Oracle's recent acquisition of Xsigo raised a lot of questions. Many concluded that this was Oracle's way of hitting back at VMware's acquisition of Nicira, but I believe that not to be true, as Xsigo and Nicira are not the same.
Xsigo's technology aims at virtualizing I/O and reducing cable count, whereas Nicira allows you to build complete computer networks. They both do share one similarity in that they reduce proprietary networking equipment.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/01/20123 comments
If you are just starting to dabble with Windows Server 2012 and specifically with Hyper-V 3.0, you may find it a bit confusing since there are three different ways of installing the Hyper-V role. You can install it on Windows Server Core 2012, Windows Server Minimal Installation and the regular full-blown version of Windows Server 2012.
Windows Server Core is a very lightweight installation with access limited to the command line and PowerShell. Minimal installation has limited access to the MMC and Control Panel. The full Windows Server 2012 install has full GUI access.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/30/20127 comments
It is no big secret that I am a huge believer in cloud computing, so much so that I think enterprise-owned or -managed datacenters or infrastructures will be the exception in the next 10 years, with enterprise datacenters existing only for very specific use cases.
From a technical and cost perspective, cloud computing is a great model. But one of the things I failed to factor into my relentless excitement about cloud computing is the fact that now that we have taken computing into the clouds, we have little to no control over natural disasters and our ability to recover from them.
Now, I'm not talking about earthly natural disasters, those we can somewhat protect against by building redundancy, geo-replication etc. Instead, I'm talking about the unearthly ones, such as space weather that could disrupt and destroy, like solar flares.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/23/20126 comments
Registering a virtual machine with the hypervisor is a handy tool that can be used when moving VMs between hosts, changing storage locations or even manual creation of virtual machines. Hyper-V 3 in Windows Server 2012 has some new advanced features for registering a virtual machine and options for importing them into Hyper-V.
To get started, launch Hyper-V Manager, select your host in the left node, right-click and select Import Virtual Machine. The Import Virtual Machine wizard launches and you are presented with the "before you begin" welcome screen; click the Next button to continue.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/18/20123 comments
Lately, I have been coming across many customers that are not leveraging the full potential of Citrix provisioning services simply because they are not configuring the product the right way. Basically, they are using it with all the defaults configured during installation.
One of those defaults, if not modified, will limit Citrix Provisioning Services to support only 160 devices. These devices can range from physical or virtual, but if you are planning on using the product for VDI, for instance, and you will be supporting more than 160 devices, I suggest you keep reading.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/16/20121 comments
Now that Dell acquired Quest and is already touting the idea of an end-to-end, single-throat-to-choke desktop virtualization solution, does it make sense for Citrix to respond by acquiring Nutanix? Citrix is already in the hardware business with NetScaler and Branch Repeater, so the concept is not foreign to the company at all, and the Nutanix appliance would fit perfectly in Citrix's line of business solutions such as VDI-in-a-Box and XenDesktop.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/11/201217 comments
Michael Dell should give that credit card a breather, and explain to us what the overall vision is for his company. Where do all these acquisitions fit? What is the story, Michael? I look at Citrix, VMware, Cisco, EMC, etc., and I see a story, I understand what they are doing, I look at Dell and I see acquisitions but no one is taking the time to give us a story, to dazzle us with some thought leadership. I am sure someone at Dell understands where all these pieces fit and what they are trying to accomplish.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/09/20120 comments
I can't seem to stop writing about Microsoft, and as I have been touting for a while now, the company is in high innovation mode, striking on multiple fronts and it seems to be in a hurry, acquiring where it needs to, improving where it needs to and building where it must.
Just last week I was discussing whether or not the company would build or buy a tablet and Microsoft unveils Surface. I still think they will acquire RIM or Nokia. The latter is what I am leaning towards as its current stock price is ideal, but we will see.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/27/20120 comments
IntelliCache is a Citrix XenServer technology that was developed to ease the I/O traffic that VDI environments place on shared storage. It is used in conjunction with XenDesktop Machine Creation Services (MCS).
In a nutshell, IntelliCache caches blocks of data accessed from shared storage locally. For example, if your master Windows 7 image resides in shared storage, the first VM that launches on a particular host will get its bits from that shared storage. At that point IntelliCache kicks in and saves those blocks; for Windows 7, IntelliCache will reserve about 200MB. The subsequent VMs that launch on this host will no longer need to connect to shared storage; instead, the VMs will get their bits from the locally cached copy, and so on.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/20/20120 comments
Microsoft has traditionally done very well in the hardware business. I can honestly say I like all Microsoft hardware platforms, from the traditional keyboards and mice all the way to the Xbox. Speaking of Xbox, who would have thought that Microsoft would turn the Xbox into such a success, given the stiff competition from Sony and Nintendo at the time? But the company did it.
Microsoft now faces a new challenge: Its phone and tablet market share is off the charts -- that is, it's literally off the charts. With Microsoft recently announcing that it will be building its own Windows tablet, it begs the question: Will Microsoft buy a company and build tablets and phones? Or will Microsoft follow its traditional, very successful hardware endeavors of building those devices from the ground up?
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/18/20125 comments
Is it arrogant for a company the size of Nutanix to take on the giants of our industry by saying FU-SAN? It is most definitely arrogant, but I most certainly like that because that arrogance hides a solid technical solution and an innovative perspective, a new way of thinking that essentially says that “monolithic” infrastructures are great but they are not the only game in town.
If we look at all the large cloud deployments, the likes of Google, Facebook and others we will quickly notice that they use commodity hardware in a grid computing type approach. That is not to say that they don't have shared storage or SAN, but they have much more of these nodes that together form their compute fabric, except these nodes would need a layer, a file system that connects them together to yield the desired results.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/13/20122 comments
I am finding that a lot of my customers are starting to realize that they can deliver a more cost effective desktop to users by leveraging Terminal Services with Citrix XenApp, but in most cases they want to be able to provide the same look and feel that Windows 7 delivers rather than a server operating system like Windows Server 2008. For that matter, Citrix XenApp 6.5 includes an Enhanced Desktop Experience feature that can offer that Windows 7 look and feel.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/06/20122 comments