One of the major announcements today that has gotten customers worked up a little bit is the change in the licensing model with vSphere 5.0. In previous versions licenses were tied to the number CPU sockets, and the various editions had limitations on maximum physical memory supported and the number...
When migrating towards a VDI environment you really have to re-think your entire architecture. Servers, hypervisor, storage, application delivery, network, and everything in between. Simple things like anti-virus can wreck havoc and cause massive I/O storms that bring your VDI environment to its knees. One aspect that I hadn't thought...
During a VDI pilot you really need to gather some real-world stats on how your client VMs are performing. People generally underestimate the workload VDI can put on a SAN. Thankfully if you are using vSphere 4.x, you can easily pull the stats with a short PowerShell script. I took...
According to Citrix, the number one mistake people make when deploying VDI is not sizing their storage properly for performance. However, calculating a target IOPS for your environment is far from easy and you really need to understand VDI, its unique workloads, and your storage subsystem. There are many blogs...
This session was presented by two non-Microsoft speakers: Benny Tritsch from AppSense and Shawn Bass from Syn-Net. After seeing their extensive testing methodology and the presentation of the results, I feel confident that the results are accurate and as neutral as one could get. The whole session was presenting the...
This session went into great gory depth on how RemoteFX works, and the hardware requirements. What is RemoteFX? RemoteFX is a new technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 that when combined with a VDI environment allows efficient host-side rendering of graphics and multimedia. It requires...
This session was also very good, but a higher level session that didn't discuss any particular technical solutions. In fact the speaker said he's solution agnostic, as any given company has many scenarios and there's no one size fits all solution. The speaker is a Microsoft strategist, who talks to...
You know, sometimes Microsoft drops the ball on some TechEd sessions. WCL324 is one that the ball got dropped on. While the presented content was useful, it in no way reflected the course title or description and to make it worse, only took 25 of the 75 minutes. So disregarding...
Yes, time for part 2 of the Wyse PXE booting series. Part 1 described the general concept and why you might want to PXE boot your Wyse zero client instead of having embedded flash for the ThinOS. The remainder of this post will cover the technical details on how to...
If your organization is looking at deploying VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), I highly recommend you check out the VDI Smackdown report by PQR. It has a very lengthy and highly detailed feature comparison matrix of leading VDI solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 SP1, Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop...