Here is a short video demonstrating the multimedia playback
capabilities of VERDE’s remote display protocol:

The distance between client and server is over 800 miles (or over 1300
kilometers), demonstrating that even across great distance and
relatively modest connection speeds, full-screen video playback is
completely acceptable with the VERDE VDI solution.  The client
location is on a small-business grade broadband (cable modem)
connection.  Obviously playback on a LAN segment is even better, so
there’s no need to demonstrate that!

Note that no special video codecs are used – this is just YouTube
displayed from a server-hosted virtual desktop session using VERDE’s
remote framebuffer and audio playback protocol.  Notice also the
audio/video synchronization, illustrating the timing and accuracy of
VERDE’s pure software protocol!

I respectfully contend that the “Madden Paradox” is fundamentally flawed because it is equating “VDI” with VMware and Citrix and not taking into account more complete offerings in the market such as VERDE from Virtual Bridges and IBM.

IBM gave a very compelling demonstration and presentation of the newly-announced VERDE 2.0 yesterday at CloudWorld in San Francisco.

If the world were flat then yes, the “paradox” is increasingly true. The gap between TS and VDI is increasingly negligible. But, the world is not flat, and there are vendors out there who offer truly innovative VDI, not just blatant extensions of the server consolidation paradigm with token efforts at incorporating innovations that address desktop-centric computing. Of the two, Citrix at least seems to understand the desktop better but they are the ones most caught in the teeth of the “Madden Paradox” – but that is another discussion.

So, if you come to see the world as round, you will see that Virtual Bridges’ VERDE has been designed from the ground up as a pure VDI product and addresses most of the issues that you have been insightfully pointing out are wrong with the flat-world comparison for TS and VDI.

When looking at The Paradox in the context of TS versus VDI, where VDI is defined as VERDE, then there are a number of distinguishing advantages of VDI over TS – and, I concede that TS still fills certain use cases better than VDI, but in meeting the needs of next generation desktop management, which is what VDI is all about, VDI has a number of distinct advantages:

1) VDI is superior for Public Clouds and MSP’s because of the better inherent segregation of users on the same servers. This is more cost efficient (HW, SW and operating cost), more energy efficient and more flexible for serving diverse populations efficiently.

2) VDI is superior in its ability to accommodate heterogeneous user environments – VDI allows one to seamlessly deploy a mix of XP, Windows 7 and Linux on the same infrastructure. This is important to not only future-proof your management and provisioning infrastructure, but also to make it more flexible in assigning the right desktop to the right job instead of a one-size-fits-all tariff on your desktop population.

3) VDI is superior in Application compatibility… (as referenced above). Not only are there applications that are not TS-aware or TS-friendly, but when dealing with sensitive legacy applications with finicky food chain dependencies, it is a lot easier/cheaper to isolate and provision these from a separate gold image than it is from a separate server as is required in TS.

4) VDI is superior in enabling disconnected use/local processing. Just because VMware and Citrix have no figured this out yet doesn’t mean others haven’t. VERDE has had support for disconnected use for several months. TS will never cross this barrier. VDI (VERDE) can do it today.

5) VDI is more flexible in accommodating distributed infrastructure whereas TS requires a centralized monolithic array of servers. This is currently unique to VB, and counter-intuitive to VDI, but the ability to have regional data centers and replicated branches that are centrally managed and dynamically provisioned as opposed as having to consolidate infrastructure into data centers gives VDI a practical advantage in situations where network reliability or bandwidth is an issue.

6) VDI servers are lower maintenance – VDI architectures are effective stateless when it comes to applications on servers whereas TS architecture needs to have applications installed on each server, and each server therefore requires more management and care. VDI involves running of desktop gold master images that are stored on disk. The applications are installed in the gold master images, not on the server.

7) VERDE VDI has built-in storage optimization. With its minimal persistent storage requirements this compares a lot closer to TS than Vmware for example. This isn’t really an advantage of VDI over TS, but it narrows the TS advantage

In the same vein, unlike the re-purposed server-oriented hypervisors like Xen and ESX, VERDE uses a more modern hypervisor approach so that densities of our desktop-oriented hypervisor are closer to TS densities than to the densities of antiquated server-oriented hypervisor densities.

So, in our view, VDI has several compelling and sustainable advantages over Terminal Services that will allow it to fulfill the high expectations that analysts and strategists have for it… but it will be a slow painful process if thought leaders continue to look to Vmware and Citrix for delivering on the promise.

Unfortunately, if you concede that there is a bigger world out there beyond just Vmware and Citrix, you will have to give up on your dream of the “The Madden Paradox” being your ticket to the Industry Lexicon Hall of Fame…

Link to Brian Madden’s “Madden Paradox”

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Our VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product is the same as ourWin4VDI product but with support for Linux guests. When we developed the MS-free capabilities in our new product, we called it VERDE rather than “Win4VDI for Linux Guests”, because we wanted to emphasize the fact that there was no “WIN” in the new solution.

Now that VERDE has become so popular, eclipsing Win4VDI, we are moving to fold the Win4VDI capability of running Windows desktops into the VERDE solution. Now, instead of having to decide between VERDE and Win4VDI, you just need to deploy VERDE and decide how many, if any Windows sessions you will host on VERDE versus Linux guest sessions.

There is no difference in price between Windows or Linux guest sessions. There is no need to define a set number of Windows or Linux guests. You can mix and match and change on the fly in any way you want to allocate session between Windows and Linux guests as long as the total number of concurrent sessions is equal to or less than the total number of concurrent session licensed.

Folding Win4VDI into the VERDE brand makes sense. Users need to be able to seamlessly allocate resources between Linux guests and Windows guests and this move helps them do that while reducing any confusion from having two product names.

We have been getting lots of questions about what is the difference between Win4VDI and VERDE. So, to be clear, the answer is, none. They are the same thing. And, now they have the same name.

We will be synchronizing web pages and collateral over the next couple of weeks – but with the introduction of our new  VERDE Documentation Suite, we have begun the process of assimilating Win4VDI into VERDE.

The VERDE product documentation suite recently received a major
refresh. There are now nearly 200 pages of up-to-date, high-quality
information in PDF format covering the entire VERDE, Win4Lin
Pro, and Win4Solaris Pro product lines.

We are very excited about this refresh as it gives our customers an
enhanced learning and reference experience for our products. We also
remain committed to continue updating the set based on customer
feedback and new product developments.

The latest guide to the VERDE documentation suite, including links to
all references, is here:
http://www.vbridges.com/docs/VERDEDocumentationGuide.pdf

Back in 1998 when we first envisioned buying the dormant Merge technology from Platinum, we saw virtualization as an exciting way to improve how companies provide desktop computing resources to their employees. We didn’t know what to call it. All we knew was that it was the next generation to what Citrix was doing with Terminal Services.

In our mind, it was much more logical to consolidate desktops in the data center and provide them to users through the cloud (that was already a term in use back then, though it is much more in vogue these days). We called it a consolidated desktop solution, or a Linux alternative to Citrix.

It wasn’t until VMware decided to extend the footprint of their ESX franchise into “VDI” that we finally had a generally accepted name for what we do – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

We have come a long way since those early days. when it comes to modern desktop management and deployment models, we believe we still represent the state of the art. Consider the following:

• Dynamic renewable desktops
• Malware resistance
• Open protocol architecture
• Linux Host – let the open server do the work
• Massive scaling architecture
• Modular hypervisor architecture
• Integrated endpoint services – printing, file transfer, etc…
• No application re-write for running desktop apps on servers
• Runs both Linux and Windows guests on same server
• Runs in streaming mode for rich-client processing

And all of this at a $50 per user average price at typical volumes.

Because Citrix is coming from a Microsoft and Terminal Services heritage, they are always going to be hobbled in moving quickly into new desktop models, despite acquisitions, even if they are adjacent market opportunities. The weight of the installed base, and the dependence on the revenue that comes from it, as well as a culture steeped in the old ways, are yokes around their neck. Same for VMware, an architecture that is commendable for server consolidation is awkwardly heavy and complicated (not to mention expensive) for use as a VDI platform.

VERDE was designed for desktops from the beginning, and is built on open standards, and is modular enough to adapt in a rapidly changing technology environment (e.g. we moved seamlessly from QEMU to KVM – other hypervisors are easily adopted as well) – all of this, when combined with our IBM partnership, puts us in an excellent position to help companies large and small move to the “next big thing”, VDI, and adapt their desktop infrastructures to the more cost-efficient approaches required of the current and future economic climates.

The PC status quo is dead, Long live VDI!

Image via Wikipedia

This week we released a Win4Lin Pro 5.5 maintenance update to address
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” host compatibility. Our continued
commitment to broad Linux platform support now extends to the latest
version of this very respected distribution. We even offer .deb
packages, as we have done for years. Of course, Win4Lin still runs on
just about everything else, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS,
SuSE/OpenSuSE, and Mandriva Linux.

Also included in this release are numerous bug fixes and documentation
updates. If you already own Win4Lin Pro or Ubuntu Edition 5.5, make
sure you download the latest update. If you don’t, there has never
been a better time to join our diverse family of users!

Visit www.win4lin.com for details, updates, and purchase information.

In December 2008, we announced our VERDE platform together with IBM and Canonical for serving cloud-based virtual Ubuntu Linux desktops.  Understanding that some of our customers may have an investment in Red Hat desktops, we recently extended the VERDE platform to support them as well.

You can now serve Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5.x virtual desktops from VERDE, side by side with Ubuntu 8.04 and even Windows XP virtual desktops.  Additionally, we’ve even introduced 64-bit guest support for Red Hat EL 5 desktops, as well as SMP capabilities for up to 8 virtual CPUs.

This makes VERDE suitable even for many Red Hat-based scientific workloads, such as statistical analysis applications, which may require expanded guest capabilities. And of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been and continues to be a supported server platform for VERDE as well.

Whether you are looking to serve Red Hat, Ubuntu, or Microsoft workloads, VERDE is the answer you are looking for.

VMare made a little splash when they announced “open sourcing” their VDI client.

My first thought is, so what?

The second issue is, the press got so excited that they prematurely extrapolated it as a release of the full VDI product – as if there isn’t enough misinformation out there…  The VDI product and the client are two very different things. The client is what connects the endpoint to the server(s). Without the server piece – proprietary and very not-free – you might as well have been given a free razor handle… Though, I think a razor blade handle may be more useful, as razor blade handles can’t be hobbled like this piece of code is – no USB redirection, no multiple desktop sessions and no multi-media redirection.

This is a blatant play to the HW and OEM community to pre-load their client piece in the hopes it might make their VDI more accessible. Citrix already did something like this many years ago with their ICA client. They were able to brag that they had tens of millions of clients in the field – that had nothing to do with how many people were actually using MetaFrame or Presentation Server, but that didn’t stop them from mentioning it at every opportunity.

For Virtual Bridges’ part, our client piece has been open source and freely downloadable from day one, six years ago.

Sorry, been there, done that.

Since 2000 we’ve helped customers deploy large-scale Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) solutions in various ways. Some consolidated hundreds of users in a data center. Others chose a “replicated branch” model, where they deployed VDI from local servers across dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of locations. In the last year or so we have seen tremendous interest in massive data center deployments, where tens of thousands (or more) virtual desktops are hosted in a single data center. Our answer to this common scenario is VERDE Cluster, introduced in Q4 2008.

VERDE Cluster helps arrays of VDI servers function as a “single system image” and serve any combination of virtual Windows XP or Linux desktops over the cloud. Bundled with the VERDE/Win4VDI platform, this solution is truly revolutionary. Its distributed nature eliminates bottlenecks and allows for scalability of up to 10,000 servers hosting up to 1 million concurrent user sessions. In the VERDE tradition, there are no vendor lock-ins for either hardware or software platforms. It works with any Linux servers, using any storage, on virtually any type of enterprise infrastructure. Best of all, it requires very little management and configuration – just plug your servers into the network, and play. The cluster automatically distributes load to new nodes with no special configuration. There’s no need to upgrade your connection broker either, since it’s all included in the stack! What’s more, VERDE Cluster’s proven dynamic desktop management all but eliminates help desk costs when compared to traditional “1:1” VDI solutions, while its built-in storage optimization helps keep your backup and data management strategy sane. You can finally scale your architecture with confidence, ease, and peace of mind that your software will handle it in stride.

Now that hardware and network technology has caught up to the true vision of VDI, isn’t it time your software platforms do too? We certainly think so. As large scale VDI projects move from theory, to pilot, to production, you can count on VERDE Cluster to finally unlock the potential of server-based virtual desktop technology.

Take a look at our comprehensive technology overview paper here:

http://vbridges.com/docs/VERDEClusterOverview.pdf

]]> http://vbridges.com/wp/name/feed 0 http://vbridges.com/wp/name http://vbridges.com/wp/name#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:33:19 +0000 Jim http://vbridges.com/wp/?p=32

When one door is closes, another one opens – don’t keep looking at the closed door or you will miss the opportunities that have just opened to you. This old aphorism is as applicable today as when it was first coined as budgets in IT shrink and organizations are expected to do more with less. This is not a temporary lull in the market. This is a sea change. Doing the same thing is not an option. Departments are either cutting or they are re-envisioning their strategic roadmaps. The companies that are quicker to recognize this downturn as a catalyst for desktop reformation will be the companies that survive this downturn with their positions intact or improved. Or, at least, it will not be IT that drags them down…

It is essential that IT leaders redefine their philosophy towards desktop brand premiums. It is one thing to choose brand when costs are equivalent, but when you have equivalent or better functionality, how can you continue to pay a premium that brings no premium in value to your organization?

“With this announcement, corporate decision makers need to look very seriously at the premium being paid for products that now have dramatically more cost-effective and secure solution alternatives available” said Jim Curtin, president and CEO of Virtual Bridges. “Gone are the days when Microsoft was the safe choice. Fiduciary responsibilities compel organizations of all sizes to forego brand premiums when comparable or superior solutions are being offered for a far more reasonable price by trusted organizations like IBM.”

In case one thinks that this is flawed logic, after all IBM is a brand too, I reiterate that when the cost of something is comparable (IBM Global Technology Services versus say HP/EDS or some other global enterprise services firm), one should rightly give added weight to the power of the brand in making a decision. When there is a huge disparity in cost but little if any differentiation in functionality, then one would be wasteful in paying a premium just for a brand name.

This combination of Ubuntu vs. Windows, Symphony/Sametime/Notes/etc… vs. Office/Groove/etc…, and VERDE vs. Windows-based VDI solutions, redefines value for enterprise IT departments. The operating system, applications and provisioning and management infrastructure combination is the most compelling on the market today.