VM-Net

In January 2008 Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies and those attending one of the last presentations at the  annual Microsoft partner event, held in Houston last year, were  luck enough to be given a brief glimpse of Calista’s desktop session manager. Since then however Microsoft has been very quiet about its VDI plans.

Few details about its solution, possibly based upon Calista’s Virtual Desktop (CVD) and Hyper-V, are available at today beside the original  list of supported hypervisors, VMware and Citrix ones, along with Microsoft Terminal Services platform.

On the paper CVD has some real potential. CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs are not available for a particular application or client platform.

CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user.

However while in the past Microsoft is implicitly admitting that its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is not optimised for multimedia streaming but with the up and comming release of Windows 7 and the much improved RDP 7 has Microsoft integrated some of the Calistia’s technologies into RDP. One thing is for sure though Microsoft is going to overlap Citrix ICA more than ever.

BT is preparing to launch new Virtual Data Center service for large business and public sector organizations. Based on a cloud-computing model, the VDC provides a dynamic and virtualised infrastructure platform that enables organizations to consume their IT and networking infrastructure as a service.

BT Virtual Data Center service will, uniquely in the market, be rolled-out across data centres in multiple countries in EMEA and this will enable BT to provide true enterprise class services. BT said the second key differentiator with competitors is that it offers servers, storage, networks and security that is orchestrated and automatically provisioned through an online portal. Customers can change the infrastructure easily in real-time throughout the duration of the contract through the portal. BT customers will also be able to virtualise many of their networking and IT needs to the required service levels. By using BT’s enterprise class infrastructure, BT VDC delivers to large organizations the benefits of enterprise class “cloud computing” to customers at a significant saving against a standard hosted infrastructure deployment.

Now that Cisco have released its Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware vSphere Cisco is has started to release detailed demos of the product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that amongst other topics cover what are port-profiles, how to create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client, how vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs andhow to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration from a host to another with vMotion. Head over to Facebook and check them out.

Cisco Nexus 1000v  Video Part 1 (11 mins)

Cisco Nexus 1000v  Video Part2 (10 mins)