraordinary market growth of Lotus Notes.

Leostream Pushes Connection Broker 6.0

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Leostream announced late last week a new version of its vendor-neutral connection broker. The Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 features native support for Citrix XenServer, along with additional highlights including extended monitor support, an enhanced Web interface, more powerful USB device management and reporting capabilities.

The Leostream Connection Broker, which is delivered as a virtual appliance, is the software management layer that ties desktop images in the data center to users’ thin client, laptop, desktop or Web interfaces. With it, enterprises can provide end-users with a virtual desktop experience equal or superior to that of traditional desktops. End-users can access their virtual desktop from any machine, no matter where they are located, due to the Connection Broker’s ability to direct users to their own virtual desktop image.

For IT, the Leostream Connection Broker allows managers to maximize the virtualization of existing resources by easily integrating an array of clients, back-end systems and viewers. In addition, management can rest assured that its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is secure. The Leostream Connection Broker integrates with existing authentication and security protocols without changes, providing a rich set of policies for exact implementation of business rules for users and machines.

With its new version, the Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 offers native support for Citrix XenServer, easily installed as a virtual appliance on Citrix XenServer 5. As a result, enterprises can now create a VDI entirely on XenServer. This new capability builds on Leostream’s previous Citrix offerings. This includes Leostream’s long-standing Citrix Ready verified support for XenServer Centers and the more recent addition of XenApp Integration for delivering desktops and applications side-by-side. With Leostream, organizations can deliver Citrix desktops simultaneously with other virtual, physical or bladed desktops or Terminal Server sessions, create pools of Citrix desktops or applications for delivery to different groups of users, and assign desktop and application pools based on end-user policy and location.

The Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 also provides extended monitor support. Virtual desktops can be split or spanned across multiple screens with no degradation of performance. This enables IT to provide virtual desktops to end-users accustomed to multiple monitors.

Additional enhancements in the Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 include:

  • More Powerful USB Device Management: End-users can attach and employ USB devices on virtual desktops with the same ease-of-use as physical desktops, while IT management has complete visibility and control over which USB devices are permitted;
  • Enhanced Reporting: IT can now monitor resource usage; and
  • New Integration with Syslog Servers: New integration features allow for more effective compliance and auditing.

Former Vizioncore CEO David Bieneman Is Back With A New Startup

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Founder and former CEO of Vizioncore, David Bieneman, is back after selling the company he started to Quest Software in January 2008. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now the CEO of a startup called Liquidware Labs.

Alessandro guesses the company will be doing something in the desktop virtualization sphere:

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity. Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?

Time will tell.

Sun Microsystems Releases Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3, which provides new enhancements and features to help companies maximize their IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments. Sun VDI Software 3 offers VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems.

The open architecture of Sun VDI Software 3 now gives users access to a broader choice of client devices and virtualization hosts — increasing flexibility, management efficiency and data security. Sun VDI Software 3 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded here.

Sun VDI Software 3 represents a seamless solution, leveraging core open source technologies including Sun’s Open Storage, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL. With Sun VDI Software 3, customers can deploy a number of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, and access these operating systems from a variety of client devices — such as traditional PCs or Macs, energy-efficient Sun Ray thin clients, or thin clients from other vendors. In addition, to host virtual desktop environments, IT architects can opt to use the improved integration with VMware Infrastructure, leverage Sun built-in virtualization, or use a mixture of the two.

Sun VDI Software 3 has exceptional management capabilities, resulting in lower equipment costs, less energy consumption, reduced system cooling requirements, simplified system administration and reduced e-waste. Since desktops are centrally hosted, only the display is sent to the client device; critical data never leaves the corporate network and can be managed and backed up by IT. Moreover, built-in Sun Ray technology support takes advantage of the excellent performance and inherent security features of Sun Ray thin clients, which contain no resident operating system or applications — making them virtually immune to client-side viruses.

Sun VDI Software 3 is available today and offers subscription-based pricing starting from $40 per user/per year, as a discounted price off the U.S. list price for pre-pay and multi-year purchases.

Here Comes Citrix XenDesktop 3

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Citrix Systems today announced Citrix XenDesktop 3, the newest release of its desktop virtualization solution. XenDesktop 3, a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, incorporates several of the company’s new Citrix HDX technologies, giving virtual desktop users a richer “high-definition” experience with enhanced support for multimedia, audio and video.

XenDesktop 3 also dramatically improves scalability, hosting twice as many virtual desktops per server as previous versions. And with version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first product on the market to deliver Microsoft Windows desktops from a common set of centrally managed images that can be run either in the datacenter (hosted), or directly on a PC or thin client device (local). This new capability gives IT organizations far more flexibility, reducing desktop management costs by making efficient use of distributed processing power across both servers and end point devices.

XenDesktop 3 includes several enhancements that dramatically improve virtual machine density and efficiency in the datacenter, allowing customers to host up to twice as many hosted virtual desktops per server as previous versions.  These new optimizations cut server acquisition costs in half and dramatically reduce ongoing management and power consumption costs, allowing significantly larger deployments than before at no additional cost.

With version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first solution on the market to deliver both hosted virtual desktops and local streamed desktops from a single image store, leveraging the same delivery infrastructure. Most virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions on the market offer only hosted virtual desktops, in which each desktop runs inside a virtual machine in the datacenter.

Adding support for local streamed desktops lets XenDesktop administrators stream desktops from the same golden master images, and execute them locally on any network-connected endpoint capable of running a desktop operating system. This powerful combination adds significant flexibility and cost savings, allowing IT to centrally manage desktops for office workers and run them wherever it makes the most sense, leveraging the distributed processing power of both servers and endpoint devices.

XenDesktop 3 also includes a variety of new features to support simpler management, easier user personalization and enhanced security. Most significant among these new features is fully integrated user profile management, making it far easier for IT to provide a consistent, personalized experience for each unique user every time they log in. Version 3 also includes broad support for smart card security authentication systems which are widely adopted throughout government, financial services and healthcare organizations.  XenDesktop not only enables this added level of security for gaining general access to the desktop environment, it also ensures that this information is seamlessly and transparently passed through to individual applications within each virtual desktop.

Citrix XenDesktop 3 will be generally available from authorized Citrix partners in February 2009, and from the Citrix website at http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop. Suggested retail pricing begins at $75 per concurrent user.