It has already been six months (a little over) since my last update, time for version 4.0 – a lot has happened in the meantime, as a result, you’ll see some noticeable changes. Not only from a feature/functionality perspective but from a vendor/company perspective as well. From now on I will be focusing on the big three: Citrix, with App Layering – former Unidesk, VMware App Volumes and Liquidware FlexApps.
Continue ReadingVMwares’ Instant Clones technology with a touch of XenDesktop
Average time to read: 6 minutesAlso know as Just In Time (JIT) desktops, or vmFork technology. In short, it enables you to clone an existing virtual machine in just a matter of seconds — close to one clone per second actually. Its technology is based on in-memory cloning of a Master virtual machine (which also means it shares the memory of the so-called parent virtual machine) and copy-on-write for rapid deploy purposes. As you can probably imagine, this approach offers some unique desktop provisioning options when combined with, let’s say a Citrix XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI in short. Do note however that initially Instant Clones are/were a feature of VMware Horizon version 7 (Enterprise edition) and upwards, it was VMware’s Project Orion that introduced Instant Clones to Citrix’s XenDesktop, which is still in tech preview.
Nutanix & Citrix… A match made in heaven. In 30 minutes we will tell you why!
Average time to read: 8 minutesThe title of our slide-deck, which we presented at the 7th Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG) over at Cisco Systems in Amsterdam (Friday the 25th of September). ‘We’ in this case are Kees Baggerman, Sr. Solutions Architect over at Nutanix, and myself. We talked about Nutanix in general, why XenApp and/or XenDesktop both perform so well on Nutanix, the Acropolis infrastructure, the Distributed Storage and App Mobility Fabric, and of course, last but not least, the Acropolis Hypervisor, the latest addition to the Citrix Certified portfolio. We also touched on some of the services and features already available today (fully supported of course) and briefly highlighted some features which will be available in one of the upcoming Acropolis releases. I also included our slide-deck.
Block vs file level storage, VMware VMFS, NTFS and some of the protocols involved.
Average time to read: 14 minutes
During the past few months I have spend a considerable amount of time looking at various storage related topics. Among others I discussed Web Scale technology as part of converged and software defined architectures, with Nutanix being one of the main vendors, next I also took a, somewhat, deeper dive into the wondrous world of IOPS where I talked about some of their characteristics and ways to potentially enhance performance and the end user experience, which are still two of the main concerns when dealing with these bad boys. Throughout this article I want to take a closer look at some of the differences between block vs file level storage, the accompanying file systems, the different protocols used, potential block sizes and some of the characteristics of VMware VMFS in particular.