Virtualisointi EQU virtualization

I just got spam, err, marketing e-mail from Citrix (apparently I accidently signed up for something in somewhere at some point) which had an interestingly sounding title: “5 Features VMware Can’t Deliver”.

It says (those?) five things in the body of email and urges to download something called “VDI Comparison Kit”, which evidently talks about these issues in more details.

Well, here are the five things mentioned in the email:

* 10X lower bandwidth requirement for LAN or WAN
* Unmatched user experience on any device
* Unique performance monitoring of desktops
* Scalable, single image management
* Lowest TCO with both hosted and streamed desktops

While I haven’t (yet) read about the explanations behind these claims and thus cannot comment on their validity, I can only say that it would be interesting if Citrix would compare their solution to others as well (like Quest vWorkspace); I bet that at least some of the things mentioned do not hold up water (TCO comes to mind as a first thing, knowing general level of Citrix pricing) in that comparison.. The 10X bandwidth claim also sound quite incredible as a blanket statement.

Another interesting point is that Citrix openly compares themselves with the competitor, this is something that tech companies generally do not seem to do. Yes, they usually have internal/with restricted distribution documents for that purpose but not so often in the public.

Well, maybe I have to download the kit and see what sort of adjusted truths I can find from there. As we all very well know, VDI is still far from being cost-effective solution [as centralization technology] so it’ll be interesting to see how they spin the story this time.

The official blog for vWorkspace published an article over a year ago about how to publish automatic farm settings to vWorkspace client(s) via config.xml file, but it only concerned the usage of HTTP(S) protocol.

While this protocol is surely an usable one, and perhaps most common as well in normal circumstances, I was recently faced with a situation while doing PoC wherein no web servers were readily available and we had to be able to assign correct farm settings to the client regardless of who was logging on to workstation. After thinking a while, it occurred to me that from the AppPortal GUI you are able to download farm settings with file protocol, but this method wasn’t documented in the blog article or in the official documentation when it comes to using AutoConnectURL registry setting.

Hence I had to do little bit experimentation myself and came across this syntax which seems to enable automatic loading from the file-location, instead of more familiar HTTP:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Provision Networks\Provision-IT Client]
“AutoConnectURL”=”file://\\\\servername\\share\\”

Note that the backslashes are doubled in this regedit export, so the “human readable” form is: file://\\servername\share\

Hopefully this helps others in similar situation as I was facing!

Quest just recently released new 6.2 version upgrade to their vWorkspace product suite.

New version adds some more rapid deployment of VDI instances, but only when using VMware as virtualization platform and NetApp FlexClone as a storage. Hopefully similiar features will start appearing in Hyper-V’s side of the fence, which is still little bit lacking behind VMware in features being offered/supported through vWorkspace UI. Of course, this is most likely due to differences of underlying technologies, but hey! it would be nice to have e.g. sysprep options offered directly from the vWorkspace for Hyper-V/SCVMM as well..

Maybe more universally appliable enhancements in 6.2 releases are ones in EOP however. There is a new/rewritten graphics acceleration functionality that moved things from user- to kernel-mode and should also provide more higher-quality compression, which is of course very user subjective as things compressed with JPEG usually are. But should be better anyhow.

Also in the EOPs enhancements, there’s support for more oddball multi-monitor resolution/orientation configurations and some improvements on universal USB redirection. Which, IMHO, can never be “good enough” ;-)

The updated version is downloadable, as always, from the http://www.vworkspace.com/ website, after you have registered an account for yourself. Full features, but time-limited.

-Kalle