A couple of weeks ago I broached the
topic of user personality
and how critical the ability to maintain the look and feel of a worker's computer would be to the success of a company's desktop virtualization initiatives. I'm picking up that topic here, with a look at another approach.
AppSense has been beating the user personality drum for years, coming out of the terminal server world and now calling its approach "user environment management." In a recent research note, Rachel Chalmers, an analyst with The 451 Group, calls the company a pioneer for its work in separating user settings and preferences from the underlying operating system and applications.
With virtual desktops, a company has to be able to deliver the corporate operating system and applications on-demand from a centralized source. AppSense throws in user environment management as a third layer -- the one that allows the other two to be managed more efficiently. This means IT can deliver not only the standard corporate desktop but also the user's personalized working environment.
What's more, the AppSense products are client-agnostic. "We lift off the user environment, manage it and deliver it back to wherever the next sessions happens to be," describes Martin Ingram, vice president of strategy for AppSense. "This is completely transparent across all platforms."
The user environment includes all the little setting tweaks and application downloads a worker might do in the course of a day. If a user changes the font size in a template and downloads Adobe Reader during one session, for example, that change and software will be part of the desktop image received thereafter -- or at least until another font change or an uninstall.
"The critical point," Ingram says, "is that users need to be able to install the applications they need and have them be maintained" from one session to the next.
AppSense and Tranxition, which I covered in the earlier blog, are among nearly a dozen pure-play user experience providers Chalmers makes note of in her briefing. Others include Atlantis Computing, SlickAccess and UniDesk. As desktop virtualization moves from paper to practice, it'll be interesting to see how these and others make their marks.
Posted by Beth Schultz on 09/29/20090 comments
Most of us know of an older folk or two plagued by memory problems. Such is the case with x86 server virtualization these days. As the technology has aged -- and in its case, proliferated -- memory is becoming an issue.
In fact, ask enterprise IT managers what causes them the most problems as they virtualize their infrastructures and, almost unanimously, they'll reply "memory," contends Andy Mallinger, vice president of marketing for RNA Networks, Inc. Follow up with a question on how they're addressing the problem and they'll say they're adding more physical memory or servers -- costly remedies from budget and overhead perspectives.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 09/16/20090 comments
I've been thinking a bit about virtual appliances lately, prompted in large part by Novell's summer announcement of its SUSE Appliance Program. Under that program, Novell gives independent software vendors (ISV) a helping hand in building, updating, configuring and delivering virtual appliances.
Under the program, which of course is built on top of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, ISVs get access to a free Web-based appliance building tool called SUSE Studio Online. Novell reports that within the first month, 2,000 ISVs signed up for the appliance program, with thousands of people registering for the building tool. It shares these stats:
- 20,000 total requests for new accounts in the first four weeks of the program, with more than one request per minute in the first week alone following the launch.
- 28,000 appliances built.
- 13,000 appliances tested with SUSE Studio's integrated test function.
- Since the beta program started four months ago, more than 27,000 total accounts created.
The draw, Novell says, is being able to create a single integrated stack for an application that can be deployed seamlessly across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.
I recently talked with Daniel Lopez, co-founder of BitRock, a provider of cross-platform deployment tools and services, to get his take.
Lopez says he believes virtual appliances will help BitRock get more of its BitNami open-source applications into users' hands. That's because they'll help address a problem BitRock has seen for its open-source stacks. While a lot of open-source software is fairly advanced, it's also stable and free. Still, some installs require more knowledge than many users possess, and so they skip the download. "It can be hard to set up even though it's not necessarily hard to use," he says.
"We decided to launch virtual appliances to address that gap," Lopez says. "We figured with the rise of virtualization, which is mainstream as of 2008, that people are used to consuming virtual appliances."
So now just about all 30 or so BitNami Stacks, including those for popular applications such as Drupal, SugarCRM and Wordpress, are available as SUSE-based virtual appliances.
For the first month, the number of virtual appliance downloads hit 5,800, or about 10 percent of total BitNami downloads, Lopez says. The folks downloading the appliances must be developers familiar with virtual machines, he reasons. But many end users come to BitNami.org as well, and they haven't gravitated to the appliance offerings yet, he says. "I don't think they know what to do with a virtual machine yet," he adds.
Another consideration, he says, is file size. "Appliances tend to be bigger, say 50 megabytes vs. 250MB," so that may detract the curious, he says. This likely will change, however, as virtualization comes packaged with the operating system, a la what Microsoft is doing with Hyper-V. "Especially as virtualization comes with Windows, people will be much more inclined to download a virtual appliance," he predicts.
So I'm curious: How many virtual appliances are floating around out there in the enterprise, in hardware or software versions? Ping me if you're using a virtual appliance and tell me how it's working.
Posted by Beth Schultz on 09/03/20096 comments
The other morning as my household sprang to life, I could hear the first of my teenage daughters run down the stairs, undoubtedly hurrying to stake a claim on a shared family laptop. Sure enough, the familiar start-up ding sounded not but a few seconds later -- and then, a roar, "WHO CHANGED THE BACKGROUND?!"
I chuckled to myself, tucked away in my home office, working on my own machine that everybody here knows is totally hands-off. When I launch my PC, I know I'll find my familiar screen saver, color scheme, icons and customizations. (Unfortunately, my cell phone is another matter entirely. My kids love to torture me by changing my settings on that device.)
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 08/27/20090 comments
Keeping up with the latest IT lingo can be a challenge for just about any IT executive, and understanding the nuances among the terms is even tougher. Let's look at data center virtualization and private clouds as cases in point.
Tom Nolle, principal at IT consultancy CIMI Corp., tells me that a narrow majority of IT managers he's surveyed say they're interested in deploying private clouds, while the rest claim they're doing data center virtualization -- meaning, they're taking simple server virtualization and spreading it out across multiple servers to create a resource pool. "But the whole notion of cloud computing and data center virtualization are really the same," he says.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 08/19/20092 comments
As chip makers continue upping the ante in the x86 server virtualization game, they're strategizing about what cards to play next. Advanced Micro Devices Inc., for instance, is scrutinizing how it might deal with graphics virtualization -- an increasingly important technology for a world in which virtual clients become the norm.
In a recent conversation, Margaret Lewis, director of virtualization for AMD, discussed how the company is approaching this emerging technology. Graphics being AMD's "lifeline, our blood," understanding this technology is especially important to the company, she says.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 08/12/20090 comments
You can't have a conversation about virtualization these days without the name "VMware" cropping up in one context or another. Lots of other companies offering competitive or complementary products play in the virtualization field, but only VMware has become synonymous with the technology it's hawking.
Well, I guess that's only natural when you hold nearly 90 percent of the x86 server virtualization market.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 08/07/20090 comments
As expected, earlier this week Oracle gathered together Virtual Iron customers for the official rundown on how their hypervisor-of-choice would fare under the company's big red umbrella.
So the deal is done, and development of Virtual Iron's Xen-based hypervisor is no more. Oracle won't sell any new licenses but will support the Virtual Iron hypervisors already serving up workloads. Should a Virtual Iron customer have been planning an expansion of its virtual infrastructure with Virtual Iron, it best come talk to an Oracle rep, said Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle and chief presenter at the customer Webcast.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 07/24/20091 comments
Virtualization watchers have been on tenterhooks waiting to see just what Oracle has planned for Virtual Iron's technology (not to mention Sun's, but I'll leave that discussion for another day). As Keith reported last month in his original, "Oracle Kills Virtualization" post, unconfirmed reports have Oracle ditching Virtual Iron customers. No new licenses. No ongoing support. Not surprising, really.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 07/17/20090 comments
Talk about the future of virtualization and the conversation inevitably comes around to management
-- as in, "How the heck am I going to manage all these virtual machines as I scale out? How am I
going to optimize performance and? How am I going to manage costs?"
Bit by bit, the hypervisor vendors are coughing up the products that make answering these
questions much easier, if not stop the asking all together. VMware's vCenter AppSpeed and vCenter
Chargeback are the two latest examples, introduced early last week.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 07/14/20090 comments
Hi all. Just wanted to take a few minutes to introduce myself. I'm Beth Schultz, Virtualization Review's latest blogger.
I'm a longtime IT journalist, most recently overseeing next-generation IT infrastructure coverage for a special editorial supplement series at Network World. Over the years, I've heard and seen a lot on virtualization, from those early days of "Huh? What's this all about?" to today's almost mainstream conversations about the technology. Watching the technology evolve has been fun, and things are really heating up now, with more and more enterprises moving virtualization into full-scale production environments and the never-ending talk of the inevitable 100-percent virtual data center.
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Posted by Beth Schultz on 07/13/20090 comments