It's not often that you find a commercial for-profit company that is willing to develop really useful tools and utilities. For the virtualization admin, Veeam's free tools -- notably, FastSCP -- has been an invaluable tool for many years. Today, Veeam ups the ante: The company has given the virtualization community yet another free tool, Veeam Backup and Replication 6.1, which is now available in a limited-feature capacity, free of charge.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/04/20121 comments
The VMworld 2012 excitement is definitely heating up and for those of you who really want to keep some of us nervous all summer long, vote for our sessions. VMworld 2012 public session voting is now open and will remain so until June 8.
VMware receives an enormous amount of sessions each year and factors in public voting to determine what sessions should be delivered at VMworld. This year, I have two sessions, 1857 and 1978, that I am hoping you are interested in and as a result can help get them selected by voting for them. Creating a VMworld account is free and that is the only way you can vote, and you can create an account whether or not you are attending VMworld. The link to VMworld is at www.vmworld.com.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/30/20123 comments
I have been hoping and expecting VMware to acquire Unidesk for years now. Instead, it ended up acquiring the cousin of Unidesk, Wanova.
VMware made a very good move, as Wanova has very good technology. Still, is it good enough to position VMware to own the desktop virtualization market like they currently do the server virtualization? The answer is no. VMware still has a few purchases to make before that happens.
I have been touting for a while now that in order for VMware to be on par with Citrix from the standpoint of features, capabilities and flexibility at the desktop level, it needs to
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/22/201210 comments
If you have not installed and tried Desktop Director for XenApp 6.5 servers, then you are missing out on some great functionality that I am sure your support staff will appreciate. Desktop Director is the support management console available with XenDesktop. It allows for helpdesk to view and interact with users that are connected to the system. These users, in XenDesktop's case, are
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/21/20120 comments
What constitutes a desktop? It is a framework, a workspace for aggregating resources in the form of data and applications and the ability to use applications to manipulate data and produce a desired result. In the move to cloud computing we expect this new workspace or desktop to be accessible and available from anywhere on any device for all applications and data. What better place to do all that other than from
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/16/20120 comments
If I was to summarize last week's Citrix Synergy I would put it like this: the energy was high and the show was great!. It's really great, at least for me personally, to see Citrix evolve so much, to think that at one point this company was a single-product company. It feels like it was that so long ago. Citrix has truly diversified its portfolio and
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/14/20126 comments
It's been six years since Microsoft acquired Softricity, the company that developed the App-V product which was at the time called Softgrid. Since that acquisition and with the exception of renaming the product, Microsoft had done very little with the software aside from some minor upgrades, patches and hotfixes. That's all about to change.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/25/20122 comments
Many of you posted good comments on the XenServer blog
I wrote
a few weeks ago and so many others e-mailed me about XenServer that I have decided to follow it up with another article. I almost think it is a good idea to post side by side typical commands that are used in VMware vSphere and how they translate in XenServer and Hyper-V.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/23/20120 comments
Microsoft this week announced a new feature that will be available for Hyper-V version 3 and System Center Configuration Manager 2012: shared-nothing live migration. In so many words, it's the ability to move a virtual machine while it is powered on from one host to another without requiring shared storage.
While I am very excited to see this welcome feature for Hyper-V, which reinforces a much-needed notion of creativity at Microsoft, the feature is not a game changer by any stretch of the imagination. Let's take a look at how it works:
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/18/201217 comments
The acquisitions season for virtualization giants Citrix and VMware is approaching. Traditionally, we have seen Citrix and VMware announce new acquisitions right around the same time of their conferences taking place.
And since we are on the heels of Citrix Synergy in San Francisco next month, I am betting that Citrix will announce an acquisition of a mobile device management company to augment CloudGateway's capabilities. Many players in this space are prime candidates for an acquisition with a great product and great mind share in the industry, namely Zenprise, MobileIron, AirWatch, MaaS 360 and others.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/16/20120 comments
Microsoft System Center 2012 is packed with new capabilities aimed at addressing today's technology challenges. If I had to summarize what System Center 2012 was about, I would simply say it's about private clouds and mobile device management, two of the hottest topics in the IT world today.
Microsoft is betting the company's future on cloud, and one of the manifestations of that bet is the strong emphasis on private cloud in System Center 2012, with capabilities ranging from self-service to automation and orchestration. Furthermore,
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/11/20120 comments
MDOP, or Microsoft Optimization Pack, is welcoming this Wednesday a new star member dubbed User Experience Virtualization. Microsoft went against the flow and used the term "experience" as opposed to the well-established and popular "environment," which is used industry wide. UE-V will be released in beta first and will be positioned to enhance a desktop virtualization rollouts.
The idea behind UE-V is to
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/09/20123 comments