This is the conclusion of Steve Parlee’s interview with Josh Osborn and Dave Jolley of Wyse. In Part 1, they discussed the Xenith “zero-client” terminal and the new Windows Embedded Standard 7 thin client terminal. In this concluding segment, they talk in more detail about how the Xenith gets its configuration information, as well as the reliability and power savings of Wyse terminal devices compared with desktop PCs.
Recently, our own Steve Parlee sat down with Josh Osborn, the Wyse Regional Sales Manager for the Northwest, and Dave Jolley, our local Wyse Sales Engineer, to talk about what’s new in the Wyse product line. In this video, they talk about the Xenith “zero-client” device that was introduced last quarter, and the new Windows Embedded Standard 7 device.
Moose Logic has been building and supporting networks for a long time. And during most of that time we’ve had a real love-hate relationship with most of the backup technologies we’ve implemented and/or recommended.
Tape backups – although they are arguably the best technology for long-term archival storage – are a pain to manage. Tapes wear out. Tape drives get dirty. People just don’t do test restores as often as they should. As a result, all too often, the first time you realize that you’ve got a problem with your backups is when you have a data loss, try to restore from your backups, and find out that they’re no good.
Add to that the astronomical growth in storage capacity, meaning that all the data you need to back up often won’t fit on one tape any more. So, unless you have someone working the night shift who can swap out the tape when it gets full, you’re faced with…
Then there’s the issue of getting a copy of your data out of the building. Typically, that’s done by having multiple sets of tapes, and a designated employee who takes one set home every Friday and brings the other set in. If s/he remembers. Or isn’t sick or on vacation.
Backing up to external hard drives is a reasonable alternative for some. It solves the capacity issue in most cases. But over the years, we’ve seen reliability issues with some manufacturers’ units. We’ve uncovered nagging little issues like some units that don’t automatically come back on line after a power interruption. And they’re not necessarily the best for long-term archival storage, unless you keep them powered on – or at least power them on once in a while – because hard disks that just sit for long periods of time may develop issues with the lubrication in their bearings and not want to spin back up.
But we’ve finally found an approach that we really, really like. One that, as one of our engineers said in an internal email thread, we actually enjoy managing. In fact, we like it so much we built a backup appliance around it. It’s Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM).
In this installment of the Moose Logic Video Series, our own Scott Gorcester gives you a quick overview of SCDPM 2010:
For more detail on how it works, check out the description of our MooseSentryTM backup appliance.
According to an August 26 Gartner press release, your Windows 7 migration may have a painful impact on your budget. The heart of the problem is summed up in this quote from Gartner managing vice president Charles Smulders:
Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle. Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.
Because of this time crunch, Gartner says that you really have only one of three options:
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know were we stand on the “hosted virtual desktop” issue. To most people, the term “hosted virtual desktop” refers to a virtual instance of a PC OS (e.g., Windows 7) running on a virtualized infrastructure such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. However, this is only one way to deliver a virtual desktop to a user. Other ways include:
We’re also of the opinion that no single one of these approaches will fit all use cases. But the nice thing about Citrix XenDesktop is that you can mix and match any and all of these use cases to the needs of your users, all under a single license model.
It still isn’t going to be inexpensive. As Gartner points out, you have to build the virtual infrastructure to deliver those desktops, which will involve both capital costs and labor costs. Anyone who tells you that VDI will save you money in immediate capital costs compared with buying new PCs is not being straight with you. But you can, according to other studies, save up to 40% in your “Total Cost of Ownership” (“TCO”).
And your other alternatives aren’t inexpensive either. So why not take advantage of this opportunity to change the way you deploy and manage PCs? Take a look at what you can do with XenDesktop today, think about how much easier and less costly your Windows 7 roll out would be if you already had XenDesktop in place, and then think about how much easier and less costly your next major PC upgrade project will be if you deploy XenDesktop now.
Windows 7 is going to impact your budget one way or another. Gartner estimates that if you just decide to accelerate your upgrade cycle, the percentage of your IT budget that you spend on PCs will need to increase somewhere between 20% and 60% in 2011 and 2012. If, as in many organizations, your PC spending accounts for 15% of your overall IT budget, that means that in 2011 and 2012 you’re going to be spending between 18% and 25% of your budget on PCs instead of 15%. And that will impact other projects.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Gartner also predicts that the demand for “highly qualified Windows 7 migration IT personnel” will exceed supply in 2011 and 2012. Remember those discussions about supply & demand back in Economics 101? Yep, that means that IT labor costs are going to go up. In fact, Gartner predicts that the labor shortage, and higher costs, will persist into 2013 as organizations realize that they’re behind in their planned migration schedule and try to figure out what to do about it.
Mr. Smulders had a recommendation on that as well: “Begin talks with suppliers now about putting in place contracts that can deliver flexible levels of resources at a fixed rate over the migration period.”
If you want to purchase a copy of the full report from Gartner, you can order one through their Web site. Or, if you just want to take Mr. Smulders’ advice, you can reach us at (206) 774-0619, or by email at sales@mooselogic.com, or by using our handy information request form. We’re here to help.
Last fall, we posted about Citrix Provisioning Services and Microsoft KMS activation. To briefly recap, here’s the issue:
In the comment thread of that earlier post, “Chris” stated that he was trying to use Provisioning Server to provision Windows 7 systems, but that they were not incrementing the counter on the KMS server. It turns out that he was absolutely right, and I thought this was important enough to bump the issue by writing another post rather than just going back and commenting on the older one.
It turns out that, although Provisioning Server changes the host name as systems boot, it does not change the machine ID (“CMID”). And, unfortunately, the CMID is what a KMS server looks at to determine whether a machine that’s checking in is a new one that hasn’t previously checked in. Therefore, all of your provisioned Windows 7 systems will look to the KMS server like the same system checking in over and over again, and will not continue to increment the threshold counter.
According to a blog post by Thomas Koetzing a couple of weeks ago, Citrix has told him that this will be fixed in the next release of Provisioning Services, scheduled for sometime in Q4.
Frankly, I’m pretty disappointed by this whole issue. Windows 7 has been out now for almost a year. The big push by both Citrix and Microsoft is that XenDesktop is a great way to roll out Windows 7. Provisioning Services is a must for any significant VDI deployment, because otherwise you eat up far too much of your expensive SAN storage. But yet we’re still stuck in a situation where we can’t use Provisioning Services to provision Windows 7 unless we have at least 25 physical systems checking in with our KMS server for activation. In my opinion, there is no excuse for this issue not being addressed long ago…particularly when it’s been a known issue since the release of Windows Vista.
I did find a workaround described by Kirk Kosinski in a Citrix forum post:
What I did was create a VM with VL media, sysprep and power off, convert to a template, then deploy the template 25 times and boot each VM once (a few required a reboot before contacting the KMS for whatever reason). My KMS server could then activate clients successfully, at least for a while… the activation count will decrease over time if the machine doesn’t contact the KMS server, so you will periodically need to redo this process.
The VMs don’t have to join the domain to activate so you don’t need a complicated sysprep script, just make sure to not include any license key in the script…
This strikes me as a bit of a pain, particularly when you’ve got to do it every six months or so to keep your systems alive, but it should at least work until Citrix and Microsoft get this sorted out.
Back in the old days of minicomputers and mainframes, we used to joke about IBM’s ability to, for all intents and purposes, get the customer to sign a blank check. They were better than anybody I’ve ever seen at getting people to commit to a solution when they really had no idea what the ultimate cost would be – and they were successful because of another cliche (which became a cliche because it was so accurate): “Nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM.” The message was basically, “Yes, we may be more expensive than everybody else, but we’ll take care of you.”
For the most part, those days are long gone, which made it all the more amazing to me to read that VMware is adopting per-VM licensing for most of its management products.
The article nails the basic problem with this licensing approach:
You know how many processors you have on a system, and that’s a fixed number. But the number of VMs on one host — let alone throughout your entire infrastructure — is regularly in flux. How do you plan your purchasing around that? And how do you make sure you don’t violate your licensing terms?
Hey, it’s easy – you just let VMware tell you what to put on your check at the end of the year:
You estimate your needs for the next year and buy licenses to meet those needs. Over the course of those 12 months, vCenter Server calculates the average number of concurrently powered-on VMs running the software. And if you end up needing more licenses to cover what you used, you just reconcile with VMware at the end of the year.
And, before you ask, no, you don’t get money back if you use fewer licenses than you originally purchased.
Sounds to me like a sweet deal – for VMware.
By comparison, the most expensive version of XenServer is $5,000 per server (not per processor, not per VM), and all of the management functionality is included. And the basic version of XenServer, which includes live motion, is free, and still includes the XenCenter distributed management software. (Here’s a helpful comparison chart of which features are included in which version of XenServer.)
A number of years ago, I attended a seminar that discussed the product adoption curve, and how products moved from the “innovation” phase to the “commodity” phase. The inflection point for a particular market was referred to as the “point of most” – where most of the products met most of the needs of most of the customers most of the time. When this point is reached, additional feature innovation no longer justifies a premium price.
The fact is that XenServer and Hyper-V are rapidly achieving feature parity with VMware. If we haven’t reached the “point of most” yet, we certainly will before much more time goes by. So even if you have a substantial investment in VMware already, at some point you have to re-examine what it’s costing every year, don’t you? Or are you OK with just signing a check and letting them fill in the amount later?
Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Office, we all have to ask ourselves whether there is enough business value in the new and improved version to justify the time and effort of rolling out the upgrade, listening to our users complain about the things that may not work the way they used to, and helping them through the rough spots.
Since Moose Logic is a Microsoft Partner, we don’t have to pay for the Office licenses we use internally. Moreover, it’s important for us to actually use the technology that we’re promoting to our customers, so that’s another reason for us to upgrade. Even so, it costs us time and effort to upgrade everybody, and we have other critical applications that depend on Office – like the Word merge app that allows us to print quotes and sales orders from our MS-CRM records – so we have to make sure that those dependencies don’t get broken. So, like you, we have to ask, “Is it really worth it? Is there that much difference between Office 2007 and Office 2010?”
Well, actually there’s more than you might think, and J. Peter Bruzzese wrote an article about it over on infoworld.com earlier this week. Here’s just a quick bullet list of his “top 25″ new Office 2010 features. If any of them catch your eye, I’d encourage you to read his article for a more detailed description:
So, a tip of the antlers to Mr. Bruzzese for coming up with a great list. Again, if any of these catch your interest, I’d encourage you to read more about these features in the InfoWorld article.
Congratulations to Citrix for, once again, being awarded the Microsoft Global ISV Partner of the Year award! For those of you keeping score, that’s four times in the last eight years that the award has gone to Citrix:
This is an outstanding record of achievement, and all our friends at Citrix deserve hearty congratulations for it – but it’s important for another reason, too. It should send a clear message to Citrix customers and prospective customers that the Citrix/Microsoft relationship is as strong as it’s ever been. In fact, you could build a case that it’s stronger, because there are more touch points in that partnership than ever before. In addition to the value XenApp brings to Remote Desktop Services, you now have:
Those of you who were around the industry in the mid-90s may recall that, during the transition from NT v3.51 to NT v4.0, there were serious doubts as to whether Citrix would even survive. But against all odds, and thanks to some intensive negotiations, Citrix and Microsoft signed the deal that led to the introduction by Microsoft of NT4, Terminal Server Edition, and Citrix MetaFrame, which added value to NT4, TSE – and set the pattern for the relationship that has continued to this day.
Nevertheless, in the late 90s, even some of the folks at Microsoft didn’t know quite what to think about Citrix. Shortly after the release of NT4, TSE, a Microsoft employee who will remain nameless (partly because I don’t remember his name, but I wouldn’t reveal it even if I did) commented to me that he didn’t understand why anyone would spend money on Citrix, because once Windows 2000 was released, no one would need it anymore. I’m happy to say that you’re unlikely to find that attitude at Microsoft today – and part of the reason is that all of those Global ISV Partner of the Year awards also sent a clear message throughout Microsoft that this was an important, strategic partnership. A large part of the credit also goes to the outstanding liaison team Citrix has placed in Redmond. And I speak from experience: since we’re also here in Microsoft’s back yard, I’ve had the privilege to get to know some of the folks on that team. They’re great people, and the state of the Citrix/Microsoft partnership today is also a reflection of the hard work they’ve put in.
The last decade has been nothing if not interesting for us Citrix partners. I’ve lost count of the number of times the rumor has resurfaced that Microsoft (or someone else) was going to buy Citrix. (I think the most recent rumor had Oracle as the buyer.) And, invariably, every time Microsoft releases another version of Windows Server, there are still those who predict that, with this version, people won’t need Citrix anymore. Yet Citrix continues to find ways to add value, grow their customer base, and continue to grow their business – and that’s also a remarkable achievement.
So here’s a big shout-out to Mark Templeton and his entire team. I’m not going to try to list names, because there are way too many to list, and I know I’d leave out someone important. Besides, you know who you are. It’s been one heck of a ride (and it’s not over yet). Thanks for letting us share it with you!
Some folks out there are still scratching their heads over the Citrix decision to change the name of Presentation Server to XenApp. There were actually several reasons for that change. For one thing, we’ve all seen Remote Desktop Services (formerly known as Terminal Services) get better and better with every release of Windows Server – and don’t think for a minute that Citrix didn’t see that coming. As closely as they work with Microsoft, of course they did. So it became obvious to Citrix long ago that they needed a better value proposition for their product than “something that I add to Terminal Services to get better performance.”
In point of fact, Citrix does have a considerably better value proposition than that – but not everyone was “getting it.” One way to help people get it is to re-frame the conversation by repositioning the product, and sometimes changing the product name can help make that happen.
But why XenApp? Well, that goes back to the acquisition of XenSource a few years ago. It seems that, after making that aquisition, Citrix decided that, in their vocabulary, “Xen” = “Virtualization.” Therefore…
But does it, really? (XenApp, I mean.) Well, sort of. These days, application virtualization is a component of XenApp, but XenApp is more than just application virtualization.
Which brings me back to the question: What is application virtualization? I would suggest, as a good working definition, that, just as server virtualization is the abstraction of a server operating system from the underlying hardware, application virtualization is the abstraction of an application from the operating system it’s executing on.
We virtualize servers by interposing a layer of software – the hypervisor – between the hardware and the operating system. Although some operating systems, like Windows Server 2008, are virtualization-aware, meaning that they know when they’re running on a hypervisor and modify their behavior accordingly, earlier OS versions had to be fooled into thinking that they were running directly on server hardware when in fact they were not.
Applications today are still at the stage of development where they have to be fooled into thinking that they’ve been installed normally when in fact they have not. When they’re installed, applications typically write specific information to specific locations in the Windows registry. They place .DLL files into specific folders (most frequently into C:\Windows\System32) – and sometimes these .DLL files overwrite or conflict with others, which is why you can’t, for example, run two different versions of Microsoft Access on the same PC workstation without some kind of application virtualization. Application virtualization places a sort of “software wrapper” around the application – sometimes referred to as an “isolation environment,” or a “sandbox.” It causes these Registry keys and files to be written to an application specific location, and redirects the application calls so they can be found when the application executes.
By contrast, when an application is executed via Remote Desktop Services (with or without the involvement of XenApp), you’re really virtualizing the presentation of the application. The application is executing on the server, and the user interface is being presented remotely at a client device, using a protocol such as RDP (Microsoft) or ICA (Citrix) to transport keystrokes and mouse movements from the client to the server, and screen updates from the server to the client.
In the old days – and often today as well – that application was installed directly on the Remote Desktop server. Today, we can instead use application virtualization to deliver the application to the server for execution on demand rather than installing the application in advance in the traditional way. But it’s important to understand that presentation virtualization – running the application in one place and displaying the user interface in another – is not the same thing as application virtualization, which, as we have defined it, has to do with how that application is installed on the desired execution platform and how it behaves when it executes.
The first product to do application virtualization on a large scale for Windows apps was Softricity, by a company called SoftGrid. Softricity evolved into App-V after Microsoft acquired SoftGrid. App-V not only virtualizes the application as described above, it also allows the application to be streamed on demand to the computer that needs to execute it. Application streaming works better than you might think, because it turns out that for most Windows apps, most of the code is seldom (if ever) used. (Just think of all the arcane features in Word or Excel that the average user will probably never use.) So we can stream down just enough code to get the user interface up and running, and continue to stream additional code in the background as features are actually required.
The combination of (1) not having to explicitly install applications on workstations (or Citrix servers, for that matter), and (2) not having to worry about applications conflicting with one another can make life much easier for the IT staff:
Meanwhile, back in Fort Lauderdale, Citrix had been working on its own approach to application isolation, which was added to the Enterprise and Platinum editions of Presentation Server when v4.0 was released. This “Application Isolation Environment” then evolved into application streaming with the release of Presentation Server v4.5. For those who are familiar with the Citrix application publishing paradigm, you can now:
NOTE: Yes, I know that not all applications can be successfully packaged for streaming. But most modern Windows applications can be. Yes, you’ll have to test your apps, or, if you have a lot of apps, use a tool like AppDNA to analyze them for compatibility.
Administrative options allow you to specify whether an application package will be streamed to a XenApp server to be executed there, or streamed directly to the client PC to be executed there, or conditionally streamed (e.g., stream to the client PC if a particular set of criteria is satisfied, otherwise execute the app via XenApp). You can also stream it and cache it on the client PC so, in the case of a laptop, it can be disconnected from the network and continue to run the app for a specified period of time.
So, in a sense, the application virtualization component of XenApp competes with App-V. Prior to the release of XenApp 6, our advice would have been to use XenApp to package and stream apps if your need was primarily to serve up apps to Citrix users, and use App-V if Citrix represented only a small piece of your infrastructure and you primarily needed to package and stream apps to Windows-based workstations. This was mostly based on the fact that App-V needed its own servers to control publishing and streaming of the applications – so if your primary need was to deliver apps to XenApp users, it didn’t make sense to build that App-V control infrastructure when your Citrix farm already had everything you needed to stream apps via XenApp.
One of the features of XenApp 6, however, is the ability to deliver App-V packages through the Citrix application publishing infrastructure, without having to build out the App-V back-end server infrastructure. So now you can use whichever packaging tool you prefer with your Citrix infrastructure. If your staff is more familiar with – or just prefers – App-V, it’s not a problem, because XenApp will support those packages natively.
A discussion of application virtualization wouldn’t be complete without mentioning VMware’s ThinApp. A while back, VMware, seeing which way the competitive winds were blowing, realized it needed an application virtualization solution of its own, so it went out and bought one. In addition to packaging and streaming, ThinApp can also wrap an application up as a free-standing executable, meaning that you could theoretically carry the entire Microsoft Office suite with you on a USB stick, and plug it into any Windows PC anywhere regardless of whether (or which version of) Office was installed on that PC. Of course, if you actually did that with a PC that wasn’t already legally licensed for Office, you’re violating your Microsoft Office license, but I digress.
There are other application virtualization products in the marketplace, but at the moment, the “big three” are App-V, ThinApp, and XenApp. However, as I said way back in the beginning of this post, XenApp is more than just application virtualization. And that will be the subject of my next post.
Every now and then an internal email thread pops up here at the Moose that’s a variant on, “Hey, check this out…” Recently there have been a couple of these threads that were related to Windows 7 tips and tricks. You may know about some of these already, or you may have read about them somewhere else, but I thought it might be useful to gather them into a single post.
So here’s my list of interesting tweaks, stuff that might be helpful to a handful of you, or just stuff that I think is cool. (Cool does not always mean useful – but who doesn’t like cool stuff?)
Note that Win7 will put the Quick Launch toolbar on the right end of the taskbar (next to the System Tray) rather than on the left.
