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.

VMware recently released the 3.1 version update for their desktop vitalisation (VDI) solution called VMware View.  

VMware View is still being sold in two editions, Enterprise and Premier, as a bundled solution that includes VMware Infrastructure or as a desktop add-on to a separate or existing VMware Infrastructure purchase. The 3.1 version ships with the following new features and benefits:

•Performance Improvements: Login times are significantly improved and server utilization is reduced.

•Automated LDAP Data and View Composer Database Backup: You can now configure automated backup of LDAP data and View Composer databases in View Administrator, enabling disaster recovery.

•Client Information: Information about the client device that the end user is connecting from is now provided for the desktop session as registry settings. This enables customers to use third party tools or create custom scripts to map local printers to devices. The information available includes the device name, IP address, and MAC address.

•Improved Logging: Debug logs are now enabled by default. Logging has been improved to provide more informational messages with minimal performance impact.

•Edit Desktop Wizard Navigation: Improved wizard navigation enables you to quickly modify existing desktop pools.

•USB Improvements: View 3.1 offers more reliable and broader device support with reduced bandwidth consumption. A separate TCP/IP stream is used.

•Multimedia Redirection (MMR) for Windows Vista: MMR is now supported in Windows Vista environments. MMR technology delivers the multimedia stream directly to the client using an RDP virtual channel instead of decoding and rendering it with RDP. This enables full fidelity playback in View Client.

•Adobe Flash Bandwidth Reduction: The Adobe Flash bandwidth reduction feature improves end-user productivity when browsing Adobe Flash content.

•Multi-Protocol Support: View Client can now use HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) as the display protocol when connecting to HP Blade PCs, HP Workstations, and HP Blade Workstations. The connection is brokered by View Manager. HP RGS is a display protocol from HP that allows a user to access the desktop of a remote computer over a standard network. VMware View 3.1 supports HP RGS Version 5.2.5. VMware does not bundle or license HP RGS with View 3.1. Please contact HP to license a copy of HP RGS software version 5.2.5 to use with View 3.1. This release does not support HP RGS connections to virtual machines.
For more information please refer to the VMware View 3.1 Release Notes
 
You can download trial versions of VMware View 3.1 Here

Up until recently VMware released very little information about how it uses virtualisation internally. The first time VMware released any information was during its VMware US event in September 2008. However during this years VMworld Europe 2009 event, held in Cannes, Tayloe Stansbury VMwares CIO, in his presentation (DC35),  provided a further interesting insight to the extent VMware uses its own products to support its day to day operations.

According to Tayloe Stansbury VMware has an internal VDI deployment of over 550 users, covering most of its departments. The client configuration includes Wyse V10 Thin Clients, Dell 24 inch monitors (configured at 1920×1200 pixels, 15bit resolution), keyboard and mouse.

The server configuration runs on HP c7000 blade systems, EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage and Cisco 3020s switch modules for the HP blades. The entire infrastructure is powered by VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1 for US and View 3.0 for Europe.

VMware has an internal virtualized mail server deployment serving 7800 mailboxes. The entire infrastructure is powered by 29 virtual machines (split in two data centers) running Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition. 22 of them are just for the mailboxes, the other 7 work as Client Access Servers (CAS).

VMware virtualizes its entire ERP infrastructure except Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).  With 97% of the company servers are virtualized across one Tier 4 and two Tier 2 data centers just two applications are missing (one is Oracle RAC). EMC DMX4 is used as the storage backend of choice for mission-critical applications, otherwise EMC CX3-80 is the choice.  The front-end servers of choice are HP c7000 blades everywhere.