VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘vdm’ Category

John Troyer has announced that the VMware website has been updated to reflect new product line names first introduced back in September at VMworld 2008. In the VMTN post Do they smell as sweet? New product line names: vCenter, View, John explains that the VirtualCenter and VDM products have are now referred to as vCenter and VMware View. Several VC add ons such as Update Manager and Converter are included along with Site Recovery Manager (SRM), Lab Manager, Lifecycle Manager, and even the file system VMFS now have slightly new names.

John provides a complete list of all products impacted by the name change which I have copied here. Read the rest of this entry »

Look for a new VMware KB article in the near future for this VMware VDM error.

I helped implement a VDI solution for a customer that ended up revealing an issue with VMware Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1 and the resource pools of an ESX Cluster. The explanation of the problem to me was that the VDI desktops auto-deployed via persistent VDM pools were out of sync with the ESX resource pools they were members of, and therefore new VDI desktops could not be cloned by VDM. That’s a little confusing I know, so I’ll try to explain it better by providing the sequence of implementation steps that resulted in the issue.

Here’s how it happened. Read the rest of this entry »

VMworld 2008 is all about understanding new visions and not just new versions so far. Today’s announcement of the VMware View technologies and the Universal Client are the latest vision VMware wants us to focus on. VMware View is another concept name for a group of technologies and not a product. VMware View Composer, VMware Offline Desktop and VMware Client Virtualization are the core technologies that make up VMware View. The Universal Client is a term for the next evolution of desktop computing provided by VMware’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

More information about these new desktop concepts are found on the new VMware pages linked above.

VMware View

New Desktop Technologies Announced for 2009VMware announced new technologies to be introduced in 2009 – VMware View Composer, VMware Offline Desktop and Client Virtualization to build upon our leadership in virtual desktop infrastructure(VDI). Each technology provides additional functionality to make the universal client a reality – an end-to-end desktop solution that is easy-to-manage and cost effective, with the best end user experience, the strongest security, and the most efficient way to manage all of your desktops and applications.

VMware View Composer – Advanced image management for virtual desktops allows you to: Read the rest of this entry »

I attended a VDI Technical Deep Dive and Competitive Comparison Partner Day session Monday and learned about both VMware’s priorities for improving virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and some of the technologies of the new VMware View solution that will enable that vision.

Here’s my notes from the session:

VDI / VDM version 2.1 priorities at VMware fell under the following 3 categories based on customer requests and feedback.

User Experience

• 2 and 3D graphics improvements
• improve multi monitor abilities
• VOIP
• add multimedia and video playback features

Aquisition cost

• Huge storage costs asscoiated with multiple desktops, backup, and user data
• Improve desktop server density (# of VMs to host)

Management

• Solution for offline mobile workers
• Provide enterprise class desktop management

The following future technologies are being introduced to make these requests features in VMware’s new VDI solution Read the rest of this entry »

This checklist is intended to optimize a Windows XP VM for VDI deployments and keep it as small as possible.
The configuration steps were taken from the VMWorld 2007 lab “Using VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for Hosted Computing”. The Appendix of the lab materials .pdf was copied to create this table and most of the steps are copied as they appear in that document.

It is recommended that a VM that has been optimized by performing the steps in this checklist be used as a template or gold image for all other XP VMs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email today with a new VDI promotion from VMware:

Subject: VMWare Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Starter Kit Promotion

Customers who purchase a VMware license are entitled to a “free” VDI Starter Kit. Interested? Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

VMware VI3.5 is scheduled to be generally available by the end of 2007. Based on a public .pdf released by VMware, this post is my summary of the new features. I’m guessing this .pdf is really a .ppt presentation that VMware is delivering, but I have not attended this presentation myself.

The screen shot is from the document and shows the new features in the defined layers.

After some sales and marketing slides the document classifies the VI3 features today across 3 layers. These layers are then used to group the new features for the rest of the presentation.

The features are divided into 3 layers: Read the rest of this entry »