Blog Posts

VMworld Europe 2009 is a wrap and despite the economic challenges everyone is facing across the world the turnout was amazing. One of the most exciting parts of the show for me was being able to demonstrate an early preview of the software to software implementation of PCoIP that we have been working on through our co-development agreement with Teradici.

This really is no secret, we announced our strategic partnership with Teradici last September at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas Nevada. Since, we have been working hard to bring the best remote display solution to market based on Teradici's next generation display protocol PCoIP. A combined VMware, Teradidici solution leveraging VMware View Manager will allows us to deliver an enhanced solution to desktop organizations that enables them to target users from task worker to the designer, remotely accessing their virtual desktop both from the LAN or the WAN using a single display protocol with an uncompromising user experiance. Combined with VMware View Managers support for multiple protocols, we can offer cusomters a solution with the broadest array of choice in display protocols and client access devices.

For everyone that was not able to attend VMworld 2009. On day two, Steve Herrod and Jerry Chen provided an update on our progress to dated wrapping up with a live demo of a Teradici hardware to hardware based solution. The full Keynote and demo can be seen here VMworld 2009 Day 2 Keynote

In addition to the Keynote, there was quite a bit of coverage from the blogging and analyst community around our PCoIP efforts. Below I have pulled together several bits of commentary I have been able to find.

Totally unplanned and pulled together on the fly, I was able to sit down with Brian Madden and give him the first sneak peak of a PCoIP software to software demo. This can be found on Brian Madden TV along with interviews from Microsoft, Redhat and Citrix.

I also was able to find an interview with Peter Ghostine, CTO of Quest Software. Interestingly, in this interview with Eric Sloof, Peter tries to explain what the VMware remote display strategy is? He shares his skepticism regarding what can be acheived with PCoIP. Peter primarily focuses on attempting to cast a shroud of doubt regarding the WAN capabilities of PCoIP. Quest has been betting on RDP and has been building RDP enhancements for some time now. Features such as MMR, similar to the technology we OEMed from WYSE. In addition, to psudo multimonitor and more needed features such as latency reduction etc..

On that note, I was also able to sit down with Chris Wolf. Chris Wolf is a Sr. Analyst with the Burton Group covering the virtualization space, focusing on the Desktop to the Datacenter. I had a little more time with Chris and was able to demonstrate the current progress we have made with software to software PCoIP under a variety of network conditions including both the LAN and the WAN. Chris shares his thoughts and observations here - VMware's Software PCoIP - A Sighting!

Last but not least, Gerben Kloosterman attended a presentation I gave on the future of the VMware View Remote Display Experiance. Gerben did an excellent job capturing the Q&A at the end sharing that information on his blog for anyone not able to attend. For more information visit Gerben's Blog on Virtualization.

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.