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.

The importance of (VMware) Unity

I'll start this post by talking about Citrix instead of VMware...

Part I: About Citrix's Seamless Applications

One of the things that Citrix has offered enterprises for many years already is the integration of a remote desktop with a local desktop by means of seamless windows. In theory, one does not need to know whether an application is running locally or on the server: it looks the same and reacts the same. This is important, especially if you note that Microsoft released a similar feature only with their just-released (2008) version of the Windows server OS.

Part II: About VDI

As an alternative to server based computing, VDI is gaining a lot of momentum lately. For specific users and workload, running a desktop on a virtualization platform can have significant benefits over traditional fat clients or server based computing.

The idea remains the same, however, and remote desktop protocols are required to transfer relevant data over the wire. In practice, what we 'see' on the client side is a published desktop, not an application. This is where the final part comes in:

Part III: Seamless VDI

What if we need just 1 application from our corporate VDI desktop and not the full desktop environment (with icons, Start menu, etc.)? We would need seamless applications for a VDI desktop.

Citrix obviously is able to achieve this with XenDesktop (they did it with Presentation Server), and now VMware is ready too. The technical roadblock that is required to embed applications running in a virtual desktop on the local machine is tackled. The rest is a matter of using an appropriate remote desktop protocol.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of VMware VDI/VDM support 'seamless' VDI applications, embedded in the local client desktop.

VMware Workstation 6.5 beta: Unity

Unity is a feature in the new beta of VMware Workstation that allows users to see only specific windows inside the VM, as opposed to a complete virtualized desktop. The feature exists already in VMware Fusion, the Mac counterpart of Workstation. This feature is long awaited and a welcome addition to the functionality of the product.

I was expecting a lot of comments about how this is a major roadblock in the ongoing battle with Citrix and Microsoft. I didn't find any references in the line of what I was thinking, so I will put them here. See my next post for what I think is the importance of Unity.

VMware vscsiStats: The paper

I wrote about vscsiStats before, but it seems I was amongst the first to do so. Luckily, one of the creators has put some more info on his blog. In this post, he refers to his paper about the technology.