This video from BriForum 2008 is entitled VDI Product Smackdown, and was presented by Brian Madden. From the session description: There are several VDI products on the market now, including Citrix XenDesktop, VMware VDI / VMD2, Qumranet Solid ICE, and...

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the fact that VMworld 2008 had over 200 vendors and exhibitors is a bit overwhelming at first. After going to the show, I realized that only about 30 or so of the 200+ vendors made products that were relevant in the desktop and application virtualization spaces. I tried to visit and learn about as many of those vendors as I could at the conference. Last week I published Part 1 of the vendor round-up, and today's article is Part 2....

I have seen a few replies to Brian's post about VMware and Citrix getting together and around the fact that the WSJ reported an uptick in trading volume of CTXS. What's up? Speculation is what's up....

We all hear the news; bailouts, volatile currency markets, energy prices, etc. It's enough to make a sane person mad. Every morning I get the headlines on my RSS readers, my Kindle downloads the latest edition of Financial Times (it's the only...

Like many features of Windows Server, the TS Session Broker is a "platform" feature that provides basic functionality, but Microsoft wrote it in such a way that it's highly extensible. To that end, the Microsoft Terminal Server team has started blogging about the various ways that the Session Broker can be extended....

There's been a lot of talk over the past year or so about someone buying Citrix, with rumors ranging from Cisco to IBM to HP to Oracle. And then of course there's the [now] decades old rumor that Microsoft might buy Citrix. Douglas Brown and Jeff Pitsch have both written about this recently, with their consensus being that while there's no real reason for Microsoft to buy Citrix, if another competitor tried to buy Citrix, Microsoft might step in to buy them defensively....

We've been seeing Macs more and more at the conferences, training classes, and other public functions we attend. At BriForum this past summer, we even got to see presenter Joe Shonk switch to a Mac mid-conference, when he closed the lid on his Vista...

Last July, Login Consultants released an early beta version of an upcoming freeware tool called Login VSI. This tool is a Windows desktop benchmarking tool that runs a series of workload simulations and produces a relative performance score. The idea is that you'd use Login VSI to test various hardware configurations (Would that extra 4GB RAM make a difference?) or to see what the impact would be of going VDI (How much more hardware would I need to support the same number of users with the same scores as I can do now with TS?).

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Is virtual desktop infrastructure old wine in new bottles?! Will this still be the case in 2010? If there is just one buzzword in the IT industry, then it is “virtualization.” Nowadays we virtualize the network, storage, hardware, desktops and applications. Desktop or workspace virtualization is an application that is gaining in importance. This form of virtualization can, in essence, be divided into to parts: “server-hosted” and “client-side.” The type of desktop virtualization that is receiving the most attention is “server-hosted.” More and more organizations are asking themselves whether they must choose between Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), Server-Based Computing (SBC) or local desktops. Questions that arise include: Will VDI replace the SBC concept? What are the pros and cons of VDI? What role do application virtualization and OS streaming play in the overall concept?...

As I wrote last week, VMworld was a ridiculously huge conference. Although I was overwhelmed at first, once I realized that most of the vendors didn't have anything to do with the application or desktop space, it was easier to handle. In fact, in many ways I felt that I was at a 3000-person, 30-vendor VDI conference that just happened to be taking place at the same time as a gigantic 14000-person, 200-vendor virtualization conference....