Virtualization

If you were at I-Forum or Citrix App Delivery Expo you would know that VMWare and Citrix have their eyes on this merging market space. Citrix has Xen for virtualization and it's cheap compared to VMWare plus I think Citrix has the more developed product portfolio for this sort of solution. The downside is most customers have an investment with VMWare.


As for disk streaming it allows you to run many machines off of one image without having a local image on disk. The system boots up but streams the portion of the disk image it needs to run. Changes are cached much like how SoftGrid would deliver a virtual application. Ardence can support variations of the master image by looking at the client MAC address then overlay the personalization data over the image that is sent. Ardence also uses a network protocol optimized for this sort of data transfer so it is much more efficient than something like ISCSI. The beauty of disk streaming is that if the machine has a software issue you can discard the cache of what has been changed and go back to a known good state. I think if you go with disk streaming you should be using virtual applications and have a non-local user profile to see the full value of the solution but maybe you don't really need virtual apps because all the systems don't need to be all that different. Here is some recommended reading:

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Using-Ardence-Disk-Streaming-with-Citrix-Servers

I went to a session last week. The idea with VDI and ACE is ace is the framework to take your VMs on the road and put security around them so the information is safe as well as what this VM can connect to from a network standpoint. You can take that a step further and check out your VDI VM and take it with you on the road. I see some value in ACE but you still have to remember that the host PC will need the resources to run the VM.

There were some interesting bits in the ROI side for VDI that might make it suitable for larger implementations such as less overall hardware cost, lower overall power consumption and the ability to reduce deployment costs such as the movement of PCs from one office to another. What I am finding cool is disk streaming and VDI because then you can further cut down the disk requirements of your VDI deployment. Citrix bought a solution, VMWare has one that hasn't been released and I just found out Provision Networks is looking at a solution. I think disk streaming is really cool if you lay down your virtual applications on top of it then you really cut down the support costs of the platform because troubleshooting should get down to resetting the virtual app, if that fails reset the OS to a known good state via reboot and if that fails either you have a nice issue or the user profile might need to be reset.

Let's assume for a second that I don't know what "disk streaming" is, because I don't. Could you please explain?

Also do you see VDI getting any traction from what you saw last week?