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Brian and Gabe welcome you to Geek Week, outline our process, describe the lab rig, and kick off VDI week the way only they can.
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Posted Monday, March 29, 2010
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We sit down with Frank Anderson of Citrix to get a hands-on look at XenDesktop. During the day, we'll get a look at the installation and configuration of the Desktop Delivery Controller and Provisioning Server, as well as the user experience when using the HDX protocol over various WAN connections.
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Posted Monday, March 29, 2010
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We sit down with Mike Coleman and Todd Dayton of VMware to have a look at VMware View. Among the cool things we'll get to see are PC over IP and a video of Mike Coleman leaving Bill Gates on stage during an earthquake. We also find Bug #1 of Geek Week - an issue with Wyse P20 thin clients and our crappy Acer monitors.
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Posted Tuesday, March 30, 2010
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Virtual Bridges' CTO Leo Reiter comes to visit and show off VERDE, Virtual Bridges' VDI solution. With an elegantly simple setup and config (as long as you don't mind some CLI work), Brian was caught a little off-guard and was, dare I say, "impressed" by the solution in general. Still, the VERDE protocol leaves some to be desired, but only during the WAN tests.
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Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2010
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Michael Kleef and Eric Schroeder come to show off Microsoft's in-box VDI solution. We thought it would be simple enough that we could move on to the VDI Suite...turns out that's not the case. While we may not have made it all the way to VDI Suite, we did get a surprisingly good performance out of RDP over a terrible WAN link...with Aero Glass ON! Oh, and we had yet ANOTHER fire drill.
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Posted Thursday, April 1, 2010 (no really, it is)
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Rob Mallicoat from Quest stops by to help us take a look at Quest vWorkspace and how it works with Hyper-V. Not only do we get a look at Quest's EOP protocol enhancements to RDP, but we also find Bug #2 of Geek Week. It's a perfect storm of PowerPoint 2007 on a Windows 7 VM, a Windows 7 client, and Graphics Acceleration.
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Posted Friday, April 2, 2010
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Geek Week: VDI - Explained
What would you do if your boss came to you and said that he wanted you to take the entire week and spend one day looking at each vendor in the VDI space? You'd think he was crazy. You'd tell him it's impossible.You'd stomp your feet, pull out your hair, and maybe even quit.
Not us.
During Geek Week: VDI Shootout, we're taking exactly that approach. Each day, we're going to take a look at a single vendor's VDI product. Obviously, we can only go so deep in such a short amount of time, so in order to keep the project moving, each vendor is sending along one of their engineers to help us as we check each product out.
The point of Geek Week: VDI Shootout isn't to take deep dives into each of these products. Instead, it's to give everyone a taste of a product they may not have been exposed to in the past.
Our goals for each vendor, lofty as they might be, are to show you:
- Product installation
- Basic product configuration
- Client installation
- User experience (both LAN and WAN)
- Basic management capabilities
We'll augment our writing with video that actually shows the user experience on the LAN and WAN, as well as anything else worthy of film during the week.
The Schedule
Since this is a pretty large project, we're breaking it up into two parts. The first part, where we do all the technical work, took place from March 8 to March 12 at our office in San Francisco. We tweeted the whole thing, so check out the #geekweek hash tag for a glimpse of the fun!
We're currently working on editing the videos we shot each day, which we'll release on BrianMadden.com the week of March 29.
Monday, March 29 - Citrix XenDesktop 4
Tuesday, March 30 - VMware View 4
Wednesday, March 31 - Virtual Bridges VERDE
Thursday, April 1 - Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 VDI
Friday, April 2 - Quest vWorkspace 7