Search results matching tag 'VMware'

VMware is releasing Horizon Mobile Android virtualization, and your phone might be capable of running it today!

Jack Madden — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

Today VMware announced that Horizon Mobile for Android, their dual-persona mobile virtualization product, is finally available on two phones from Verizon (the LG Intuition and the Motorola RAZR M). We’ve been waiting for this release for a long time, so today’s announcement feels important. However, there still some interesting surprises that could change the way we think about Horizon Mobile.

Horizon Mobile for Android consists of a guest virtual machine that separates corporate apps and data from personal apps and data on the host. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read these articles to get up to speed:

And of course today, Horizon Mobile for Android is finally being released.

The problem with mobile virtualization is that it requires a specially-modified version of Android to act as the host—it won’t work on just any Android device. With VMware Horizon Mobile, there’s a kernel module that lies latent in the host until it’s activated by installing an app from VMware. Users login and connect the app (called VMware Switch and available in Google Play) to their corporate environment, and then IT can provision and manage a work VM with appropriate apps and policies.

What’s new with today’s announcement is that Verizon is installing the kernel module as part of over-the-air operating system updates. In fact, the two phones that were announced today—the LG Intuition and the Motorola RAZR M—already had the update with VMware’s kernel module pushed to them about a month ago. So if you have one of these phones, it already works with Horizon Mobile!

Verizon has plans to push the update to more existing phone models in the coming months. This means that VMware Horizon Mobile will be available on a larger number of devices than we previously thought. The old assumption was that this would only be available on new phones, so this is kind of a big deal.

How big? Verizon may be the largest cell phone carrier in the US, but as we’ve known all along, when it comes to mobile virtualization, we still have to deal with fragmentation in some form or another. In this case, Horizon mobile won’t be available on phones from other carriers, and VMware didn’t mention anything about tablets, either. Compare that to other vendors’ dual persona mobile app management products, which can work across a much wider range of devices from different carriers. Right now all VMware has for these other Android devices is the Horizon Workspace app and an email client.

For sure today’s announcement is a huge win, and I don’t want to take anything away from that, but we’re still left wondering if VMware is going to go full-on into mobile app management for Android, like it intends to do for iOS.

Still, this is an exciting time. There was a trial release of Horizon Mobile for Android starting last December in Japan, but now after talking about and debating this product for nearly five years, we finally can get our hands on it and see what happens.

Project VRC's State of the Industry survey results: 32% of VDI is stateless, and over 50% of companies don't use third party UEM. These results and more!

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Last year, Project VRC invited people around the world complete an extensive survey that asked them to describe their desktop virtualization environment. 662 people took part in the survey, and since it closed, Project VRC has been busy making sense of the data. That information was made available today, and after looking at it, I want to share some of my observations. There are so many useful data points that I can't talk about it all in one article, so I invite you to visit the Project VRC website and download a copy of the results.

Before I get into the data, I thought I'd share some background on Project VRC. It was started in 2009 as a collaboration between PQR and Login Consultants to develop best practices and collect information on the desktop virtualization space. Ruben Spruijt (@RSpruijt) and Jeroen van de Kamp (@TheJeroen) (of PQR and Login, respectively) are the founders of Project VRC, and, along with a team of like-minded geeks, have compiled and shared much information over the years through white papers, presentations, and community involvement. These guys–and I mean this in the best possible way–are crazy! I don't know when they sleep, or when they stop thinking about desktop virtualization. The end result, though, is some really awesome information. (So thanks, guys!)

On with the data

I took a ridiculous amount of notes when reading the survey, but I can't possible write about them all. It's broken down into many sections, including VDI, SBC, comparing stats between the two, and explaining how Oracle stacked the deck. Well, they didn't say "stacked the deck", I did. Let's just say once Oracle learned about this survey, the number of Oracle responses skyrocketed. This information has been sanitized, and the Oracle numbers in the survey are believed to be accurate. We had the same problem (not with Oracle, though) when we polled our readers for the vendors that we should include in Geek Week, when we had a sudden influx of votes from a single IP address that belonged to Symantec :)

Let's look at some key observations:

Hypervisors

There's no surprise here that VMware makes up the vast majority of hypervisor usage, with vSphere 5, vSphere 4, ESXi, and ESX making up 63% of the responses. Surprisingly, Hyper-V 2 is in use in 9% of organizations, which beat out XenServer's 8% share. They also note that 10% of the organizations are migrating to Hyper-V, which I have to say isn't all that surprising. Microsoft has made many improvements, and has all but declared war on VMware in that arena.

While we don't know the percentage of people migrating away from Hyper-V, the key takeaway here is that while MS was bringing up the rear, they are now the third-place hypervisor, and people are actively migrating towards it.

WAN Optimization

47% of companies have no WAN optimization at all in their environments, which isn't surprising. Those that do are using Citrix, Cisco, and Riverbed, followed by F5 and Juniper. Citrix is the clear favorite there, but with almost half the respondents doing nothing at all, there's a lot of room for growth with regards to the vendors and a lot of room for improvement with regards to the user experience and WAN utilization.

VDI

It's no surprise that XenDesktop has a 44% share of the connection broker space, or that View is second with 27%. What is surprising to me is that Oracle came in at #3 with 13%, beating out Microsoft (6%) and Dell vWorkspace (just 3%). Perhaps this is due to Oracle's marketing efforts (that's the word Project VRC used), but it could also be the loyal following that Oracle VDI has. It will be interesting to see this same statistic next year, which we can use to gauge how Microsoft is doing with RDS in Server 2012 and to see what, if anything, Dell is doing with vWorkspace.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this is that 32% of respondents were using stateless VDI as the primary desktop platform, while another 36% had at least some stateless VDI in their deployments. Those numbers are way out of line with perception, and I can't wait for Project VRC to mine that information more. In the future, they'll slice up the data in other ways to try to get an idea of what's going on. I have personally seen an increase in the use of stateless VDI when I ask the question during the VDI Road Shows that I give, so I'll be curious to see the results.

SBC

Not shockingly, SBC is in widespread use in 85% of respondents organizations. 40% of respondents said that SBC was their primary method of desktop and application delivery, while another 35% said it was in use alongside traditional desktops. Around 2/3 of people said that they use XenApp 5 or 6, followed by Windows Server 2008 R2 with 13%. Oracle and Server 2003 both came in around 4%.

Just over half of the people said that they use Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, while Server 2003 R2 x86 was in second place with 23%. This isn't surprising, since Server 2008 x86 is essentially Vista Server. I don't expect to see that number drop until we get closer to the EOL date for Server 2003, which is July 14, 2015. Until then, we might even see increased use in Server 2003 as a way to extend the life of Windows XP applications past April 8, 2013.

Storage

33% of respondents are using their existing storage for desktops, which we've argued against in the past because desktop I/O is so much different than standard I/O on storage arrays (or even that of server virtualization). It could be that their storage was already optimized for desktops, though, which I imagine would work just fine for everyday use as well. 42% have a dedicated storage solution just for their desktops. The vast majority of them are using well-known vendors. Additionally, of the companies using VDI, almost 3/4 of them are using centralized storage as opposed to local. I wonder if it's possible to mine from the survey the breakdown of stateless/persistent combined with centralized/local storage?

Citrix Provisioning Services beat out VMware Linked Clones, full clones and Citrix MCS for the top method of deploying desktop images.

User Environment Management

The leading method of managing the user environment is simply GPO (35%), followed by custom scripting (18%), then Citrix UPM (14%). RES, AppSense, and VMware View Persona all came in under 10%, while Dell vWorkspace, Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, VUEM, and Scense were each used in less than 3% of environments. While it doesn't look like there's heavy UEM adoption, there are so many vendors in the space that it can appear that way. The clear favorite among third parties is Citrix UPM, but when you combine it with the shares of all the other solutions, organizations are roughly split down the middle on whether or not they use third party UEM.

Final Thoughts

A common thread throughout the survey is that companies place a high importance on user experience. In fact, the top four "innovation areas" in the survey have to do with User Experience (WAN, mobile performance, unified communications, and rich media). Still products, technologies, or methods that improve the user experience aren't highly used. Almost half of the responses indicated that there is no WAN optimization, and over half of the responses show that companies are simply using GPOs and scripts (although you could argue that people don't see UEM as an innovation area). That can mean one of a few things:

Those are enough and all the users are happy
The users aren't happy but IT doesn't know/isn't willing to fix it
The third party solutions aren't good enough to justify the expense
Awareness of third party solutions is low, or organizations are still just getting the lay of the land

If user experience is truly king, then you would think these solutions would be in more widespread use. I guess there's room for both the vendors and the organizations to grow, and since the key innovation areas called out are more about mobility and connectivity, it appears the public perception of what is needed gels pretty nicely with what we think (hooray!).

There is so much more information in the survey results that I cannot encourage you enough to download it and read it yourself. This article has only looked a comparatively small amount of information. There is detailed stats on SBC, application virtualization, load testing, web applications, storage, networking, server hardware, antivirus, and the vendors associated with each of these aspects of desktop virtualization. You can download the white paper, and check out all the other stuff they do, on ProjectVRC's website. Thanks again to Ruben and Jeroen for all the work they put into this!

VDI Smackdown: Head-to-head analysis of Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix VIAB, Dell vWorkspace, Microsoft Windows8/Server2012 and VMware View 5.2 + more

rspruijt — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:36:00 GMT

Are you looking for an independent overview of desktop virtualization solutions and curious about the different strategy questions? Do you want detailed information about the features and functions each desktop virtualization vendor is offering!? If so the VDI Smackdown you definitely must read!
In the current market there is an increasing demand for unbiased information about desktop virtualization solutions. This white paper is focused on solutions that are anticipated to have an important role in desktop virtualization deployments. An overview of available features of each solution has been created to allow an understanding and comparison of capabilities.

The latest solutions included in the feature matrix are: Citrix XenDesktop 5.6FP1, Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5.2, Dell vWorkspace 7.6, Microsoft RDVH Windows8/Server 2012 and VMware View 5.2; The English whitepaper can be downloaded here. The Japanese version will be available as soon as possible.

Empowering the end-user by giving access to Windows, Web and Mobile applications so he can access data and information systems from both private and public datacenters regardless of the device or location is the ultimate strategic objective.
The delivery of the classic (Windows) desktop interface can be divided in two segments:

the classic desktop and laptop, running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X;
the virtual desktop running in the datacenter or local on the classic workstation.

In essence “desktop virtualization” is the de-coupling of the desktop, operating system and the applications from the underlying endpoint or device. This kind of virtualization can be subdivided into two types:

With the first type applications are executed remotely, server hosted, and presented at the endpoint via a remote display protocol.
With the second type applications are executed at the endpoint, client-side and presented locally.

Making Windows, Web and Mobile applications available to the end-user, regardless of the technology being used, is an important strategic objective of an advanced IT infrastructure. The Virtual Desktop (vDesktop) is an essential component in the range of Application and Desktop delivery solutions and in essence, it provides the following functions:

Flexibility: Detach the vDesktop from the endpoint; Several vDesktops can be used next to one another
BYO: enables delivery of applications and desktops for BYO scenario’s;
Access: vDesktop works independently of location, endpoint and network;
Security: Server Hosted – VDI; data in the computing center;
Freedom: Every user can have his own desktop with administrator privileges when needed;
Management: Centrally managed and hardware independent;
Legacy: It is simple to offer legacy applications on a state-of-the-art platform;
Sustainability: Power Management, handling the necessary resources in an efficient manner

The transition to a dynamic and optimized desktop is causing many IT organizations to reevaluate traditional IT operations, deployment, delivery, packaging, support, and management methods.
Desktop virtualization is a key component in the optimized desktop. It’s important to have a Vision and Strategy around application and desktop delivery and enterprise mobility. Designing, building, managing and maintaining the desktop virtualization infrastructure using the right Technologies, corresponding vendors and products is an important step. We see a lot organizations primarily focusing on products and vendors and lacking a clear and profound vision and strategy. This approach is fine for a point solutions but a proper vision and strategy is crucial for a vNext optimized desktop. How can the vision and strategy be successful? Success = Vision x Execution x Adoption!

The following discussions and corresponding topics should be part of the optimized desktop strategy:

What are the use-cases? Does the use-case require Desktop Virtualization?
VD-why, what do you want to achieve, a business enabler, overall cost of ownership (TCO) and cost reducer?
What is the business-case? What do you expect as a ROI?
How do you deliver applications to users in a Bring Your Own (BYO) or Choose Your Own (CYO) scenario?
What’s your desktop delivery and migration strategy for Windows 7/Windows 8?
What’s the user experience using Multimedia, Video/Voice, 2D/3D applications?
Is Unified Communications and VoIP functionality within VDI needed? Is it supported by the VDI and UC-vendor?
What are the user expectations of the vDesktop? Are users involved in a proof of concept and pilot? What are their acceptation criteria?
What endpoints do we support and facilitate and what is the role of these devices in the end-user experience? Are the endpoints managed by the IT organization?
Do you want to deliver windows and web applications to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones via VDI? What does the user wants? What is your enterprise mobility strategy?
What is the impact of Secure Access and Secure Networking solutions on mobile devices while connecting to the vDesktop? What is the user experience with these secure access solutions?
Is there a supported agent for the OS/endpoint? What is the User Experience with this agent? What is the feature and future roadmap of these agents? Is agentless via HTML(5) included and important?
Is image deployment and management part of the (virtual) Desktop Strategy?
How do you design and build the user’s profile and his ‘workspace’? Does Application virtualization fit into this strategy? The ‘User Environment Management' Smackdown can be helpful.
Do we need a vMachine based image management solution? How do we design, build and maintain the (golden) Image(s)?
Do you need context awareness? Based on user/role, device, location and various settings is access to application resources controlled and enforced when needed?
What is your application readiness assessment strategy? Are Windows 7, Windows 8, VDI, application virtualization and x64 included?
How are Windows applications delivered within the vDesktop? Unattended or manual installation, application virtualization or the applications are part of the (golden) image? What is the strategy?
Does the end-user needs the ability to install and update applications? Is User Installed Applications functionality needed? Does the user have the correct privileges to install or update software?
Do you need local or centralized storage? What storage optimization (IOPS/latency) technology is being used?
What is the VDI impact on storage and how does it affect the business case?
Do we focus on stateless (non-persistent) and/or stateful (hybrid/persistent) images? What is, for example, the impact on storage, manageability, security, legal and business-case?
Windows 8 or Windows 7 as core guest OS platform? x64 or x86?
How does the solution scale? What do we need from a scalability point of view? Is there a validated design?
What is the performance and bandwidth impact on the network infrastructure; LAN, WAN, WLAN, Mobile;
Licensing; VDI solution, guest and client operating system, Client Access Licenses and (Business) Applications.
Is Antivirus needed? Inside the VM or as layer on the Hypervisor? What is the real performance impact of Antivirus?
Is the VDI solution as a whole highly available? Is that built-in or are additional planning and solutions needed to get high availability? Is a highly available vDesktop needed?
Is the IT department able to adopt the technology with right knowledge and skills? What subject matter experts are needed to get and keep the VDI solution up and running in production environment? Is this expertise available? Who has overview of the complete VDI solution stack?
How does the desktop virtualization solution fit into existing deployment and management tools?

Bottom Line: What’s your current Enterprise Mobility and Desktop Delivery strategy?!

Get a head start! Download our complete, in-depth, and independent whitepaper. We try to provide accurate, clear, complete and usable information. We appreciate your feedback. If you have any comments, corrections or suggestions for improvements of this document we want to hear from you! Feedback!? rsp@pqr.nl or twitter

To make a true BYOC play, VMware needs centralized management of Fusion and Workstation

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 05:03:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote about Horizon Suite and about how Horizon Mirage comes with a license to use VMware Fusion Pro to address BYOC situations. In that article I lamented the fact that Fusion Pro was a Mac solution. Someone from VMware reached out to us and mentioned that VMware Player also comes with Fusion Pro, and because of that is licensed for commercial use, which it wasn't before. (Tell that to the companies using it!) What we didn't get out of that, though, is that it also comes with added functionality.

Fusion Pro is interesting because it adds management capabilities to Fusion that make it more enterprise-ready. There's no central management console, but it does expand the feature set to include the ability to create and run restricted VMs, limit access to USB devices, and create custom networks. Restricted VMs are ones that are pre-configured with settings that cannot be altered by end users, like drag and drop transfers between the host and guest.

VMware Player's inclusion with Fusion Pro seems somewhat insignificant at first, but it actually has the ability to run the same restricted VMs as Fusion Pro. Ultimately that means that VMware Mirage can be used to support not only Mac, but Windows and Linux BYOC scenarios. (Although, I dare you to find me a Linux BYOC scenario from a normal user...) This is the message VMware was trying to get across that we missed, and it seems like a fair solution that makes use of the products currently available.

Prior to this revelation (which most people probably already knew since it came out around VMworld), I kept thinking about the possibility of a Workstation Pro. While the additional functionality of VMware Player scratches my BYOC-for-Mirage itch, I'm still left thinking about the possibilities. Fusion Pro adds some nice features, but it really only brings it closer to the functionality that's also in Workstation (which also supports restricted VMs). What would be cool is centralized management across the board.

In a BYOC environment, IT accepts the fact that they cannot control the host. They can, however, control the VM and, to some extent, the hypervisor. Today that control is exhibited by deploying the aforementioned restricted VMs, leaving the hypervisor alone. What I'd like to see across the board is a management system that not only controls what a VM can and cannot do from a central location, but also the hypervisor itself since it is the BYOC enabler. It's like PC management, but in this case the hardware is virtual. If IT has the ability to maintain the VM settings, hypervisor configuration, and the restricted OS inside, then that makes for a better-managed BYOC situation.

Think of it a bit like MDM or MAM on mobile devices. With those technologies, IT can deploy apps and configuration settings to devices that they don't own, while ensuring certain settings are in place to strike a good balance between management and end user flexibility. I'm not suggesting that the hypervisor have any management hooks into the host OS, just that the hypervisor can keep an eye on what's happening and react according to IT policies. For instance, if a virus is detected on the host, disable access to the VM until it's fixed. Or, new network or hardware settings could be centrally created and delivered. Plus, IT would have the ability to grant access to VMs, or to revoke that access when a user leaves the company or loses the laptop.

This isn't new thinking of course. It's the client hypervisor mindset that a few companies are already on board with. Citrix has XenClient, Mokafive has, well, Mokafive, and Virtual Bridges has VERDE LEAF. At one time VMware was on that path, trying to create a Type-1 client hypervisor from the ground up (remember CVP?). Now those lines have blurred, and we don't really care so much whether a client hypervisor is Type-1 or Type-2. I'm not saying that it's something that should be used enterprise-wide, but if supporting BYOC is the goal, VMware already has the technologies in place to deliver the entire stack—they just have to be tied together. Mirage is the first step in that, and bringing it down a level to the hypervisor could be Step 2.

VMware clarifies my "facts." It's not that they're saying not to use Mirage with View, they're just saying it's not supported.

Brian Madden — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:36:00 GMT

From the, "Well I'm glad we got that cleared up" department, I've received multiple calls and emails about my article from yesterday called "VMware's recommendation to manage physical and virtual desktops differently is WRONG."

When I visited VMware a few weeks ago, they asked me where I got my information because some of my facts were sometimes wrong. I was surprised that I hadn't heard that from them before, because over the past 12 years as a writer I've always been quick to fix a fact, publish an update, or even write an entire new article explaining that I was wrong. (And vendors are usually the most vocal with corrections.) So I encouraged VMware to keep me in the loop when it comes to factual data in my articles, telling them they can use a virtual "bat phone" to call me with updates.

I didn't have to wait long, as a few people at VMware took issue with some things I wrote in that article about Mirage and View. We had a briefing phone call on Friday, February 15, and my article came out ten days later on February 25. When they called me yesterday we discussed "facts" of that call. That's one of the things that's nuts about this job that I never envisioned—that two people can remember things so completely differently less than two weeks later.

In this specific case, in my article I had originally written that VMware was being shady by not disclosing the real reason that Mirage couldn't be used in View. My recollection is that they didn't say why at all during their presentation, rather it was only when I asked that they said it was because the consoles weren't integrated and that they wanted to not deliver a product with too many consoles. I remember that I didn't think that was the real reason since I knew of customers who were having performance problems, so I thought the console thing was just a cover. So I asked about the performance and that's when they said there are scalability limits and that while Mirage does work with View, they don't recommend it at scale.

So the "facts" I remember are that (1) they didn't mention why you couldn't use them together at all, then when I asked they said (2) it was because of the consoles, then when I asked more they said (3) it didn't scale and they don't recommend it for performance reasons. So to me, I remember the facts as them not sharing this until I asked multiple times, which is what I wrote in the article.

VMware's recollection of the exact same conversation is different. They look at it more holistically and say, "Hey, when you left that phone call, you had all the information. We tried to be as clear as possible on that call, and if you had heard that it wasn't scalable then you should have told us that up front."

So was it me who was being shady for not telling them what I heard? Was I to expect that they would lead with performance problems and talk about them if I didn't ask? I don't know...

This is what's tough about this job. If I write a statement like, "VMware was being shady before admitting performance scalability issues," is that "factually" correct or not? It's kind of funny because I write something like that and they use the "factual error Bat-phone to Brian" to send the correction, "Fact: we were not being shady."

VMware's correction about their support of using Mirage inside of View

The point of this article is not to bitch about VMware or to say I deserve some kind of blogger Pulitzer for thinking about this stuff, but rather I did want to publish VMware's view (har har!) on the whole thing.

In that article from yesterday, I wrote, "they're saying that you should NOT use Mirage to manage your View VDI desktops!!?! That's crazy!"

VMware representatives believe that statement is factually incorrect, saying:

"We do not say to not use Mirage with View. We tell prospects that View does not support Mirage right now. This is a completely different statement."

I have to admit that I don't 100% understand what this means. I think their point is that I'm saying "do not use Mirage with View," and they're saying, "it's not that we're saying not to use it, it's just not supported."

Or maybe it's the whole "right now" part? They're mad that I'm making it seem like VMware's whole strategy is to have two separate ways to do things, and they're saying that their strategy is to have one way to do things, it just doesn't work right now. (Though if that's the case, we're in agreement with the way my article from yesterday ended. I said that as soon as Mirage is ready to go for View desktops then let 'er rip and use Mirage for VDI, client VM, and physical desktops. We just don't agree on whether that means you should wait to purchase it or not.)

I guess at the end of the day, VMware and I both believe that they have a good strategy, so at least there's one "fact" that we can agree on. Now can they execute on it? (Fact: They believe they can.)

VMware's recommendation to manage physical and virtual desktops differently is WRONG

Brian Madden — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 08:03:00 GMT

One of the big things that came out of last week's Horizon Suite announcement from VMware was that they are recommending different management strategies for physical desktops versus VDI desktops.

For physical desktops, VMware now offers Horizon Mirage (which they got from their 2012 acquisition of Wanova). Mirage adds layering and application management to Windows desktops, irrespective of whether they're physical or virtual. (In other words, Mirage manages Windows, and it doesn't care whether that Windows is on a laptop, a desktop, a VM on a client, or a VDI instance in a datacenter.)

Gabe and I have loved Mirage since the product was launched several years ago and we've said things in the past like, "Yes! THIS is the way to manage Windows!" So when VMware bought Wanova, we were generally happy. The typical "onboarding" of a Mirage into an existing environment is that you install the Mirage agent on a user's existing laptop, it starts scanning and figuring out what's what, then it copies any unique bits up to the datacenter. (This happens continuously as the user makes changes.) Then moving forward, admins can push out or replace certain applications or layers, and if the user ever loses their laptop, they can get a new generic one, install the Mirage agent, and get their environment put back together. Again, very cool!

One of the biggest reasons we love Mirage is because it works with persistent, non-shared desktops. So if you have 500 users, you can have 500 different desktop images. You don't have to virtualize every single app with ThinApp or App-V, and Mirage can support user-installed software, users being their own admins, drivers, etc. Basically Mirage allows desktops to work exactly how they work today before Mirage.

Compare that to the way that many vendors who try to scam you into the whole "shared image" thing. The claim many users sharing a single disk image is easier to manage than each user having his or her own unique image. While it's true that managing 1 image is easier than managing 500, the challenge is that existing desktop environments are built around every user having their own image. If image sharing was so easy, you'd be doing it today (either using using Ghost, or Terminal Server). The reality though is that image sharing requires that your users can't install their own apps and your users can't have admin rights—and that's just not the way that Windows desktops work today in many environments.

So that's why I've always advocated building VDI environments based on the same type of desktop imaging and management as your physical environments. If you blew away your physical desktops every few months with new images, great, then use Linked Clones or master images. But if you image your desktops once and let users customize them from there and manage them with SCCM, fine, but you need to make your VDI environment so it also uses SCCM and allows users to customize as they want.

So for me, VDI is nothing more than a form-factor change for your existing desktops and laptops. VDI has several great benefits, like centralization for business continuity, accessible desktops from anywhere, and desktop portability. If you need this, great, then you should use VDI! But don't try to completely change the way all your existing persistent / personal desktops work. Just rebuild that in your VDI environment and you're all set. (Again, I'm not saying that moving to a single image shouldn't be a goal. That's a fine goal, but it shouldn't have anything to do with your move to VDI.)

How to be successful with VDI? Do not create a VDI strategy!

For the past few years at our desktop virtualization seminars (25 cities this year, all free :) and in our book, I've specifically said, "if you want to be successful with VDI, do not create a VDI strategy!"

At first that might seem counter-intuitive, but since VDI is just another way of delivering a Windows desktop, what you really need is a Windows strategy, not a VDI strategy. After all, this has served you well over the past 20 years as you've gone from desktops to laptops to huge powerful machines to small ultraportable weak machines. You don't fundamentally change your Windows management / application / profile / security strategy based on what type of device you're using, so why should you change it just because you add some VDI? In fact creating a brand-new Windows strategy just for VDI is another big reason that many VDI projects fail. As long as VDI is "different" within your organization, it will always be an outlier.

VMware's split strategy

That brings us around to the problem I have with VMware's recommendations around their launch of the new Horizon Suite. Prior to buying Wanova last year, VMware never had a strategy or product for physical desktops. While some might argue that if you used VMware you would always have a split strategy, but I never saw it that way. Like I said, for me VDI is all about the persistent desktops, so if I used VMware View for VDI, then I wanted to use it with persistent desktops. Doing so would mean that my desktops were managed in the same way regardless of how I delivered them. If I wanted to use ThinApp or App-V or SCCM or Altiris or Browsium or AppSense or antivirus of whatever to manage them, I would do that for all my desktops—physical and virtual, since it's completely crazy to manage different desktops in different ways.

But now that VMware bought Wanova, they're saying that Wanova is the way to manage physical desktops. This is great and we love it. But they're saying that you should NOT use Mirage to manage your View VDI desktops!!?! That's crazy! [UPDATE FEB 26: VMware believes this statement of mine is factually inaccurate. Read more here.]

It took awhile for us to understand the reason. When we asked about it they initially claimed it was because the management consoles weren't integrated and that they only wanted to deliver a suite with one console, but then we pointed out that the suite still has plenty of different management consoles once you look at all the components (Workspace, Mirage, Fusion Pro, Workstation, vCenter Operations), so that didn't fully make sense. Then they clarified (a bit on the phone and more fully the next day via email (as Gabe mentioned in his coverage of the Horizon Suite announcement) that it was also because Mirage doesn't have good performance within View, so there are performance issues and while it technically works, they don't recommend it at scale.

Okay, so that sucks, but whatever. Personally I would have thought that the whole point of buying Wanova was so that you could use Mirage for physical and virtual desktops, and I also would have thought that nine months was enough time to get that work done, but I'm not a developer or a product guy so I don't know what it would take. The bigger point though is that now VMware has come out with their own version of Mirage and they're telling customers to use that for physical desktops only while telling them to use different strategies for their View-based virtual desktops.

But that's crazy. Why would a customer want to do that? Because if the Linked Clone / master image sharing works for VDI, why is the customer even using VDI? Why not just use RDSH and get the same functionality for 1/3 the cost? And if the customer is using View for persistent one-to-one images that they have to manage with something like SCCM, then why not just use SCCM for all desktops rather than SCCM for some and Mirage for some?

The more VMware encourages customers to manage physical and virtual desktops differently, the more VDI will be viewed as an awkward cousin of "real" desktops, and that's not good for any of us. So as long as VMware says that using Mirage with View is a "future design goal," then customers should be advised to keep Mirage as a "future purchasing goal."

Consumerization Nation #20: We interview VMware's Ben Goodman about Horizon Suite

Jack Madden — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:03:00 GMT

VMware's end user computing evangelist Ben Goodman joined Colin Steele, James Furbush and me to talk about VMware's Horizon Suite announcement.

In particular, today's show covered:

Why VMware's enterprise mobility management has been a long time coming.
The the Horizon Workspace mobile apps (I just learned that they have a mail client for Android, too, but it's not manageable.)
The Android virtualization debate and VMware's plans for supporting non-virtualized Android.

Thanks everybody for listening and joining the chat!

VMware launches Horizon Suite, but it still has a ways to go to meet expectations. Here's our complete analysis:

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:01:00 GMT

Today, VMware is launching Horizon Suite, which we first learned about at VMworld last fall. Coming out of VMworld, I remember having the impression that despite being let down in the past by announcements that were never seen through to releases, VMware might still "get it" when it comes to the big picture of end user computing (EUC). Today's Horizon Suite release represents the marriage of all the EUC technologies and products that VMware has assembled over the years, and is in large part focused on behind-the-scenes things like wiring together the backends and integrating everything together. The primary components of Horizon Suite Horizon View 5.2, Horizon Mirage 4.0, and Horizon Workspace 1.0. Horizon Mobile (for EMM) will also a part of this suite (sometime later in 2013), as are updated mobile Suite-wide mobile clients (which Jack has written about separately). Let's dig into the remaining components:

Horizon View 5.2

Part of today's Horizon Suite release involves renaming the core technologies, so we have a new name and minor version number for VMware View. Now called "Horizon View," the 5.2 release also brings with it the addition of an HTML5 client that leverages VMware's "Blast" protocol. Blast is based on the same technology that runs AppBlast, which we talked about after it was announced at VMworld 2011. AppBlast, for those that don't remember (or have forgotten) was a technology designed to deliver seamless applications from the datacenter via HTML5. It has never been released as an actual product, rather, it was intended to be built into various products that VMware already has.

You'll note that the "App" part of AppBlast has disappeared, and that's because this release only has the ability to deliver full desktops to users rather than seamless applications. VMware says that single application seamless Windows is still their ultimate goal, but that's really hard to do via an HTML5 client and they just wanted to get this technology out there. (I've heard through other channels that the lack of seamless app delivery is because of the way browsers work, namely that browser window borders must be present. Imagine delivering a dozen applications via AppBlast, only to have each one have a browser window around it. That experience is less than optimal, and confusing for users.)

VMware Blast is built a little differently than other HTML5 remote desktop solutions. Rather than using a gateway component to translate or re-encode a remote desktop protocol like other solutions do, Blast was designed from the ground up to deliver pixels straight from within the VM in essentially the same way as PCoIP. This also means the scalability is on par with PCoIP, since little-to-no extra overhead is introduced. Without translation in the way, Blast excels at remoting the desktop itself. Plus, all the traffic runs through the same Horizon Gateway that secures all the other communications between your endpoints and the datacenter.

Disappointingly, there are many limitations that overshadow Blast's great video performance. For instance, there is no multimedia or Flash redirection which would allow the browser to interpret the data natively rather than sending it over the wire. There's also no USB support, no ThinPrint, and no audio support, or no webcam support either. The end result is a protocol that delivers a great looking experience that's not all that usable. Perhaps in a pinch, or in certain situations it will be useful at scale, but ultimately it's behind the curve when compared to more mature HTML5 products from Citrix and Ericom, among others.

A few other aspects of View 5.2 worth noting:

The AppShift technology that we were shown at VMworld is now part of View. AppShift introduces gestures and UI changes that make it easier to use Windows and Windows desktop applications on touch-based devices. If you want to see it in action, Ruben Spruijt recorded a video during the keynote of Daniel Beveridge's demo. This looks pretty cool, and I'm happy to see it make it into the product. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't dubious when it was announced.
View 5.2 finally includes the support for the Nvidia Virtual Graphics Platform that we learned about at VMworld Europe 2011. This will allow for remoting of 3D applications (with the appropriate GPUs in your View servers).
View is SAML-aware now, so when you sign into the Horizon Workspace (more on that later), your credentials are used not only for apps and data, but also to log you into the View desktop.
Microsoft Lync communicator is officially supported via View. (We assume this is via PCoIP only since Blast doesn't do audio.)

Overall impression: AppShift looks cool, Blast is falls way short, SAML integration is nice to have.

Horizon Mirage 4.0

VMware bought Wanova last May, but since then they haven't done anything with the technology. It's still been version 3.0—the version that Wanova had been shipping since 2011. Today's Horizon launch includes a new version of Mirage (now 4.0) along with a name change to "Horizon Mirage."The biggest new feature is that you can now configure layers for single applications. Prior to this release, Mirage could be broken down into three layers—Base, Apps, and User—which were composited together and delivered to an endpoint. The 4.0 update now lets you effectively package applications into their own layers, which you can then deliver based on policies (specific machines, groups, departments, etc.). It gives more flexibility when it comes to managing applications, even letting you deliver ThinApp packages as layers (although I'm not sure why you'd do that).

At this stage, there's still no integration between Mirage and View. Our sources claim it's because Mirage doesn't perform well when used in a View environment. This would make sense, since it was designed for desktops that are notoriously over-powered. Performance hits on a single desktop or laptop would likely go unnoticed, but when concentrated on a VDI host those hits would be multiplied and quickly become noticeable. The official response for VMware confirms this (if you read between the lines):

It remains our goal to fully extend the benefits of Horizon Mirage's image layering technology across both the physical and virtual desktop environments. That being said, it is important to note that Mirage and View were initially conceived with different objectives in mind and so interoperability at the underlying resource level is not yet optimised: some of the dynamics of how our agent uses CPU and Network in a distributed environment may be sub-optimal when deployed on a shared resource like a VDI server.

So this is unfortunate, big time. I was of the opinion that integrating the technology into View would be the first thing done, but that appears to be on the back burner. As it is today, Mirage is VMware's physical desktop solution, meaning that you still have to have separate physical and virtual desktop strategies. Sure, that's how it worked in the past, but they didn't make the change I was hoping to see.

What's interesting is that there is a virtualization play for Mirage, as VMware also views it as a BYOC solution, allowing users to use their own machines at work via a corporate VM, managed by Mirage. In fact, VMware even includes a copy of Fusion Pro (the centrally-managed version of Fusion) with each Mirage license. You might be thinking "That's a Mac product. What about Windows?" We thought that, too. VMware believes the most common BYOC use case one that involves bringing Macs into the workplace, so they've bundled the Mac version of their hypervisor for that specific use case. Perhaps this is because there is no "Pro" version of Workstation that could also be bundled? [UPDATE Feb 25: VMware told us that the Mirage license for Fusion Pro is also valid for VMware player for deploying Mirage-managed VMs to Windows and Linux clients. "But wait," you're thinking, "Isn't VMware Player free already?" We thought that too. Turns out that it was free for non-commercial use, so now with Mirage you're legally allowed to use it for corporate stuff. VMware also asked us to point out that you can use both Fusion and VMware Player for corporate-owned laptops too. It's not just a BYO solution. Noted.]

Overall impression: Just a minor change, frustratingly slow integration since we're near the one year mark after the acquisition.

Horizon Workspace 1.0

The glue that binds the Horizon Suite together is Horizon Workspace, launched today for the first time. Workspace aggregates everything in the suite together into one management and end-user package. From Workspace, users have access to their files via what we once called Horizon Data, their web and SaaS applications via the original Horizon App Manager, and their desktops via Horizon View. Mirage is not integrated into Workspace, but it also doesn't need to be since it's only a physical solution (or Fusion) that's managed via the Mirage management component.

Workspace looks cool, and it appears this is where most of the development work has been focused of late, the bulk of which has been regarding the integration of all the platforms. It had to happen some time, but looking around for killer features doesn't result in much. Accessing the data, apps, and desktops is great, but as you look into each of those you find a few things that you would expect to be there that are not.

The "files" functionality is meant to rival other cloud file sync providers like Box and Dropbox. It could be said that it does too good a job of that, because there's no integration with other file storage solutions outside of Horizon itself. Where other solutions allow you to hook into your local file stores or to other cloud services (thereby letting you leave them in place while still providing sync and access to those files on other devices), Horizon Data exists as its own "all-or-nothing" silo. (We were told that integration with existing file shares, SharePoint, and other cloud-based file sync services are all "design goals.") There is some integration with Office Server that allows users to view Office files through the Horizon Workspace, but they can't be edited. If a user wants to edit a file, they need to either find it via the Horizon Data client on their device (which works like Dropbox), or download it, edit it, and re-upload it into the system.

Another gripe is that desktops you can access through Workspace appear to be limited solely to View desktops despite hearing about XenApp integration for, I believe, two years. Also absent is Teradici Arch integration, but that may be understandable since that's only in Tech Preview at the moment. It would seem to be an easy inclusion, though, since it leverages the View connection broker. Finally, Workspace doesn't have any kind of "open in" intelligence in the web browser. So it can't automatically stream a ThinApp package to your workstation or launch a remote View desktop session if you click on a file that can't be handled by your local client. [UDPATE Feb 20 8:45am, we also confirmed that Workspace can only connect users to View desktops, so too bad if you were using View to broker connections to Remote Desktop Session Hosts.]

Overall impression: You have to start somewhere, and this is it. Hopefully VMware can make the updates fast and furious.

Pricing & Licensing

You can buy the entire Horizon Suite for $300 per named user. That's for a perpetual license, not per-year. That includes View, Mirage, Fusion Pro, and Workspace (SaaS app integration, Horizon Data, etc.) That seems like a really great price for so much and significantly cheaper than everything Citrix bundles together.

You can buy the components individually too. View is $250 per concurrent user on its own, and there's now only one edition of View that includes all the features. (Well, we think it includes all of them. We asked vCenter Operations Manager for View was included since VMware shamefully charged $100 per user(!) extra for that in the past, but VMware didn't get back to us on that.)

Mirage and Workspace can each be had on their own for $150 per named user.

As mentioned in the opening section, this Horizon Suite is ultimately supposed to include the Horizon Mobile (EMM) components, but they're not in there yet and we don't know whether or not that addition will affect the overall price of the suite.

Summary

VMware might understand the space as well as I'd hoped, but it sure looks like they're having trouble executing. These products seem to carry so much potential that has yet to be realized, and it seems like all we do is speculate (and hint) about the cool things that could be done, then wait to see if anything catches on. Perhaps the recent changes within VMware will spur that on, but as it stands VMware has a long way to go to catch up to competitors in a lot of areas. It's pretty bad when you make Citrix look like they can turn on a dime.

Let’s take a look at the VMware Horizon Workspace mobile apps

Jack Madden — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:00:00 GMT

VMware is launching Horizon Suite today, which includes updates to View and Mirage as well as a new product to tie together all of the pieces together, Horizon Workspace. Gabe wrote an overview of the whole suite and gave details about the new features in the desktop-related products; here I’m going to dig into the mobile apps.

The mobile apps

The Horizon Workspace apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android bring together access to files, applications, and Windows desktops (desktops are omitted for the iPhone app) arranged in tabs. The application tab, which inherits the functionality of the previous Horizon App Manager, only launches web apps in the device’s built-in browser, but presumably it will be able to launch native apps in the future (more on that below). Launching a Windows desktop triggers the device the launch native View client, which continues to be a seperate app. If the View client isn’t on the device, the desktop will launch in the browser and be delivered by Blast, VMware’s HTML 5 remote desktop protocol.

The data tab incorporates functionality from Horizon Data, and it’s pretty much like any other “enterprise version of Dropbox” app. IT can control what’s allowed to be saved locally and whether or not users are allowed to open documents into other apps. It’s also possible to selectively whitelist which other apps are allowed to open documents, regardless of where the apps came from or how they’re managed. Why is this so special? In order to get granular control of the “open in...” function, most other file syncing solutions require that the whitelisted apps be managed and deployed by IT.

We’re still waiting on most of the other Horizon Mobile components, which include the mobile virtualization platform for Android and app wrapping and an email client for iOS. For both platforms, Horizon Workspace will gain a secure browser app and document editing capabilities. All of this will supposedly be coming sometime in 2013.

Overall impression

It’s good to see that Horizon Data is finally out—we’ve always said that file-syncing is an important first step and easy win when it comes to embracing enterprise mobility management—but as Gabe wrote, the problem is on the back end; there’s no integration with file storage solutions other than Horizon. Mobile file syncing apps and the backend storage that supports should be two completely independent variables. Integration with more types of file systems is expected in the future for Horizon Data, so when that happens the product will be able to satisfy many more use cases.

Horizon Data’s granular “open-in...”whitelisting feature is a win on several counts. First of all, it’s a useful way for any EMM solution to give outside apps controlled access to corporate resources. Second, for VMware in particular it’s good to have because their iOS app wrapping product isn’t out yet. Finally, it’s also good because they don’t have any plans for Android app wrapping.

As we know, VMware’s plans for Android are all based on the mobile virtualization platform. The idea is that when you’re managing and securing an entire Android virtual machine, you don’t need to worry about app wrapping because there are no personal user apps in the corporate image. The problem is that bringing Android virtualization to market requires the cooperation telco carriers and device OEMs, which is a clearly a difficult process. While VMware says that the MVP is on its way, no matter how you look at it you’ll have to support non-virtualized devices. The Horizon Workspace app for Android gives us a way to do that.

***

Want to learn more about Horizon and VMware’s enterprise mobility management plans? VMware’s EUC evangelist Ben Goodman will join Colin Steele, James Furbush, and me for the Consumerization Nation podcast on Thursday, February 21 at 1pm EST / 10am PST. Come join the conversation!

Do VMware's recent moves point to a spinoff of the EUC group?

Kevin Goodman — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:03:00 GMT

In Colin Steele's post yesterday he asked if VMware would dump any more products after their announcement that SlideRocket was on the block. In my guest blog back in August I wondered out loud if VMware would bundle up the EUC products so they could be spun off. I was partially correct. I had suggested a suite based upon View: View Horizon, View Mail, and so on. Instead, at VMworld we learned the suite would be based upon Horizon (Horizon Administrator, Horizon Enterprise Connector, etc.).

Even though I got the name wrong I was correct about the bundle and it has a lot to do with today's announcement. Creating a suite combines job functions and therefore facilitates layoffs. Six products means six product managers, six product marketers, six project managers and so on down the line. In this instance one product would render 15 people extraneous. Extrapolate that through the organization and suddenly a bunch of people are looking for work. There are always winners and losers in this kind of shakeup and that includes both VMware and some of other companies in the valley. On the VMware side some folks have found they have just gone to the head of the class, and the exodus some primo talent has enriched some very lucky companies in the northern California area (AutoCad, MobileIron, Authentic8, Facebook and a startup still in stealth mode–I am talking to you). At other companies I have worked for they called this the "Rats off a sinking ship" phenomenon. Now VMware is not sinking by any means, but uncertainty has its way of unsettling people, leading them to look for other opportunities.

In my previous blog, I had suggested a spin off rather than a layoff just based upon what I know about the Silicon Valley job market. All things being equal a job candidate would rather go to work for a company that doesn't have a history of laying off workers. And you can bet VMware will continue to hire.

I was also wrong about Paul Maritz. Turns out they he will head up the newly formed Pivot Initiative. I thought he would just disappear like the dog on the Brady Bunch (to those of you outside the US or those of you who don't watch Nickelodeon, the "Brady Bunch" is a TV series about a blended family with six kids. One season the pet dog, "Tiger", was written out of the show, but they never explained it to the audience. Didn't any of the six kids notice that the dog went missing?). It reminds me of one of my favorite VMware managers. I am still waiting for her to come back from "sabbatical".

However, I was correct about VMware's need to focus on the cloud. I surmised back in August that Maritz's departure was due to his inability to get traction on a cloud initiative. Six months later I am even more convinced. I understand many of you come to BrianMadden.com for all things virtual desktop, but I know from some of the comments that many of you are also involved in the infrastructure. You may be surprised to know that VMware's main competitor isn't Microsoft and Hyper-V or Citrix and everything Xen–it's Amazon. To demonstrate how easy the Amazon's cloud is they have an offer at http://aws.amazon.com/free. If you want to kick the tires you can get a free Microsoft Windows Server instance for a year. Once you get your server instance up and running, compare it to this VMware's equivalent: https://vcloudservice.vmware.com/starteval/order/info

It's my opinion that VMware has a long way to go. But, since this is a virtual desktop blog you may be asking how does all of this affect View and ThinApp and does this mean that View or ThinApp are going away? I don't think so. I predict VMware will retain ownership of these products, although the names my change to something like HorizoView and HorizoApp (Meh, I still like ViewHorizon), but I also believe that VMware management now understands that VDI is a bit player in the desktop space and is planning accordingly.

BTW, I don't work for Amazon or VMware although I do own a shitload of VMware stock.