Virtualisation on the Graphics Card with NVIDIA

So even the graphics card is now virtualised! Surely this has great opportunities to VDI solutions ultimately.

So how do you virtualise the Graphics Card? Well there are three stages to it:

1. A Chipset that provides I/O virtualisation technologies
2. A hypervisor that can support them
3. A graphics card that can handle multiple requests from multiple virtual machines at a single time.
   

Currently this is supported by:

• Intel (Xeon 5500 series,codenamed Nehalem with Intel VT-d technology)
• NVIDIA announced the SLI Multi-OS technology contained with the new Quadro FX3800, 4800 and 5800 cards
• Parallels announced an impending release of a new edition of Workstation capable of supporting Intel-VT and NVIDIA Multi-OS

Should be an interesting product moving forward in the VDI space.

Citrix Finally Release Apple iPhone Client

After teasing the IT world for months a preview version of Citrix's ICA Receiver is now available for free in the iPhone App Store

As part of Citrix Receiver they are also providing a new feature called Doc Finder that runs on XenApp but provides an iPhone experience to allow users to easily find, view, edit and send documents. Because the Documents are hosted securely in the data center nothing is downloaded and Doc Finder provides fast one click access to all of your important files.

More information can be found here

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.5

In 2008 Veeam added additional capability to its Report tool through launching Enterprise services. The main differences between standard and enterprise were reporting the changes happening in large scale virtual infrastructures.

W/C 23/03/09 Veeam released a new Enterprise Edition - version 3.5 which amongst other features incorporated a couple of essential features:

• Support for Microsoft PowerShell
• Custom Reports

The new version also extends data capture and reporting to the networking layer.

New Citrix Videos Released detailing Citrix Essentials Provisioning, Lab Management and StorageLink

Citrix recently announced that their enterprise class Hypervisor - XenServer is FoC and have experienced unprecedented downloads to their website since the announcement. XenServer has many great benefits included in the FoC version including Virtual Machine Live Migration, resource pooling and storage management.

But to provide a greater level of management Citrix also announced Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and XenServer and to support this they have just released some very interesting videos of three of the features in Essentials; Dynamic Provisioning Services, Automated Lab Management and Advanced StorageLink technology.

Citrix HDX Technology

Citrix have integrated a whole host of technologies under the HDX banner to provide improved performance to the end user, without reading all about it on the Citrix website, this animation may just help you in understanding more about it! Enjoy....

Citrix Braeburn?

No its not an apple - not quite anyway, it's Citrix on the Apple iPhone.

Citrix have been working on an ICA client for sometime now and have just completed a beta phase of the client.

With Apple iPhone predicted to become a corporate device this makes perfect business sense.

The iPhone client is not just a standard client, Citrix are redefining the end user experience with what they are calling the Citrix Receiver.

The first edition of the iPhone client will be released to the AppStore in H1 2009.

Manage your VMware vSphere install anywhere...

... that will be VMware vCMA.

VMware have just announced a new component for vSphere 4.0 - vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA).

vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. Specifically, it allows you to:

• Search for virtual machines in your data center
• Migrate virtual machines from one host to another using vMotion
• Execute recovery plans using VMware Site Recovery Manager
• Access Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events.

More effective to see it in action!!, here you are:

In order for you to access vCMA, you will need to deploy a virtual appliance; call it the vCMA server. The vCMA server must be connected to VMware vCenter or any of the ESX servers that you want to manage. Once the server component is set up, you can manage your datacenter from the convenience of your mobile phone.

Microsoft Release Med-V 1.0 Beta

In 2008 Microsoft acquired Kidaro which focused on corporate virtual machine security.

The product was originally named Managed Workspace and has now been renamed to Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V)

Microsoft officially plans to release the product in H2 2009 as part of the MDOP package which means the end user needs an enterprise agreement with Software Assurance.

The MDOP pack is great in principle but is considered an annoyance to many end users who simply need key elements of MDOP but can't afford or see value in software assurance, MDOP comprises:

• App-V
• Asset Inventory
• Diagnostics and Recovery
• Group Policy Management
• System Center Desktop Monitoring
• Med-V

The download comes as a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine and its pre-configured to show the use of legacy applications in a Windows XP SP 3 virtual environment on top of a Windows Vista host.

The 1GB package will expire on June 30, 2009.

Every VM Helps!

Tesco has recently made an announcement revealing their new virtualisaiton platform based upon HP Blade Technology and Citrix XenServer. The architecture has seen the virtualisaiton of 1,500 servers which are capable of handling four times as many sales per second.

Tesco (LSE:TSCO), Britain’s leading supermarket chain, has announced pioneering updates to its mission-critical Real Time Sales (RTS) systems, virtualising key business applications with Citrix® XenServer™ running on HP ProLiant BL680c G5 blade servers. With infrastructure from Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) in place, Tesco has increased its RTS capacity by 75 percent, handling 1,500 sales-related messages per second – catering to the critical nature of the RTS systems and creating room for growth. This is a major milestone in Tesco’s plans to virtualise its entire server infrastructure.

Tesco began investigating virtualisation as an alternative to adding more physical servers to handle its growing capacity demands as well as fulfilling its community commitment to reduce carbon emission levels. While adding physical servers would require an increase in power and cooling, virtualisation has better equipped Tesco to hit its target of reducing carbon emissions from its UK datacenters by 20 percent.

“After conducting a major evaluation of virtualisation providers, we went with Citrix based on the strength of the Xen® technology, the ability XenServer has to provide high levels of performance for heavy duty 64-bit applications, its licensing model and its UK-based engineering team – decisions that have already paid off for us,” said Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco. “The virtualised RTS environment uses less than half of the energy of the physical bare metal equivalents, which supports our CO₂ targets and means we have already saved a significant amount on our electricity bills. We’re running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler. While our primary goal in working with Citrix and HP was to create a more flexible IT infrastructure, the consolidation benefits are significant.”

After the success of the initial project to virtualise RTS, Tesco has continued to deploy XenServer for its major server consolidation project. Citrix is working closely with Tesco to virtualise 1,500 physical servers on XenServer, including 80 Citrix® XenApp™ servers. This is already bringing greater efficiencies to the way applications are delivered to each Tesco store. Tesco is aiming for a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio for physical to virtual servers and is hitting 70 percent CPU utilization on the servers, versus the previous six percent.

XenServer is running on 64-bit HP ProLiant BL680C G5 blade servers with HP StorageWorks XP24000 SANs for enterprise-wide storage. HP’s four-socket, four-core machines for blade servers were a clear differentiator for Tesco at the time of purchase. Resilience through the solution ensures there is no single point of failure, which is essential for a business-critical application like RTS. And because Citrix licenses for advanced virtualisation management capabilities are charged per server instead of per socket, Tesco is not penalized for using larger blade servers.

The Citrix solution dynamically provisions both virtual and physical servers, resulting in increased IT responsiveness and agility by enabling capacity on-demand, and the ability to dynamically manage provisioning for disaster recovery and business continuity. In addition, XenServer is optimized for XenApp, providing customers with enhanced scalability and faster performance for Windows application delivery running in a virtualised environment.

Citrix to Catch up with DPM?

In the upcoming and eagerly awaited release of vSphere 4.0 (aka Virtual Infrastructure) VMware will be dropping the "experimental" state of its Distributed Power Management Technology.

It’s not yet clear how much DPM will impact the data center operations today, but CPU power management certainly is a feature that is influencing the roadmaps of several vendors:

• Intel will release a Dynamic Power Node Manager with its upcoming Nehalem CPU
• Microsoft will release Core Parking and CPU power consumption controls as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which Hyper-V 2.0 will leverage

Microsoft Releases SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta Program

Just two months after opening the public beta of Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft is now launching the public beta of SCVMM 2008 R2.

This beta build introduces the following features:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management
• Enhanced support for Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts (including support for multiple virtual machines per LUN by using CSV)
• Support for multiple LUNs per iSCSI target
• Support for host’s “Maintenance Mode”
• Support of disjoint domains
• Use of defined port groups with VMware vCenter.

Interested then contact Dataplex to learn more.

Citrix Client Hypervisor Previewed

Citrix at VMworld Europe had their Project Independence on demonstration for all to see, and recently there has been some murmurs about the architecture. The code is currently in alpha release so is naturally going to go through many iterations to ensure adoption upon general release.

The Citrix client hypervisor is a Xen-based hypervisor and will have primary / parent partition that will boot first and will be used to access the hardware. Dual boot between primary OS with hypervisor and primary OS without hypervisor is possible. Right now only Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 are supported in the primary partition.

After the primary partition is loaded, the other virtual machines can be managed through a web interface in the primary partition. The user will be given the option to check out a VM to take it offline.

There is the ability to publish an application from a Virtual Machine into the primary session, this means an application can run in a background VM but can be executed in the primary VM, Citrix are using the ICA technology to make this available.

Anyway it looks interesting, we will have to see how the parent partition handles resource consumption as it is constantly running.

No doubt Synergy will be the big splash for this release, and if you are from the UK and not able to make Synergy but want to keep up to date with the releases we will be presenting our information on all things Citrix at our Synergy update event in Chalfont, click here to register.