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 »

VMWare is offering free seminars in The Netherlands. (the following text is Dutch)

VMWare Desktop Virtualisatie

De nieuwe standaard voor steeds meer bedrijven wordt Desktop Virtualisatie. VMware Desktop Virtualisatie maakt het mogelijk om uw desktopbeheer te vereenvoudigen, uw beveiliging te verhogen, disaster recovery te vergemakkelijken en de kosten te verlagen.

Laat u volledig inlichten over Desktop Virtualisatie

Dit event is speciaal ontwikkeld om u te voorzien van alle informatie die u nodig heeft. De VMware specialisten bespreken de technologië, voordelen en ervaringen van reeds uitgevoerde implementaties. Alles zodat u een welafgewogen keuze kunt maken over wat Desktop Virtualisatie voor uw organisatie kan betekenen.

• In één middag wordt u op de hoogte gebracht van de laatste ontwikkelingen op Desktop gebied:
• Marktpositionering: De toekomst van de zakelijke desktop
• Hoe kan desktop- en applicatievirtualisatie uw beheer vereenvoudigen, uw beveiliging verhogen en de kosten reduceren?
• Demonstratie van VMware Desktop en Applicatie Virtualisatie, op een stateless werkplek
• Klanten Case Study
• Oplossingen voor werkplekbeheer
• Veel ruimte voor het beantwoorden van uw vragen door VMware experts
• Gratis software om zelf te uittesten
• Ervaren VMware partners laten hun oplossingen zien op de marktplaats

Voor wie?
Alle IT-professionals van het datacenter tot de desktop die belang heeft bij het inzetten en implementeren van virtualisatie binnen hun eigen organisatie.

Wanneer

• 17 juni Utrecht
• 18 juni Amsterdam
• 19 juni Apeldoorn
• 9 september Rotterdam
• 10 september Eindhoven
• 11 september Maastricht

 Hier kan u zich aanmelden.

Doug Brown, known for the Methodology in a Box (a 900+ page guide for installing and deploying a successful Citrix environment), has written a new white paper this time on how to get you up and running with VDM, as quick as possible, even if you have never used VDM before. It is downloadable here.

This is what he says him self about writing this guide:

 I’ve actually been evaluating and testing VMware’s VDM 2.x solutions since the early beta’s were available. I must admit, I very much liked what I saw in the early beta releases.  I feel the beauty of VDM is that it is easy it is to deploy, administer, and use. That being said, while I was evaluating VDM, I thought it might be fun to document how to install, configure, and use it.  You know, I wanted to document the exact steps I used to install my VDM 2.1 lab environment. I wanted to create a VDM in a Box!

In other words go and try it yourself.

Warren Ponder from VMware and Doug Brown, founder of DABCC, have written a VMware VDM 2.1 reviewer’s guide. This guide will help you evaluate the latest release of the Virtual Desktop Manager from VMware. You can download it here.

EWeek.com had a Q&A with VMware’s president and CEO Diane Greene. She talks about how virtualization has changed the last year and how she thinks virtualization will develop the next 12-18 months. It’s a good read, and here are some things that interested me the most: Read the rest of this entry »

The latest war in virtualization seems to be about VDI: a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Just after the release of Citrix Xendesktop, VMware send a letter to its partner stating that the product is build on a platform with an uncertain future. Virtualization.info wrote an article about this.

This is a way of putting your product on the market: just tell everyone that other products are bad. But I prefer a comparison between different solutions, like Quest software did. Quest software, who bought their own desktop broker made a comparison where Citrix Xendesktop and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager are compared next to the Quest Software Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite (kind of a long name, don’t you think?). And of course, in this comparison the Quest solution comes out as the ‘winner’. But it is fair to say that in this comparison there are a lot of features marked as YES for the Virtual Access Suite, while these features are not yet available in their current release. And future features of VMware VDM and Citrix XenDesktop were not taken into consideration.