In my 2015 predictions article, I predicted that Citrix would acquire FSLogix, and that it would introduce new products and enter the hyperconvergence market. Well, that didn't take long: The company announced at Citrix Summit this week the introduction of WorkspacePOD, its hyperconvergence solution, along with the acquisition of Sanbolic.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/15/20150 comments
As we turn the page on 2014 and begin looking ahead to 2015, it quickly becomes apparent that 2015 will not be an ordinary year for IT. Fueled by innovation, new product introduction, advanced services and new marketing tools -- and, of course, mergers and acquisitions -- I expect 2015 to go down in the books as a defining year for technology. Here's a glimpse into what to expect.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/18/20140 comments
Amazon AWS is most certainly starting to feel the competitive pressure from cloud rival Microsoft Azure. One advantage Microsoft has, which it hammers home consistently, is that combining Azure with System Center creates a centralized, single pane of glass management environment.
In response, AWS recently released AWS System Manager, a plugin for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) that allows enterprises to centrally manage their AWS EC2 instances from within SCVMM. Amazon has done well by recognizing the threat and acting on it.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/12/20140 comments
While both VMware and Citrix have technologies in their desktop virtualization products that are similar to the Apple Continuity feature, they suffer from a significant drawback. Today they offer a user the ability to launch resources on one device; should the user change locations or use a different device, his active resources (desktop applications) are automatically moved to the new device. This is a simple and seamless disconnect/reconnect operation in the background, which moves an active session from device A to device B without user input.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/22/20140 comments
Microsoft Hyper-V is continuously improving its support for Linux distributions, but some occasional manual tweaking is necessary to accomplish tasks.
Take, for example, an installation of Ubuntu in a Hyper-V VM. If you try to change the screen resolution from the GUI, you'll find that it's impossible. This is despite the fact that there is full integration between Hyper-V VMs and Ubuntu distribution, and this integration also includes a virtual video driver.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/29/20140 comments
Lately, I've been having conversations with several customers on design principles and approaches to the public cloud. What I've noticed is that many IT pros have taken an overly simplistic approach to the public cloud, viewing it as a mere replica of their on-premise, highly virtualized environments.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/02/20140 comments
On the eve of VMworld 2014, I can't help but be excited about the potential number of announcements expected at this year's show. As I consider past VMworlds, I've seen an evolution: the conference has moved past the point of being a place to announce the next version of vSphere, to become the focal point around which the entire industry revolves. Vendors wait for the event to launch new products, new companies come out of stealth mode, and customers leverage it to plot their course of action and plan ahead. That's a long way to come for a company that began with a single product that abstracted server hardware from software.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/07/20140 comments
Today there is a definite trend, or as some may like to call it, a "wave" for hyper-converged systems that take a more modular, Google/Facebook-like approach to datacenter build out. While the concept of converged infrastructure has been around for many years, hyper-converged is a twist on that with a smaller form factor and true convergence between the different components. I say "true" because some of us -- myself included -- would even classify the traditional converged infrastructures as mere reference architectures with a unified management software layer. But that's a controversial topic for a another day.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/29/20140 comments
In our industry, customers have the misconception that software has to work out of the box for everyone. While that expectation is true for the most part, when it comes to a platform that hosts your desktops and applications it is very difficult to configure the software to work right out of the box for all environments, given the different variables that exist. Maybe, one day when Big Data Analytics is truly mastered and matured it can be incorporated into our software to be able to tune and configure appropriately. Until then, we stuck doing the hard work manually.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/07/20140 comments
This is not really a new tip, but I have been coming across so many customers lately that either are not virtualizing vCenter because they have had a bad experience or because they believe that this is a core infrastructure piece that needs to remain outside of the virtual environment it manages. I am of the opinion that vCenter should be virtualized and that there is only goodness that comes out of virtualizing vCenter server. That being said, like with everything in life, doing it right makes all the difference in the world.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/30/20140 comments
One of the complaints I typically hear about Hyper-V is that while Windows performance is quite solid, when it comes to Linux the performance is just not there. Today, I want to introduce you to a tip that will improve your Linux VM performance anywhere from 20 to 30 percent.
Linux kernel 2.6 and newer offer four different I/O elevators -- that is, it uses four different algorithms to accommodate different workloads and provide optimal performance. These elevators are:
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/23/20140 comments
Quick Tip #1: Today I want to cover a quick Microsoft Hyper-V tip that is simple and very straight forward in nature but seems to go overlooked with many customers.
For those of you that were not aware, there is a Hyper-V Administrators group available locally to every Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 which can allow any member to have full Hyper-V administrative control without necessarily belonging to the Local Administrators group on that machine.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/16/20140 comments