Great news on VDI licensing

March 19, 2010

Yesterday, Microsoft made an important announcement regarding virtual desktops. Currently, if you want to use any form of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, you need to pay an additional fee for a Virtualised Enterprise Centralised Desktop (VECD)  license. The headline news is that the replacement for VECD, Virtual Desktop Access (VDA), will be a Software Assurance Benefit as of 1st July – so effectively free of charge to customers who maintain Software Assurance on their desktop operating system licenses. If you don’t have SA, VDA will be slightly cheaper than VECD.

This is really good news for anyone operating in the desktop virtualisation space, as it removes one of the blockers to adoption of this technology. It’s fantastic news for our customers as it means that they can make a decision on which technology to use independent of the licensing costs. There are seriously compelling reasons now for ensuring that you have SA on your desktop operating systems now, with VDA included and access to MDOP for a pittance – which gives you App-V for application among other things. Looks like a very cost-effective way of gaining access to some of the most exciting recent technology developments around desktop delivery.

Interesting also to see Microsoft taking the fight to VMware PCoIP with their forthcoming RemoteFX 3D and graphics acceleration technology, which will be extended by the impressive Citrix HDX. Microsoft are certainly serious about the partnership with Citrix, and those two are equally serious in their desire to compete for the virtual desktop with VMware.

Whichever vendor you favour, the real winners here are current and potential customers of VDI technology. Not only is your choice increased, but the licensing terms will be considerably more favourable come 1st July!

Posted in Desktops, Virtualisation | Leave a Comment »

Softcat: Best Company to work for!

March 1, 2010

I’m immensley proud that the company I work for, Softcat, was announced on Sunday as the best small company to work for in the Sunday Times sponsored awards. More here: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/career_and_jobs/best_100_companies/
We’re recruiting if you want to join us!

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Coming soon: client hypervisors

February 8, 2010

I’ve usually got a technology are or two to bang on about as my ‘next big thing’. My current obsession is the advent, theoretically within the next six months, of ‘client hypervisors’. As I mentioned in my earlier post about ‘Next Generation Desktops’, we’re seeing a lot of interest from people looking to change the way they ‘do’ desktops, and it seems to me that client hypervisors will be in interesting option.

The basic premise is a bare-metal hypervisor that is installed on the local desktop/ laptop, enabling one or more VMs to run locally on that hardware. Management tools should allow the IT department to deploy, secure, backup and maintain from a central point – at this stage it appears that the primary management platform will be through the major VDI platforms – this will effectively be ‘off-line VDI. Of course, the benefit of a bare-metal, Type-1 hypervisor over VMware Player or Microsoft Virtual PC is mainly in performance through direct access to the hardware.

I can see a few benefits of this model to IT departments:

Ease of management and deployment: truly driver-independent images (just needs to support the hypervisor); a backup copy of the VM, possibly synchronised at regular intervals, can be kept and re-issued in the event of hardware failure or VM corruption. If you’re going down the thin client route with VMware View or Citrix, you’ll be able to manage your offline desktops through the same tool.

Contractors: Assuming your contractors have appropriate hardware (hey, you could even demand this!), you can issue a secure, time-limited VM for them to use whilst doing work on your behalf.

Consumerisation of IT: My personal favourite – and something we are talking about internally at Softcat: give your users a laptop allowance, let them buy whatever suits them within certain parameters, and deliver them a secure, managed VM on which to do their work. IT no longer have any hardware to worry about, and hopefully you have a happier user community – who, perhaps, take more care of ‘their’ equipment,

I know that Intel, VMware and Citrix are hard at work on this stuff, and my understanding is that we should be seeing some commercial availability around the middle of 2010. Exciting stuff? I think it is…

Posted in Desktops, Virtualisation | 1 Comment »

Snow business?

January 11, 2010

As a technology company, we’re as guilty as anyone of thinking about ‘disaster recovery’ being all about ensuring that IT systems keep running in any eventuality. The recent snow puts a different perspective on things though, as almost the reverse is true in that our systems were unaffected, but quite a few people cound’t get into the office. Whether it’s snow, swine flu or something else, the conversation needs to be about ‘business continuity’ rather than DR.

Believe it or not, despite the disruption, we had a really busy and successful week. We’re well-equipped with remote systems access through a combination of Terminal Services and Citrix, and of course good old Outlook Web Access – so everyone had some level of ability to continue to work.

One area which we are looking to improve on is the phone side of things. Our aging Nortel phone system is scheduled for replacement in February. We’re moving to a Cisco Call Manager platform which will enable us to ‘log in’ to our phones from anywhere and use ‘single number reach’ to ensure we are available even if we aren’t in the office. In the event, about 40 people made it in so the phones were well covered – but this will be much improved next time round.

As usual, the snow has occasioned a fairly hefty degree of interest in remote access solutions and unified communications. As you can see we are in the process of ‘eating our own dogfood’! If you want to know more, we’re running events on both subjects, and on broader business continuity, in January and February. See http://www.softcat.com/seminars for dates.

Posted in DR/BC/HA | Leave a Comment »

Neverfail vAppHA

January 6, 2010

I was fortunate enough, just before Christmas, to be invited to play with a new product coming soon from Neverfail, vAppHA. I’ve been hearing about this for a while, and it was great to see it actually working.

Neverfail have had a great partnership with VMware for some time (VMware’s vCenter Heartbeat is actually Neverfail for vCenter!), and vAppHA looks like it will extend this. We’ve been deploying VMware for about four years now, typically as much to improve availability as to consolidate physical servers. We’re great fans of the built-in high-availability features within VMware.

However, as good as VMware HA, vMotion and FT are, they don’t have very much in the way of application awareness. This is where vAppHA steps in. It uses Neverfail’s application aware technology, and uses the information garnered from that to trigger VMware events – making HA for example a much better bet for applicaion availability.

Envisage, for example, a SQL server running as a virtual machine. If a service stops, VMware unfortunately will be blissfully unaware. However, vAppHA recognises this and will the trigger an event of your chosing – for example, the restart of that virtual machine on another host. This provides a layer of ‘self-healing’ within your virtual infrastructure, up to the application layer, that didn’t exist before.

Coupled with an intelligent storage layer such as HP LeftHand which will enable you to stretch your VMware cluster over two sites on the same campus, this could be even more useful. It’s certainly something we’re looking forward to having in our kit-bag once it’s released to the world. For what it’s worth the pricing looks pretty fair too.

UPDATE (1/3/2010): Free trial now available here: http://www.neverfailgroup.com/virtualization/vapphatrial.html

Posted in DR/BC/HA, Virtualisation | 1 Comment »

Next Generation Desktops?

December 8, 2009

It seems me that there is a bit of a ‘perfect storm’ around desktops at the minute:

  • The ‘credit crunch’ means that everyone is looking at reducing costs, and desktops are always under the spotlight.
  • The ‘credit crunch’ has also meant that many people have put off upgrading devices for some time
  • Whilst VDI might be the latest industry buzzword, it has at least reignited conversations around server-based computing
  • And of course there’s a lot of fuss around Windows 7 (hey, we’re halfway through rolling it out internally at Softcat!

The upshot of all this is that there are a lot of IT departments who want to, or need to, upgrade their desktop estates – but who don’t want to do it the same way again!

Perhaps this could best be referred to as delivering ‘desktops as a service’ – or provisioning users rather than physical devices. The basic premise is managing desktops through separation of the hardware, operating system, applications, profile and data. Today the options for ‘doing desktops differently’ are primarily based on some form of desktop virtualisation (I’m not talking about pure hosted virtual desktops, rather encouraging people to look again at the desktop and application delivery technologies available) or through the use of a client management tool such as Altiris, Frontrange, SCCM or KACE. I’m also following with interest the developments around client hypervisors (Brian Madden writes intelligently about this approach here) – that could be the best of both worlds and a simple approach to deploying desktops in a very straightforward manner.

How are you going to be ‘doing desktops differently’ through 2010, Windows 7 and beyond?

Update (19/3/2010) we are running an event on exactly this subject. Registration will be available shortly here.

Posted in Desktops, Software Asset Management | 3 Comments »

HP and Cisco battle hots up!

November 12, 2009

Late last night UK time, I read on Twitter (via Mashable) that HP had bought 3COM. Funnily enough I’d been at HP that morning and someone had whispered that an acqusition in that space was on the cards (which we had guessed anyway). I guess I wasn’t expecting it that quickly!

I asked Steve Burnley, head of our networking business for a snapshot summary, and this is what he gave me:

–          Gives HP a routing platform to compete with Cisco at both the business and service provider level

–          Security – Tippingpoint is a strong (but very under-developed in Europe) product range – very big in the US

–          3Com switch will be discontinued as quickly as they possibly can.

 –          They’re still missing an FCoE platform, but Brocade could yet fit that bill

I’m pleased to say Steve didn’t spot that one coming, and I’m hoping his shares in another networking vendor aren’t hit too hard! We’ll see if his predictions come true. I’ll look forward to a briefing on Tippingpoint.

This is only going to accelerate the battle between HP and Cisco, which I am watching with interest from fairly close to the sidelines….

Official release here: 

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091111xa.html

Posted in IT Channel | 2 Comments »

Well, that was rather easier than expected!

November 10, 2009

I’ve recently become a bit of a social media fanatic – not in a personal sense, although I do use Facebook sporadically to keep up with friends – mainly consuming, rather than updating. Rather, I’ve started using Twitter pretty hectically – it seems to have become a pretty good way of connecting with people, sharing ideas etc – in a business related sense, something that never really happened for me with Facebook.

In a way it is a bit of a shame that the two aren’t one and the same, but actually I quite like keeping work and personal separate. I was delighted to see today that you can now push Twitter updates to Linkedin and vice versa – thanks Mashable for that – http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/twitter-linkedin-sync. I’ve set it up already and it works very well. Must remember to keep my Tweets business related….

Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

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