The on-line community of end-users, partners, bloggers and enthusiasts is growing and today we see an amazing example of what such a community can do. Just last week Citrix announced Citrix XenDesktop 4 and the new licensing model , and it wasn’t pretty: it was a per named-user desktop licensing structure which would drive up the costs for loads of (potential) customers.

The on-line community Read the rest of this entry »

This sounds impossible but when I read Gabe’s article correctly he brings back Microsoft OS licensing costs of about $800.000 (for 200 physical hosts) back to just $40.000 (for 200 virtual hosts). Of course this presents an ideal situation.

The situation Gabe describes:
- 200 physical hosts -> 200 virtual guests on 7 physical hosts
- virtualization solution can be any: MS, Citrix, VMware or other
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vSphere is out on the market for about a week now and the blogosphere was already actively releasing all kinds of information about VMware’s next-gen “Cloud Operating System”.

I‘ve been reading quite a lot and made a list for myself with articles that I found most interesting concerning VMware vSphere 4.0 and I would like to share it with you.
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Sean Clark did a little investigation on licensing a virtual desktop with XP or Vista. It appears you need Vista licensed with software assurance to be able to run a virtualized desktop, even if it is XP you want to deploy in your VDI-environment. This is very interesting and could be a show-stopper for SMB. I was not aware of this and perhaps a lot of people aren’t. So go to Sean’s blog and read the article.

That Virtualization is going strong and still growing more and more mature are showing VMware and Microsoft. So during the past few days major changes happened on the licensing front:

VMWare joined Microsoft in their Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program Program (SVVP), this is great news because it makes virtualization even more attractive

and

Microsoft changed their License agreements for running their software in a virtualized environment and most surprisingly not only their own platform (Hyper-V) but others as well. Read all about the changes here.