Virtual Desktop Blog

VMware View Reference Architecture

wponder — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 04:35:40 GMT

I am well past do for a post and some might think we have fallen off the face of the planet. For the last six months I have been heads down planning, coordinating, validating and writing the first VMware View Reference Architecture.

This has been a lengthy project that had some very well defined scope from the beginning. Honestly, I allowed the scope to creep, as I felt the effort and output would go much further to benefit cusotmers and partners.

First, I would like to thank everyone who helped ensure the project was successful. I would like to especially like to thank our partners at EMC whom allowed us to leverage their Validation Facility in Santa Clara allowing us to build and validate the RA itself. In addition to providing us a place to validate future efforts. They have a world class facility where we can validate customer solutions as well.

Second, this effort is only one of many to come. The foundation we have laid allows us to rapidly change and add components or used cases based on the core architecture we have already validated. This first reference architecture effort primarily focuses on desktop replacement in the enterprise and other use cases will follow.

The first release of the reference architecture is availalbe from the following location - http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1084

One of the documents that we intended to include but, were not able to finalize, was a document around the networking aspects of our efforts. We have received numerous requests for information on the networking specifically the load balancing and layer 2/3 configs and VLANs. Although we do not have a specific recomended design yet, we have been doing quite a bit of work in the labs in this area and have some information that might be useful to some. Later I plan to post some of the configs from some of our lab work here so check back.

Lastly, there are two other documents that I am working on and I hope to release those in the next few weeks.

VMware VDI - XenDesktop success and failure

wponder — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Currently I am traveling across Germany meeting with customers and partners. This morning, just after I finalized preparation for a presentation. I decided to hop over to dabcc.com for a quick peak at what is going on in the SBC and virtualization community.

The first article that caught my eye was an article from a system provider in South Africa, OAS. The OAS was offering a test drive of a VMware VDI virtual desktop, connecting through VDM 2 and a XenDesktop based desktop.

To set the stage here. When I am traveling I use a MAC. If I need to access my VMware VDI desktop I can remotely connect with it using Safari. I also have a local Windows based virtual machine I can use with Fusion if needed. Using my MAC from the meeting room, here in Germany I fired up Safari and browsed over to the the OAS site for XenDesktop access.

At first it appears XenDesktop could not detect what client I needed.

When the client detection failed I decided to try the manual client detection.

The client detection failed so I decided to go ahead and download it. It took about five minutes to download the MACICA_OSX.DMG.zip file. Once it competed, I decided to install it. At this point I got a little confused as the installer said it was installing the ICA client for Presentation Server. Am I connecting to Presentation Server or XenDesktop? I figured I would find out once the client was installed an I get the chance to connect with a desktop. Unfortunately, that did not happen though. For some reason the ICA client could not be installed?

After this, I decided to compare the out of box experience for VDM 2 delivering a desktop. First I put the VDM 2 URL in Safari. I was asked to accept a certificate from OAS as I have never been to their site before. After accepting the certificate I was presented with a login.

After entering the login info and launching the tunnel I was presented with a list of desktops I was entitled to use.

After selecting my desktop and connecting my desktop session was successfully connected.

In all fairness, MAC support for VDM 2 is only experimental. I am unsure and have not checked if XenDestkop is planning to support MAC clients once its released. It may have been unfair of me to expect XenDesktop to work from my MAC?

Santa macked out my MAC

wponder — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Sadly enough most my holiday was spent updating my systems and lab. With the final release of ESX 3.5, 3i and VC2.5 I embarked on an upgrade of my VDI lab. Currently, most my systems have been converted to ESX 3i. I just love it, love it, love it. More on that later.

This summer I became a switcher. Windows to MAC. Anyone that knows me, knows I started out as a Windows guy and still am to a large degree. However, after spending six years at a Unix company I have done all things desktop at this point. Windows, Linux and MAC. I was waiting for Fusion to come out of the oven before switching to the MAC and I love it.

The MacBook pro I got this summer was Santa Rosa based 2.2 with 2GB RAM. Originally I started down the bootcamp path with a Vista partition.

OSX
Vista - Bootcamp
XP - VM, my work image

I never found myself booting into Vista and felt the whole bootcamp thing was a waste as I was always using Fusion to access it. Its less flexible than a VM and really buys me nothing. Since I was running out of space, I figured i'd ask Santa for one of those smoking 200GB 7200 RPM drives that plus 4GB RAM I figured would turn my MacBook Pro into a mean VM running machine.

Well Santa delivered... I got my 7200 RPM drive. The next challenge was going to be installing it and migrating. It took some planning but all in all I am extremely satisfied with the results. Below are the steps I took to get from point A to point B

1. I copied my XP virtual machine to some shared network storage
2. Using VC 2.5 with built-in VMware Converter I imported my Vista bootcamp partition into VI3
3. Using an external USB drive I used Time Machine to backup the OSX
4. I did major surgery on the MacBook and installed the 200GB 7200 RPM drive - I recommend you buy a #6 torque!
5. Using the Leopard DVD I booted with the external USB drive attached and did a system restore using Time Machine
6. After rebooting I copied my XP VM back down to the MAC
7. Using VC 2.5 I exported the bootcamp Vista VM that I had converted to a network share and copied it to my MAC.

After copying all my VMs back to the MAC each one successfully booted with no problems. The final result left me exactly where I left off, except I have 80GB more storage, a way faster system overall, and a lot more flexibility with my VMs
2.

Virtual Desktop Blog is on the move

wponder — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:20:00 GMT

This week I returned from Holiday. Nine days in mostly remote areas across Idaho and no email. We have been planning to move to Idaho for
some time now. during this trip we spent some time looking at homes and getting more familiar with the Boise area.

I am still trying to dig out of the email an get back on track and just keeps piling on. While I was gone the VMTN team updated VMTN at vmware.com. With the new version there is now a blogging capability.

Last night I took on the painful task of migrating over to the new site. I did the best I could. I think I have all the entires. I know I have missed a few comments, but I did the best I could to get them all moved over. If I missed anyones comments I am sorry, it was not intentional. On that note, this will be the last post here. Eventually, I will cancel this blog.

The Virtual Desktop Blog can now be found at its new home Virtual Desktop Blog

VMware VDI - VDM 2.0 Beta now live

wponder — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:50:00 GMT

I was so slammed at VMworld over the last week that I have not had the
time to let everyone know the Beta 1 for VDM 2.0 is now available.

VDM 2.0 is a session broker for VDI deployments offered by VMware and is a new product built from the Propero technology we acquired back in April of this year. Over the last few months the team has been hard at work so we can deliver on the design goals we set for this release of the broker. At this stage we are really focused on simplicity and saleability. One of the biggest changes for the initial release from the original Propero technolog wasporting to Windows. This release is only supported on Windows 2003.

Technically, there are a lot of things that occur when VDM 2.0 is installed, but we have simplified that process in the installation procedure. The installation is a single MSI installer. It takes about five minutes to get the initial VDM server in a group installed and ready to configure using the web based administration. In the coming weeks I will be sharing more on the architecture and available features. Anyone thats interested in
participating in the beta can find the registration page this URL - VDM 2.0 Press Release

VMware VDI - VMworld session you don't want to miss

wponder — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 15:37:00 GMT

Not a lot to share lately. I have been traveling for the last three weeks and will be traveling through the early part of Oct. Last week I
was in London, the VMware VDI team all got together for some great meetings and sessions. I have also been heads down working on a few new
papers and getting ready for VMworld. Just after VMworld I am finally taking some time off for some much needed Fly Fishing! If anyone out
ever wants to go let me know. It needs to be in the Rockies, Canada, New Zealand or South America though, because I like to go WAY out.

Sorry I digressed, can you tell I am ready to go! VMworld is a few short days away and I will do my best to post some
pictures and updates from there. Anyone attending swing by the VMware booth, say hi and share your experiences on how you VMware VDI efforts
are going! There is one session you will not want to miss.

Mark Benson, a VDI Solution Architect with the VDI development team will present the following session on Tuesday 9/11

DV18. Tuesday 9/11 5pm – 6pm.

“VDI with VMware’s Next Generation Connection Broker - Architecture, Security and Deployment Scenarios”

“As many people are realizing the potential of hosting desktop operating systems on VMware ESX Server in the data center, aspects of
access security, scalability and high availability become increasingly important. This session discusses the architecture of VMware’s next
generation connection broker from a design perspective, paying special attention to the security features and deployment scenarios supported.
We’ll also provide insight into how the product was developed to simplify the operational management needs of VDI in large production
environments.”

Just after the session will also be a “meet the developers” session for 90 mins immediately following the session. This will be a great opportunity to meet the team.

See you there!

VDI - Cardinal Healthcare - Webinar

wponder — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:30:00 GMT

Last week I had the privilege of doing a joint webinar with one of our first VDI customers, Cardinal Health. I was joined by Justin Hooper, Director of Windows Systems at Cardinal Health. Cardinal Health is the largest worldwide provider of health care solutions, with over 40,000 employees. They are global in nature and are recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of America’s Most Admired Companies.

Cardinal Health was an early adopter of VDI and selected VDI from VMware to support and deliver the desktop infrastructure of two mission critical call centers. At the time, there still was not a lot of information available regarding the architectural choices and deployment practices of VDI based solutions. Justin and his team did a tremendous job of being innovative in order to design a solution that meets the business requirements of Cardinal Health. One of the most innovative things I
feel they accomplished was in how they executed their client side strategy. After evaluating different alternatives from PC’s to thin clients.

They decided to go with low-end PC’s. Because VDI was new at the time, Justin’s team had to create their own custom image. The image is PXE booted from the network by each of the client end points. In essence this enabled them to create their own low cost unmanaged client end point. When a device is powered on it downloads its image from the network. Once the boot process is complete, the user is given a chooser created by Justin’s team for selecting the environment they need. Once the user has made their selection, a connection is established to their hosted virtual desktop.

Simple, clean and affective. This client side approach is also an effective way for organizations to move to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure today, while still leveraging the existing investment in desktop hardware they might have. In addition, it provides a clean and effective migration path to adopting alternative client devices such as thin clients, once the PC investment has depreciated. In this webinar Justin shares with us the architectural details and lessons learned from their
deployment. The webinar can be found at the following location, Select recorded webinars and its listed on page 2:

Cardinal Health’s Call Center PC Virtualization with VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure VDI

Adding users to the local Remote Desktop Users group

wponder — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:24:00 GMT

Currently, I am working on a best practices guide for building VDI hosted XP desktops. It’s been an interesting exercise. Most the content is stuff I have collected over the years and has been repeated a million times across the Net. In a lot of ways it really is no different than building a solid standardized image for enterprise based PC's. The hardest part has been putting as much useful information in it without letting it creep and it end up being to long.

Last night I was doing some testing, when I should have been spending time with my dogs, for a section that is hands down the most commonly asked question I get. How do I add users to the Remote Desktop Users Group? This is one of the most common VDI stumbling blocks. There are a couple of approaches. Probably more than I am listing below even.

1. You could create a startup script that populates the local Remote Desktop Users group with users or groups. The script can be managed through GPO by adding it to the Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Scripts\Startup Policy.

When using this approach, I prefer to create a group called VDI users in AD, and populate it with users that will use VDI virtual machines. This group is then added to the local Remote Desktop Group at start-up.

A sample code snip-it is below.

option Explicit

Dim objGroup

Dim strComputer
strComputer = "."

On Error Resume Next

Set objGroup = GetObject("WinNT://" & strComputer & "/Remote Desktop Users,group")

objGroup.add("WinNT://DOMAINNAME/VDI Users,group")

Set objGroup = Nothing

2. Another approach is using a Restricted Group. Under Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Restricted Groups add
a group.

In this case I use the built-in Remote Desktop Users, once created add the appropriate users from this Restricted Group GPO Each has its pros and cons but this should give you a starting point.

VMware Fusion enables another Switcher

wponder — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:23:00 GMT

Fu - sion – noun the act or process of fusing; the state of being fused. A long time ago, early in my career I never would have imagined I would need or want to use anything beside Windows. I started out as a Windows Server and Network admin. I really had no aspirations or interest in learning other operating systems. Over time, that changed as our business was looking for alternative and innovative ways to do things.

Ever since, I have helped customers find alternative ways to do things and focused on interoperability, primarily in the desktop space. Before joining VMware, I worked for a company that ran zero Microsoft products, no Windows Operating Systems and no Windows or Windows based applications. The also were thin. They had over 38,000 thin clients deployed globally. Talk about Green. They were Green before Green was in.

I was there for six years and was exposed to every alternative imaginable. They had quite a few Macbook pro’s running around. I myself did not have one, but was always enamored by their design. I never really thought it was practical for me to use one.

I live in a VM, I have VDI in my office and work from a virtual XP desktop day to day. I use offline files and folder redirection for syncing between my VMware assigned laptop and my VDI desktop. When I came to VMware, I got the standard IT assigned laptop that was about good enough to run Word and Outlook. Trying to run all the VM’s I needed for testing and generating content, plus doing my day to day work when traveling just sucked. I could not stand it any more. I really needed something with a a little more RAM and more importantly something faster than a 4200 RPM drive. Between the pain of the IT assigned laptop, falling prey to the continued assault of MAC commercials and the day to day glow of the Fusion team. I started looking into getting a Macbook pro, as I knew Fusion would be the ticket too bring it all together. I waited and waited till the Santa Rosa systems shipped. Then a few weeks back, I officially broke down and got a Macbook Pro. I would not quite say I was a switcher yet. I really was only looking for a well designed machine that had enough power to do what I needed when traveling, doing demos, testing etc.

The plan was to run XP by moving my assigned laptop image over, piece of cake by the way using converter, built inside ACE 2. Then, I figured I would load Vista since I had not seen Aero and needed to do some VDI testing. I had been doing VDI testing and playing with the desktop environment. I like it, I think its sweet. I like the sidebar etc.Before I loaded Vista, I played with OS X a little and got familiar with Expose, the dashboard etc. I have never used a Mac and was getting my bearings. Finally, I loaded Vista in a boot camp partition. Well, Aero 3D flip was a disappointment, too me its just a 3D alt-tab. OS X expose, and the dashboard are much more appealing.

At the end of the day, I needed XP and Vista and OS X was growing on me. In steps Fusion after all, I had been dying to play with our unity feature. I am just
blown away, thus far it exceeds my expectations and really is exactly what I was hoping for, seamlessly integrates the desktop experience with Unity. It’s simple to switch between Unity or a full screen Windows desktop. I can create snapshots of my laptop image. I run can run my boot camp partitions as VM’s. USB device support. If you are considering switching but still need to hang on Fusion is the ticket. It is the ultimate interoperability tool.

Fusion

FusionXP desktop running as a single window

Fusion

FusioniSight camera is connect to the VM!

Fusion

Fusion Unity View of my XP desktop. Each application is independent . See Outlook in the dock!
Fusion

FusionExpose of with Unity!

Fusion

FusionExpose with Unity!

Fusion

Fusion Expose with Unity!

NEC VPCC based VDI

wponder — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:59:00 GMT

Last week I was in Japan meeting with the local VMware teams, customers and partners. One of the highlights of my trip was getting the chance to catch up with a great VDI partner NEC. NEC was one of the early partners who joined the VDI Alliance, and was one of the first too launch an end to end VDI solution leveraging VMware's VI3. At VMworld last year, NEC announced their VPCCsolution which was one of the first end to end VDI solutions that offered everything from client to storage. In addition, it was the first solution offering a solution that addresses Multimedia performance issues often found with SBC and thin client solutions.

Their efforts included working with other leading technology providers in the industry and resulted in the first thin client device and software that enables multimedia formats to be decoded on the client side rather than the server side. Because their thin client device, the US100 is a thin-os device. There is little too no management required when compared to other devices that run an embedded OS. Therefore, you end up with the best of both worlds in a client device that requires no management, but can also deliver a PC like multimedia experience. Another feature of the VPCC solution is the tight integration with their IP Telephony products.

The VPCC solution is packaged to fully support the NEC VoIP offerings as well. Not only is this bundling unique but the multimedia integration with the US100 is as well. All the the voice traffic is decoded on the US100 device further reducing any server side decode required. The VPCC solution also comes with its own connection broker that is integrated with the NEC Sigma System Center server management software. One of the features I like most is the ability to do patch management of virtual desktop OS for simplifying patch management. If you are looking for a fully integrated end to end VDI solution you should check out the NEC VPCC offering. If you have never been to Japan, you will find that everyone is very polite. I also find it very service oriented . The food, as expected was also great. Lost of Sashimi!

Here is a nice view of Tokyo from the current VMware office.

VPCC

Here is another nice view of Tokyo

Dinner - Good Sashimi!

http://bp2.blogger.com/_mwnQG3BGo10/RmSG9CtQeaI/AAAAAAAAAA8/UIANP6mYJhw/s1600-h/P1030417.JPG

ACE 2 Release Canidate available

wponder — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:17:00 GMT

The ACE 2.0 Release Candidate is now available here. A ton of work went in between the last beta and this build. I think all the developers deserve a huge pat on the back for their late nights and hard work hammering though last minute issues. A new cool feature in this build is the integration of ThinPrint. This greatly enhances the printer management and capability of ACE instances. Its easily configured using the policy settings of an ACE Master. Once enabled, it automatically handles the addition of the required virtual serial port as well as installing the .print components for ACE packages. When an ACE instance that has the virtual
printer option enabled is deployed. The .print client manager is automatically installed on the host and accessible from the system tray icon for controlling the behavior. Its only available while the ACE instance is running.

ThinPrint.

In addition, a lot of work was put into how Pocket ACE's handle situations where a user may accidentally or purposely unplug their USB stick. This is a interesting situation. In essence, a USB flash stick becomes your hard drive and unplugging it while the VM is running is the same as unplugging the hard drive of a physical system as it running. Needless to say, some amazing work has gone into Pocket ACE to protect the integrity and recovery of an ACE instance if this occurs. All the skins and GUI's are finalized as well so, for early beta testers there will be some changes in the way things look. A few weeks back I received a Garmin 60CSx. Since I do not really own my own personal computer I keep an ACE instance for my personal stuff that I need to move around. Obviously, being able to load Maps and Waypoints was going to be a must have. Using after loading the Mapsource software from Garmin that includes the USB drivers my ACE instance picked up my GPS unit right away and I am golden.

ThinPrint.

ACE Beta 3 Launched - Sick as a Dog

wponder — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:06:00 GMT

VMware is a great place to work. Smart people, everyone’s on the go, lots of perks, lots of fun blah, blah, blah. However, the downside is it seems everyone is always sick. I work remotely from my home office and travel back and forth from Palo Alto. Everyday several times a day I see messages with Subject lines: Going
home not feeling good. Going home STILL not feeling good. WFH Today - open the message - sick!

My favorite's are the ones sent BEFORE they have come in and contaminated the office. At first, I thought these email messages were just standing out. That
was until after my first few trips . People walking around coughing, sneezing, red noses everywhere tissue rags in pockets, book bags, meeting tables, purses, over flowing trash cans. Don't get me wrong, I am the furthest thing from a germ-a-fobe. I felt like I was suck in the middle of a mine field and anything I touched was a flirtation with a weeks worth of misery. Someone tell these people to go home! I have had Bronchitis and the Flu since Friday. Proudly, I picked it up
the week before in Palo Alto. Two weeks before earlier, I had a cold, I had pick up out there as well. With the technology we have today, there is NO reason anyone needs to be in an office if they are even remotely contagious.

VDI can help with this, by remotely accessing your Virtual Desktop securely, you have access to all your stuff and your infestations stay at home. On to the good stuff, March 26th! ACE Beta 3 has gone live! If you have not already registered and want to start kicking the tires, you can register here. It’s really coming together. I have only been glancing at it, as I am still a little cross eyed but, it looks good. A new toolbar button for creating Pocket ACE packages. I also noticed you can now also associate managed ACE's to a new server now as well as a nice status notification when one is trying to contact the management server all really good
stuff and more to come before GA!

Reducing ambient noise and running ESX 3.0.1 on a Sun U40 Workstation

wponder — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:10:00 GMT

Because I work out of my home when I am not traveling, I have the plus of having my lab equipment local and the negative of having my lab equipment local, in that, the ambient noise and power consumption can get a little out of control. As often as I can, I look for the most powerful, quite systems I can find and consolidate.

When I first started researching desktop virtualization, a few years back. I started out with a Newisys 1U pizza box. It was one of the early units with Dual Core Opteron processors. The bad part is its defining loud. I kept it in a separate room and you can hear it all throughout the house. It has hosted my primary virtual desktop for over two years. Some time back, I decide to use a Sun U40 workstation as my Virtual Desktop testing environment. It has Dual Opteron’s and 10GB RAM with 4 x 250GB SATA drives. The problem I had going into it, was I knew it was not on the ESX HCL and because it’s based on the NVIDIA ck804, getting it too work seemed it would be near impossible. When ESX 3.0.1 released last year, I figured I would make another run at it. I have had it running for some time but, only shared the details with a few people 1:1

This week I decided to consolidate my lab systems further using ESX. Setup some iSCSI shared storage for my ESX hosts, for VMotion and testing virtual desktops running on iSCSI. This guide will outline the steps I took and explain what you need to do too run ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation and a Sun Java Station 2100. None of these systems are on the ESX HCL so this is completely unsupported. However, these are great systems for a lab environment as they are powerful and very quite.

Running ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation

Build of Materials:

Sun U40 Dual AMD 250 procs
10GB RAM
4 x 250 SATA drives
* Sun Dual Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
* Sun - LSI SAS HBA - SG-XPCIE4SAS-Z :4 x1 4-Port SAS PCI-E HBA internal connection LSI3041E
* SAS Cable # SAS-847P-F/.5m from www.cs-electronics.com

Notes a key component

Flash the U40 bios to the latest bios with patches using the downloadable supplemental CD.

Install the NIC, SAS HBA, and cable the Sun U40 disk back plane. Once installed boot the system and go into the bios. Turn off the onboard SATA controllers. Also disable the on board NIC’s the NVIDIA Ethernet will not work with ESX 3.0.1. Save and re-boot

Enter the LSI bios and configure and Array. I used a stripe volume risking failure for more capacity. I tried to create VMFS volumes on the disks individually however that did not work. You have to set the disks into some sort of array.

Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD at the GRUB prompt boot with esx noapic and install ESX as desired.

Running ESX on a Sun 2100 Java Station

Build of Materials:

Newisys 1U pizza box
2 x Opteron Procs - forget the model
4 GB DDR2 2700 RAM
2 x 72GB SCSI drives

Sun 2100 Java Workstation
2 x Opteron 248 Procs
2GB DDR2 3200 RAM
1 x 72GB SCSI drive

Flash the 2100 with the latest bios from the supplemental CD. I removed the 4GB of RAM from the Newisys system and put it in the 2100. I took the 2GB from the 2100 and moved it to the U40 making it 12GB. The 2100 has SATA ports on the motherboard and can take an additional four SCSI drives. I am sticking with the 72GB SCSI drive for now and have it hooked into the iSCSI shared storage with a 140GB volume. I might play with the SATA later. Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD and install as you prefer. On the storage side I have a 1/2 TB NAS appliance. It also is not on the HCL. It also will not work without an unsupported patch. Read hear for more details - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=468517 I also kept failing to realize the volumes needed to have 10% of space left for Metadata. Go figure after a lot of wrestling I got that sorted out. After applying the patch the NAS is working fine.

One note to mention, I run Virtual Center in a VM and it was running on the Newisys system to start with. I moved it with P2V to the U40 and shared storage. Once I had the 2100 running, I simply cold migrated it too the 2100. All the other VM’s that were on the Newisys system I also cold migrated before decommissioning it. Since my processors are not the same stepping level, I can not live VMotion but cold migrate and HA are working. At some point I might even out the processors. I am just glad I have two really, really quiet systems.

Whats in a name?

wponder — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:10:00 GMT

Ok, I finally FORCED myself to start blogging again. Last December, I embarked on a new and exciting phase of my career. I was fortunate enough that the Enterprise Desktop and Solutions product team at VMware asked me to join their team, a really smart and talented team of people by the way. Since that time, I have been sucking from a fire hose and trying to get my legs. Pictures of Bambi on ice seem to play through my head.

The level of activity and the amount of work too be done is a bit overwhelming but, I would want it no other way. I simply have not had the time to get this blog going. Between upcoming product launches, writing white papers, setting up labs and traveling to meet with customers, it's been crazy. I also was having trouble coming up with a name for my blog. I wanted to keep my former blog name Ponder This but because VMware does not have an internal blog server today, that was becoming harder to do. I also did not want to do something lame and play-off something else and use a name like Think Virtual. Sorry, that's an inside joke.

As I struggled to come up with a catchy phrase. I decided I would play a little game. Call it what it is, a blog about Virtual Desktops. What is a Virtual Desktop? My vision is it's an evolution. It's an evolution that includes best of breed technologies and architectures from the past, today and future, which are coming together and changing the way we use desktop computing today. The "desktop" is often referred to as physical device. IMO that's not a desktop, that's a Personal Computer, simply a device that is running a users desktop environment. This desktop evolution has been occurring for some time. It all started with WIMP . Virtual Desktops have existed at the desktop for a long time, primarily in UNIX like systems. Never really main stream in Windows.

This creates a unique challenge as something like 98% of the desktop market is Windows based and the largest population of users has never been exposed to dynamic flexible desktop environments. Most will only start to get exposed as they are introduced to Windows Vista. Besides the Virtual Desktop evolving at the UI level, there is also an infrastructure or delivery evolution that has been occurring and is entering a new phase driven most recently by VDI . The infrastructure and delivery evolution is a combination of Network Clients, Server Based Computing, Virtualization and Application Streaming technologies that I believe we will start to see merge together as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

So what's the game, in what's a name? It's not really a game but more of a test. We have an awesome team that is handling the blogsphere at VMware. I am amazed by the amount of content they find and aggregate. I just wanted to see how long it would take for them to find this. If you have a better name please fee free to share it. In the end I figured it really did not matter.