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Today I visited the Brian Madden Event in Enschede (Netherlands). This day was mainly about VDI and the vision Brian has on VDI. It was a great event and hearing Brian speak is always inspiring and makes me think. It was a typical Brian Madden event with quotes like “VDI is weird !“ and “If you produce a hammer, everything you see is a nail“.

Brian already wrote an article about his vision on VDI: June 2010 VDI will be ready for wholesale desktop replacement. During this day we went a bit further into the VDI story so I’ll get into that later this week and will also share my opinion about the future of VDI.

Thanks for a great event and for the nice article Brian :)!

Greg Stephens just dropped me an e-mail:

 Customers have told us that they appreciate the innovation behind our enterprise management systems connectors to VMware.  We’ve also heard that you sometimes wish we had more developers to devote to continuing enhancement of these products.  With today’s announcement of nworks‘ acquisition by Veeam Software, that wish has come true.

nworks is now part of Veeam Software, an award-winning provider of systems management tools for VMware infrastructures.  Like nworks, Veeam is known for its innovation, but Veeam is a larger organization, with nearly 50 developers focused on VMware.

Veeam is best known for its FastSCP freeware, and the company also offers Veeam Backup, the 2-in-1 backup and replication solution; Veeam Reporter, an automated way to discover and document VMware virtual server environments; Veeam Configurator, a simple way to configure and provision ESX servers;  and Veeam Monitor, for a bird’s-eye view of key performance metrics across the entire VMware infrastructure.   

I hope that nworks monitoring will go in a spin off just like FastSCP has been.

Johan announced the 9th of June that the VMWare VDI RoadShow was coming up and last week I attended the RoadShow in Eefde (The Netherlands) and below you’ll find a short recap of the event and my opinion about the future of VDI.

First of all it was interesting to see how many people were attending this roadshow. I talked to someone of VMWare and he told me that they got over 2000 applications within 2 weeks. We all know that VDI is hot but this even surprised VMWare ! Everybody is thinking about VDI and that’s logical : server virtualization is becoming commodity and people are looking for possibilities to fully benefit the potential of their Virtual Infrastructure.

For your info: VMWare is planning on expanding the VDI RoadShowthrough the entire Benelux with a total of 13 cities, but I can’t get VMWare to officially confirm that yet. Read the rest of this entry »

After reviewing VMware’s ThinApp I thought to myself:
How about the other application virtualization solution’s features? I know a couple of application virtualization products, but I don’t know exactly what the differences are.

OK, let’s google for an Application virtualization comparison chart… mmm, not there. Why not make one?
So we did. My colleague Matthijs Haverink and I have written a comparison chart with the following products:

• Microsoft Softgrid *
• VMware ThinApp
• Installfree Bridge
• Citrix Application streaming
• Symantec Appstream
• Xenocode Virtual Application Studio

* This is Softgrid 4.2. From version 4.5 it’s called App-V. When App-V is released, this chart will be updated.

This comparison chart will be expanded with other solutions in the near future, but this is a good start.
Over the next few weeks, we will publish a review of all products in the chart, starting with Installfree by Matthijs.

Feel free to comment on this chart and when neccesary, we will correct the chart.

Download the Application virtualization comparison chart. (pdf)

Update September 9th 2008: Download the updated chart.

Microsoft announces that that App-V 4.5 Release Candidate is now available. Some of the new features are:

• HTTP streaming
• virtual application interaction

Anyone may download the RC via the Microsoft Connect site.