Yesterday saw the final day of the Virtualisation Jumpstart program hosted by Corey Hynes and Symon Perriman – I can finally try and get my body clock back to normal ! The main topic for the day was VDI and its associated technologies.  When looking at use cases for a windows based hypervisor stack , I’ve always felt that VDI would be one of the stronger ones as its the management of VDI with Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 is where wins will be made rather than out and out consolidation ratio and features.

I don’t know if Corey and Symon had been reading my previous posts on the jumpstart but it was made very clear by Corey that the purpose of the sessions was not to disparage VMware View in the slightest, but to highlight where a Microsoft based solution would be strong and what features and benefits it can bring to a solution. I wasn’t able to take part in the entire session to to some “real life” issues , but I’m happy to say that they kept to their word for the portion of the session I was present at and I applaud you for it ! If the solution is good enough you don’t need to put your competition down.

Before we jumped into any demo sessions there was a quite a long talk on “what is VDI” – This was some of the clearest VDI message / evangelism I’ve heard for a long time and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Corey explained that sometimes due to some “golf course strategy” sessions , a client will decide he “want’s VDI” without really understand what is actually required. For a lot of solutions , simple session based virtualisation will be just fine ( of course those session based virtualisation hosts – Terminal Servers don’t have to be physical servers ! )

A lot was also said about the v-Alliance. This is a close working relationship between Microsoft and Citrix ( who have been like housemates who occasionally sleep together for as long as I’ve been working in IT) allowing very close integration between Xen and the Microsoft suite.

 

So was the jumpstart worth working 3 very long days for ?  I really enjoyed the SCVMM preview and its certainly given me some ideas around how a multi hypervisor environment might be able to provide a right sized solution for a number of business needs without too much additional management overhead. If you’d like to review the slide decks from the jumpstart , they are available  here . I’m told that the full recordings of the sessions will be available on technet and the Microsoft Virtual Academy.


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