Xobni

An application I’ve been digging lately is Xobni.  This tool is a free Microsoft Outlook plugin that is a local search tool and collects statistics about the people you send mail to.  The tool is cool, although the statistics are more interesting than useful.  The best thing that the tool does is to change the paradigm of email search from whatever it was to ‘conversations’.  You can use the tool to (immediately)  see all of the conversations you’ve had with a person or around a topic.  Since this is the way that your brain, or at least my brain, thinks – this is much more useful.  The best advice I can give is that you should download a copy of this FREE tool and try it out.  Quite cool.  And the guys behind this in San Francisco appear to be cool too.  www.xobni.com – check it out.

BriForum ‘08 – Chicago, IL USA

BriForum 2008 – Geekfest

 

I recently attended BriForum 2008.  This, if you’re a desktop virtualization newbie, Microsoft Terminal Services pro , or Citrix Presentation Server (now renamed) devotee is THE SHOW.

 

There were about 450 attendees (it is ongoing as I write this, but I had to return home to deal with some important corporate matters) representing some major firms.  Case in point, I had lunch randomly with a gentleman from a large company in charge of desktop architecture for 90,000 people.  That is a big job.  He was there.  There were also consultants the specialize in terminal services, entrepreneurs posing as consultants, and of course Brian Madden – “the guy” when it comes to Terminal Services and now desktop virtualization.

 

The first session I attended was given by Steve Greenberg and Joe Shonk on OS Virtualization vs. Hardware virtualization.  This was a “basics” presentation, attempting to define virtualization.  Since Steve used to work at NeXT, he was giving away t-shirts from his alma mater.  I’ve got a drawer full of old t-shirts and a rack of coffee mugs that reads exactly like my resume – I was thinking of putting them on craigslist, but maybe they will be useful if someone offers me a speaking opportunity as a contest giveaway.  Steve did prove that IT guys will put a great deal of effort into something if there’s a free t-shirt involved.  (Marketers:  Take note!) Even if it’s a historical t-shirt.  I wonder what people would do for my old Netscape developer program t-shirts?  Old Tally Systems Y2K t-shirts anyone?

 

So, with the help of the audience Steve was able to come up with a definition of virtualization – encapsulating OS and emulating hardware – and then went on to discuss how OS virtualization does not equal hardware emulation, but rather how OS virtualization such as that practiced by Virtuozzo actually leverage the first loaded copy of the OS to spawn subsequent instances of the OS.

 

Steve went in depth about Virtuozzo, stating that eache virtual machine OS instance is a complete instance of Windows, but these instances share running services, kernel, etc.

 

He then compared this to code sharing in Windows Terminal Services whereby 1 copy or instance of Word.exe can be used by many users simultaneously.  The real gain here is efficiency in memory usage.

 

He went on to demonstrate this.  He showed, by loading 10 instances of Windows Server 2003, how each copy only used 45 MB of RAM and 50 Mb of disc space.  How does that compare to your physical servers that are running in 2-4 Gb of RAM and 12Gb of disk?

 

The audience was heavy into virtualization – one of the participants claimed to have an infrastructure that was 90% virtualized.  His images for each of the virtual servers were 12Gb a piece using vmware.  I have no opinion about that.  Actually, I do.  Storage is relatively cheap, and vmware, I hear, is pretty stable – so one has to make their own decision about whether the virtuozzo approach is right for them, or whether vmware is the right choice – or any of the other players that are in the space.

 

In my opinion, the discussion was biased toward Virtuozzo, and with no vmware people in the room, there was nobody to defend their solution.

 

As for comparisons made by the speaker – and you can make your own judgements here these differences were highlighted.

 

Vmware

• Need to apply 1 patch to each virtual machine.
• Has vmotion which allows for hot moving of a live machine (this is very cool)
• Use Cases
  • When you need multiple Operating Systems or Service Pack Levels for each physical machine (like supporting legacy applications
  • When you need to migrate machines without interruption
  • When your applications running under virtualization install or run kernel mode drivers.

 

Virtuozzo

• 1 patch can be applied to the main image and it will in effect apply to all of your virtual machines
• No vmotion-like functionality for Windows.  Can do this for Linux, but not Windows – currently
• Use Cases
  • When your need to run a very standardized Operating System and Service Pack infrastructure
  • When total cost needs to be minimized (i.e. – Virtuozzo is cheaper)
  • When the number of physical servers needs to be minimized
  • When application delivery and live backup are important.

 

And then for good measure, use case scenarios for when it is best not to virtualize were given.  These include:

•  
  •  
    • When maximum performance is needed for compute intensive or transactional systems that have high IO requirements
    • Specialized applications like Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), voice mail systems, time clock systems, etc.

 

I didn’t get a clear sense of why the latter group was not suitable for virtualization, but it was offered.

 

The next session I went to was Brian Madden’s “VDI Smackdown” where

Citrix XenDesktop

VMWare VDI / VDM2

Qumranet Solid ICE

Quest Provision Networks

Ericom Powerterm Webconnect

 

Were discussed.  Interestingly, fully, 20-25% of the audience were Sales Engineers from the vendor community.  Everyone behaved and the interplay between Brian and the SE’s was very, very good and informative.  Citrix must have gotten there early, because they had a lot of the front row – but then they had one of their top “Citrite’s” in from Australia specially for the occasion.

 

Brian did a quick poll about VDI usage in production:

 

10% of the audience was using VDI in one of its permutations in production.  Remember, this was a session on VDI, which I think self-selects and skews toward the enthusiasts.

 

Roughly 30% of the audience has intentions to purchase something in under 24 months.  40-50% of the audience admitted that their timeframe was somewhere above 24 months, but that they indeed had plans to purchase.

 

Briefly,

Citrix XenDesktop – offering a VDI only solution that can run XP or Vista instances.  Consisting of a bundle of ESX (to create the environment), VDM (the connection broker), and Virtual Center (for management).  For application delivery, VMWare’s Thinstall acquisition was mentioned as a solution.

 

Qumranet Solid ICE – is a new solution with a hypervisor, a connection broker, and a transfer protocol call SPICE, which is optimized for LAN connectivity.  This is cool stuff.  Even Brian Madden gave this a “thumbs up”.  This product uses “KVM” which up uintil yesterday meant keyboard, video, and mouse in the world where we all live, but is now being redefined as “Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)”  I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.

 

The Qumranet solution is “tuned for desktop loads” and support a higher density – more virtual machines per box in the server room – with one helpful SE in the audience claiming that on an “ordinary 8 core processer box” (think dual processor Quad Core machine), 52 simultaneous end user sessions can be supported with little to no degradation of performance.  Quick question:  How much memory in that box?  It may have been discussed, but I didn’t catch it.  Still, that’s pretty impressive.

 

Quest (Provision Networks) Virtual Access Suite.  Provision Networks has a long history with this market, and indeed their roots are in making enhancements for Terminal Services.  These guys now make tools to support VDI and Terminal Services, Application and Desktop Virtualization.   This was probably a smart buy for Quest.  They do seem to have their act together with acquisitions in a way that other companies like CA and Citrix might want to follow.  Anyhow, the use case scenario is when you want 1 interface across all platforms that can natively support ESX, Virtual Iron and soon Hyper-V, and Virtuozzo.  This is cool stuff that merits looking into as we all become more sophisticated in our deployment and management of virtualization.   I’m looking forward to getting a demo of this software at some point.

Ericom PowerTerm Connect – these guys are positioned and have been essentially a low-cost alternative to Citrix and are now offering products to enable VDI with application and desktop publishing support.  The product is hypervisor agnostic and uses the Teradici PC over IP protocol – which is hardware based – meaning that the sender and recipient of the session display needs to have the proper decoding chip.

 

Other random notes and opinions:

 

 

Madden opined,

“certain that Hyper-V will be the most popular hypervisor in a few years” .

“I don’t see anyone choosing one product over another for its management tools and user interfaces”  To me this means that this is still an early market.  I was in a room full of enthusiasts, and desktop virtualization hasn’t yet, to borrow an overused Geoffrey Moore term, “Crossed the Chasm”.

 

 

There is going to be a battle over protocols used in desktop virtualization.  There is RDP (Microsoft, others) , ICA (Citrix), Net2Display, RGS, SPICE, and others – each with its own plusses and minuses.  A session is scheduled to have a protocol smackdown.

 

 

More notes on vendors, what they were showing:

 

Appsense – user environment mgmt.  These guys had been iQurious previously.

 

Datacore – storage

 

Expand Networks – wan acceleration,  applied to exchange, notes, virtualization, consolidation.

EG innovations-application monitoring for all 7 layers of the OSI model.

 

RES software – user workspace management for xendesktop.

 

Tricerat – end user preferences management.

 

Symantec – desktop streaming.

 

RTO – discovery and monitoring.  New, virtual profile management.

 

Ericom- cool, presentation virtualization.  3rd year at the show.

 

Computer Lab International – a thin client maker that targets verticals.

 

AEP – ssl vpn provider;

 

 

TechEd for IT Pro’s – Orlando, FL

 

Bob Muglia (pronounced mug-lee-ah), as opposed to the Italian pronunciation that would sound a lot like the word for “eggplant”, was the speaker.   They organizers passed out rattles, showed commercials for Technet. 

 

An aside:  In the midst of this pomp I got an email from David Ferris’  news service (see www.ferris.com) which used to be an excellent source of information about messaging products and developments, but which has recently taken a turn towards covering the IT security market – which is bigger and undoubtedly more profitable.  One thing about messaging ISVs that make add-ons to Notes and Exchange is that they’re all pretty broke and small and hard to sell to…  This I know from experience.  Today’s Ferris post was all about some new products that CA had released.

 

Another thing I’ve noticed about TechEd this year, is that the participants look a lot thinner and healthier than they have in the past.  This could be relative, as perhaps I’ve put on a few pounds lately.

The keynote opened with some sort of native dance, a drumming call to action.  I was not “feeling it”  Perhaps I should have sourced and smoked a doobie before coming to the show.  I suddenly understand what the rattle is for.  

The drummers are pierced, blond, vaguely polynesian in approach.  It’s more like a hippie fair in Eugene, OR and the blond leader of the group reminds me a lot of my chiropractor.

There’s a big stiltwalker.  She is dressed up like a character from one of the live action disney shows (It’s about a band) that my oldest son used to watch.  Then again, we are near the “House of Mouse”, so it might actually be that character.

OK, enough already.  All in all it was not a bad way to wake up.

I may have been hallucinating, but on the big screen that was showing head shots of “heroes”, I’m almost positive that I saw Barack Obama’s face go by on the big monitors while they removed the props from the dance / drum ritual and readied for the keynote.  They did some cool things on that video – suffice it to say that there are some people at MSFT that really know how to work Powerpoint.

First Theme – The theme of Bob Muglia’s presentation was “IT Pro Heroes” – given that this entire audience was made up of IT Pro’s, it was probably a safe route to call them all heroes.  Major points were:

Microsoft is an enabler (of great things)

IT Pro’s are “unsung heroes”

They showed a video featuring Hunter Ely, a security analyst at LSU.  A story was told (against a backdrop of acoustic guitar) about Katrina and how LSU used Groove and SharePoint to track storm victims and their families with relationship to the hospital.  A picture of Hunter’s wife and baby were featured.  Oddly, they were all barefoot in the picture.  Did Annie Liebovitz take the photo?

Hunter came onstage to much applause.  He had much less hair than he had in the photograph they had on screen.  Hunter, grow it back.   You are not in the NBA.

2^nd theme – Dynamic IT.

Bob Muglia then talked about how Microsoft, some 5 years ago, introduced the concept of Dynamic IT.  technology can change your business lifecycle.  Again, I saw some of the nicest Powerpoint slides I’ve ever seen.  Kudos to the marketing services team at MSFT.

He went on to discuss that Dynamic IT is a 10 year vision and we’re half way through it.  There are 5 more years to go.  Muglia pointed out that Microsoft has Infrastructure Optimization models that are available online where you can benchmark your infrastructure.  The major point being that moving away from IT being a cost center, to a Dynamic IT that is a part of your business strategy is something that you can buy now.

Some of the subpoints were

Identity Management / Managing Identities.  Security and credentials are fundamental and adopting a model of federation is a good thing.  Somehow, and I’m not sure how, this was going to allow users to do more self service identity management.

Identity LifeCycle Management with Active Directory and Windows Server 2008 was discussed.  Bob Muglia announced that Identity LifeCycle Manager “2” was in beta 3 and available for download.  

Fred Delombaerde – program manager gave a demonstration of the new UI for security provisioning.  I would like to use that UI to manage SharePoint permissions within our organization today.  ILM manager looks like a good thing and the integration with distribution lists and self-serve password reset would be great things to have.

Sidebar:  It occurs to me that Bob Muglia sounds a lot like a smarter version of George Bush.

3^rd Theme – Interoperability

Bob Muglia talked about how open Microsoft was becoming.  An example was given that 50,000 pages of documentation about standards had been produced by the developers at Microsoft.  That’s a big number, but a Public Enemy song “Don’t believe the Hype” kept echoing through my head.  The presentation got a little vague on some of the points here, but you can’t blame him for trying.  I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s idea of standards was to standardize on Microsoft.  One concrete example was that SCOM (Systems Center Operations Manager) now works with Linux.

 

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