Using Excel to manage a Virtual Infrastructure

I have always been a big fan of Excel in terms of using it as a graphical user interface for doing things one should probably not think of at first sight: generate Word documents, as a database interface, generate scripts based on input, etc.

This is exactly what Carter Shanklin has done in this video (and the accompanying script). The idea is simple and the solution elegant. It can be applied to a variety of other tasks that require a lot of similar actions.

Under the hood, a little vbscript is used to launch a powershell script that does the job. You need the VI Toolkit for it to work, of course...

Read more at the source.

Seamless VDI Windows (or application publishing)

The famous Brian Madden has written an article which touches upon similar arguments as what I wrote before concerning seamless applications in a VDI context in order to try and understand why the prices for XenDesktop are so low.

It appears Ericom and Quest have products that already enable this feature. VMware is technically able to (as I pointed out). Apparently, Citrix does not offer the feature in its XenDesktop product, maybe Brian is right in suggesting that Citrix can not afford to take away business from its Presentation Server (currently XenApp) product:

The bottom line is the fact that XenDesktop is so cool yet so cheap is really going to come back to haunt Citrix. And they're stuck. They can't raise the price because they have to compete with VMware and Quest. Quest already has the single app VDI publishing feature, but no one is paying too much attention to them (yet). But can you imagine what would happen if VMware added single-user app publishing to their VDI solution? And if they kept the price down to under $200 or so? What would Citrix do then? Talk about game-changing!

Follow the discussion here.