Industry news

On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.

This new platform promises to deliver a desktop experience  comparable to a local PC, up to 100 VDI users for each single server equipped with a VGX board.

NVIDIA VGX represents a new era in desktop virtualization. It delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.

said Jeff Brown, general manager of the Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA.

This product is intended for those kind of users who work with 3D design softwares and simulation tools and is designed to be integrated into enterprise IT departments providing an integration layer for commercial hypervisors (the news only talks about Citrix XenServer) and a level of manageability that allows to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network, based on their demands.

NVIDIA describes as follows the three key technologies of this solution:

NVIDIA VGX Boards
NVIDIA VGX boards are the world’s first GPU boards designed for data centers. The initial NVIDIA VGX board features four GPUs, each with 192 NVIDIA CUDA® architecture cores and 4 GB of frame buffer. Designed to be passively cooled, the board fits within existing server-based platforms.

The boards benefit from a range of advancements, including hardware virtualization, which enables many users who are running hosted virtual desktops to share a single GPU and enjoy a rich, interactive graphics experience; support for low-latency remote display, which greatly reduces the lag currently experienced by users; and, redesigned shader technology to deliver higher power efficiency.

NVIDIA VGX GPU Hypervisor
The NVIDIA VGX GPU Hypervisor is a software layer that integrates into a commercial hypervisor, enabling access to virtualized GPU resources. This allows multiple users to share common hardware and ensure virtual machines running on a single server have protected access to critical resources. As a result, a single server can now economically support a higher density of users, while providing native graphics and GPU computing performance.

This new technology is being integrated by leading virtualization companies, such as Citrix, to add full hardware graphics acceleration to their full range of VDI products.

NVIDIA User Selectable Machines
NVIDIA USMs allow the NVIDIA VGX platform to deliver the advanced experience of professional GPUs to those requiring them across an enterprise. This enables IT departments to easily support multiple types of users from a single server.

USMs allow better utilization of hardware resources, with the flexibility to configure and deploy new users’ desktops based on changing enterprise needs. This is particularly valuable for companies providing infrastructure as a service, as they can repurpose GPU-accelerated servers to meet changing demand throughout the day, week or season.

Labels: NVIDIA, VDI

Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

Key features and benefits of MAP 7.0 Beta help you:

• Understand your readiness to deploy Windows in your environment with hardware and device readiness assessments
• Determine Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness
• Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments
• Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services
• Ready your information platform for the cloud with the SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment
• Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Beta

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Release

Here in the XenServer R&D group I’m working on a new open-source, xen-based, virtualisation architecture (code-named “Windsor”). The goal is to exploit the awesome capabilities of the xen hypervisor to make a next-generation platform for IaaS cloud computing. Why do I love xen? Xen was originally created in the University of Cambridge Computer Lab’s xenoserver project, whose goal was: to build a public infrastructure for…

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We already posted our article and video of HP's 13-watt PoE All-in-One thin client from Citrix Synergy last week, and we actually have a few more interesting videos from Wyse and NComputing. Wyse was showing off Xenith 2, which has been reworked with a System-on-Chip architecture. It's not the HDX SoC, though, but it's the same idea. If you recall the first Xenith, it was based on a Wyse C-Class device, had a bios and on-board firmware, which had zero client purists up in arms. Xenith 2 is...

I had a chance to catch up with Mike Pagani at NComputing to talk about their new HDX System-on-Chip offering. NComputing is using this as their first foray into mainstream thin clients, having previously focused on their own solutions (which they still do).  (Please visit the site to view this media)

Wyse's Jeff McNaught took some time out to show us Wyse's new Xenith 2 terminal as part of Wyse's last hurrah as an independent company (the deal with Dell closes soon). There's some talk about how Wyse Stratus fits in, and how things will look post-acquisition. For Xenith 2, it appears that Wyse took to heart some of the criticisms from the first Xenith and created a more streamlined device. It still only supports XenApp/XenDesktop, though. (Please visit the site to view this media)

The IaaS Cloud Performance Management Problem will continue to be one of two major factors impeding the adoption of public cloud services (multi-tenant security being the other one). Inferring performance from resource utilization metrics does not work in a simple single tenant virtualized environment (vSphere in your data center). It is worse than useless in muti-tenant public cloud environments that are build up upon a virtualization platform. The only known fix for this issue is for the cloud vendors to embrace end-to-end infrastructure latency as the quality of service metric and to surface this metric on a per tenant and per image basis to their customers.

The IaaS Cloud Performance Management Problem|The Virtualization Practice

Related posts:

• Rackspace buys Cloudkick – Implications for IaaS Performance Management
• The Real-Time Big Data vSphere Management Problem
• Cloud Applications Performance Management gets Serious

As organizations move towards IPv6, driven by commercial interests or mandated by governments, they need a solution that will ease the migration while keeping the costs low and maintenance easy. For most of the organizations move towards IPv6 can begin at the internet edge for making applications available to customers, partners, remote employees etc. over IPv6. Data centers need to be enabled for mixed IPv6…

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            Greetings Community Comrades! The “Geek of the Week” blog series highlights one of our exceptional community members each week, so you can get to know more about them, and what they do in and for the community!       Our Geek of the Week is: Stephane Thirion CTO/Owner – IT Architect Activlan Paris, France          …

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That was a very nice and very busy event, and I’m very happy to have this chance to meet so many nice people from all around the world. It was very nice to speak and exchange with absolutly all of you. Once again I learned so many things my brain is still smoking from last week.

With my fellow friends and CTP Chris Rogers et Joseph Melika we made a short appearance on Citrix TV :

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A soon coming blog will present you the Synergy focus point I did to try to make things clear a get the head of this event with the main and most important information. Related Posts:

• Citrix Synergy 2011 – San Francisco Day 2 & 3
• Citrix XenClient, 3 videos
• Citrix Synergy 2010 in San Francisco – Over
• Frankfurt 2010 – PubForum
• Happy new year 2012 !

E2EVC Agenda (almost) finalized and What should Citrix do with Podio.

There is a class of applications that is extremely difficult to virtualize. This group consists of graphics intensive applications such as ProEngineer, Photoshop, and pretty much anything that requires a GPU to perform well. Graphics intensive applications make up a list of applications that are usually too big or expensive to virtualize. The last mile so to speak. This is NO longer the case. With NVIDIA's announcement of the NVIDIA VGX Cloud Platform. This and other classes of applications can now be virtualized.

News: Virtualizing the Last Mile|The Virtualization Practice

Related posts:

• Data Center Virtualization – Virtualizing the Last Mile
• Virtualizing High Performance Computing
• Could the new vSphere vRAM Pricing Slow Down Virtualizing Business Critical Applications?

The networking sessions and labs were actually more than last year’s Synergy events, so we were excited of the interests and great turnout for lots of NetScaler sessions in San Francisco. Here are just some examples of the session turnouts: SYN324- What’s the latest, coolest and best of NetScaler session that was at 5pm right before Synergy party, the session ended up with over 150+ folks…

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InformationWeek Reports and Interop Select VDI-in-a-Box as Leading Innovation at Interop Las Vegas

The Podio acquisition announcement and subsequent demo at Citrix Synergy last week brought on a lot of applause, and while that was going on, Brian and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were both thinking the same thing: "Been there, done that." The closest thing that comes to mind when watching the short demo is that Podio looks an awful lot like Sharepoint with a Facebook theme on it, but there has to be more to it than that, right? In fact, it brought back memories of the last time...

With complex needs, come complex deployments. In the realm of these complicated deployments, powerful appliances like NetScaler and Repeater-devices, support highly sensitive data and intricate conditions. With the heavy data traffic across your deployment, you would want to keep a closer look on what’s happening at runtime, what’s the connection level and packet level information across your virtual servers or even what is the current…

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Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: vFabric, VMware

Register Now for this live Webinar tomorrow, May 16th at 2:00 PM EDT/ 11:00 AM PT. Employees are accessing sensitive information from a variety of devices. Organizations must ensure they can provide secure and remote access to Enterprise and Web-based applications. What are some strategies and technologies that organizations are using to secure these Applications? How can you add security but still enable flexibility and…

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VDI Delusion Illusion, Windows 2012 Hyper-V DR Architecture and ThreadLocker utility.

Citrix and NVIDIA today announced their collaboration on GPU hardware virtualization which will slash the cost of high performance 3D graphics virtualization to under $1,000.