Original Blogs on BrianMadden.com - September 2008 - Brian Madden Brian Madden

A roundup of the desktop / application vendors at VMworld 2008 (Part 2: N-R)

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....

Published Sep 28 2008 by Brian Madden , 7,608 views, 14 comments

Extending the free Session Broker that's built-in to Windows Server 2008

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....

Published Sep 26 2008 by Brian Madden , 5,238 views, 7 comments

What if VMware bought Citrix? Would Microsoft care?

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....

Published Sep 24 2008 by Brian Madden , 5,947 views, 69 comments

Login Consultants release another beta of their freeware TS and VDI benchmarking tool

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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Published Sep 24 2008 by Brian Madden , 4,988 views, 6 comments

A roundup of the desktop / application vendors at VMworld 2008 (Part 1: A-M)

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....

Published Sep 23 2008 by Brian Madden , 6,473 views, 16 comments

Brian's VMworld session: "VDI versus TS." Today @ 10:30 and 3:30

For those of you at VMworld this week, I'm giving a session called "VDI versus Terminal Services." This is similar to the debate that Benny and I had at BriForum this year, although this session is more of a presentation style instead of a head-to-head debate....

Published Sep 17 2008 by Brian Madden , 5,961 views, 24 comments

New VMware CEO makes the desktop a core focus for the company, with SIX desktop announcements at VMworld

VMware announced a lot of cool desktop things here at VMworld, including demoing a client / laptop hypervisor, offline VDI, shared master images, licensing agreements of Teradici's PC-over-IP protocol, and a bunch of other interesting things....

Published Sep 16 2008 by Brian Madden , 8,640 views, 41 comments

Why Douglas Brown and John C. Dvorak are 100% wrong about Microsoft buying Citrix

Last week Douglas Brown ignited a firestorm of rumors by claiming that Microsoft might be only days away from buying Citrix. He even linked to a podcast by John C. Dvorak claiming this was a current rumor. The problem is that both of them are 100% flat wrong. They were duped by a glitch in the Google News aggregator....

Published Sep 15 2008 by Brian Madden , 7,568 views, 30 comments

Holy Moly! VMworld is so huge I want to cry. (And not in a good way.)

I don't mean "huge" as in "a big deal." I mean VMworld is literally a super gigantic conference. More than 200 vendors. More than 14,000 attendees. This is a problem for me, since I'm flying to Vegas on Sunday to attempt to "cover" the conference. What vendors should I focus on?...

Published Sep 12 2008 by Brian Madden , 6,008 views, 28 comments

Microsoft makes more changes to VECD. They're still screwing us though.

Microsoft announced changes to VECD. Unfortunately, these changes are just lower prices for certain use cases. VECD is still VECD. Ahhh... the power of a monopoly!...

Published Sep 11 2008 by Brian Madden , 10,706 views, 24 comments

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September 2008 - Brian Madden Brian Madden