Virtual Intelligence Briefing » Blogs

VDI Tip #5: Establish a cross-silo operational model to proactively manage performance

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:17:55 +0000

Take a look at this diagram and consider the idea that any one of the items on the outside of this wheel could be placed at the center so that we could see the whole world from the perspective of a virtual desktop. We could see the perspective of the world from a storage array looking back at the desktops or at other servers. We could look at a particular protocol and see what devices were implementing or using that protocol. It’s this 360 degree visibility that actually enables you to traverse the whole virtual infrastructure and quickly spot problems in a proactive and meaningful way.

For example, if we put the virtual desktop in the center of the universe. We understand how it talks to other virtual machines, it’s back end storage and what network issues may be affecting its application delivery. On the other hand, we could just as easily put a protocol into the center of the world and understand how PCoIP is being affected by perhaps file sharing traffic going across the WAN or a large corporate video chat that is happening at the time.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://xangati.typepad.com/xangati/2012/01/vdi-tip-5-establish-a-cross-silo-operational-model-to-proactively-manage-performance.html

Moving enterprise apps to and from clouds

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:54:25 +0000

Virtualization Management Blog

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:51:04 +0000

Capacity planning is a simple concept that is pretty much the same everywhere, right? Well, we don’t think so. We believe that an activity as important as capacity planning must provide an accurate projection of the expected resource demand levels for each workload (as in, it absolutely has to be ‘performance-based’). Additionally, that same planning activity should tell us exactly how (where) to allocate that workload (VMs to physical hosts) and those recommendations should take into account a wide array of parameters that are often overlooked by ‘capacity based’ algorithms

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.vmturbo.com/blog/bid/73934/Video-Capacity-Planning-Done-Right

ISVs caught in the chasm: between heaven and earth — SaaS and on-premises

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:41:05 +0000

In its 2011 research report “Cloud Computing Takes Off,” Morgan Stanley is bullish on the future of PaaS stating, “The low capex requirements, robust cloud enablement and rapidly improving developer toolsets are significantly lowering the barriers to entry for new application development [emphasis mine] – both in terms of cost and time to market.

The SaaS/on-premises tension sets up a complex series of challenges for the ISV including questions of business models, maintenance of multiple product versions, and updating of software to name a few issues. With apologies to last century’s poet Robert Frost, smart money may rest on the ultimate victory of SaaS, but there are miles to go before on-premises sleeps.

The intended audience for this paper is anyone responsible for generating software sales revenue, supporting a software sales cycle, or implementing software for a customer. Independent software vendor (ISV) sales, professional services, and sales engineers will be particularly interested in how AppZero software can directly impact the sales cycle, while IT professionals will find advantages in the time saved throughout the product lifecycle.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://blog.appzero.com/blog/isvs-caught-chasm-between-heaven-and-earth-saas-and-premises

Virtualization Survey – Chance to Win an Ipad2

VIB — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:32:24 +0000

Virtual Intelligence would like to invite you to take part in an industry survey regarding the current state of deployment, organizational intentions, and impediments to the widespread adoption of virtualization, cloud computing and networking.

The survey should take just 5 to 10 minutes.

If you are interested in participating, please click the link below.

SURVEY LINK

VMware VI3 Network Communication Diagram

VIB — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:16:34 +0000

This diagram is extremely helpful in troubleshooting network issues and also in helping put your companies security department at ease.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/12/15/vmware-vi3-network-communication-diagram/

Adjusting VMware View’s PCoIP for video intense applications

VIB — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:08:01 +0000

Last week a Unidesk customer emailed us asking about poor performance in an Auto-CAD application on a PCoIP thin client. Everything else in the desktop seemed fine except this application. I then received an email from a customer asking how to improve video (like Youtube) in their View/Unidesk environment (when it rains it pours right?).

After finding Andre Leibovici’s (twitter @andreleibovici) article on these settings we began playing with them and doing further research. We then found the View 5 documents on the bandwidth variables and session variables available in the View ADM templates.

But, what we wanted to see was what these settings could improve in something like a full screen video playing back from Youtube. I mean if you just set the settings and see no difference in the video, whats the use?

To test this I recorded my PCoIP session watching the Armageddon trailer on Youtube with the default PCoIP settings. I then re-rerecorded the same desktop with some additional PCoIP “tuning” to see if the video playback got any better.

ISV Use Case for Software Vendors — Sales Cycle

VIB — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:50:01 +0000

Purpose and intended audience:

Your company’s product is software. Revenue comes from selling software, not from demoing it or from proving the concept. But reality requires that before you can realize any revenue, you must first do the labor-intensive, revenue-free work that is the proof of concept (PoC) and the less-demanding, but more frequently required, demo.

This paper introduces the ways AppZero can strip the labor required to configure and implement your PoCs and demos – whether on site or in the cloud. Resulting business gains include:

Reduce the time it takes to configure PoCs and demos from hours and days, to minutes
Increase the quality of PoCs and demos by eliminating configuration errors
Speed the sales cycle cutting time from initial demo to purchase order

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.appzero.com/content/isv-use-case-software-vendors-sales-cycle

In the Cloud: the app is free, but that bucket of nuts will cost you

VIB — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:25:14 +0000

This week my kids and a bucket of nuts acted out a good allegory for enterprise IT and user cloud provisioning – a cautionary tale. It started with a call from our bank letting us know that our credit card was under suspicion of fraud. Apparently, $134.26 worth of iTunes store activity had been charged to our account in the past 24 hours.

The bank had correctly guessed that these purchases were news to us, with ‘us’ being the adults in the house. And, if not news to each one of the 5 kids we call ‘ours’, it was also nothing any of them felt like claiming. One family meeting down left us all without a volunteer to claim the shopping spree.

Clearly our family had moved to the cloud. But we had done so without giving a thought to any of the ramifications of this move. We had simply moved across the continuum from Cloud what? … to Cloud who? … to what does this mean to me and how do I use it? … to cloud, uh oh, what now?

Quest Software hangs toolmaker VKernel on its utility belt

VIB — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:38:11 +0000

In what has to be the shortest press release in the history of IT, Quest Software announced that it had acquired VKernel, which peddles a capacity management, optimization, and chargeback system for VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

Quest has been on a virtualization acquisition tear in recent years, starting with Provision Networks for its virtual desktop monitoring tools in 2007, and ChangeBase only last month for its tools for babysitting application virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In 2008, Quest bought Vizioncore, which oddly enough had created its VM monitor by licensing a Quest tool called vFoglight; Quest bought Foglight back in 2000 because it needed something to do physical system monitoring and extended it to the virtual world.