No sooner than I was having a little bit of a moan about having to redeploy one of my lab hosts on ESX4.0 due to my trial of Kaviza 3.0 not supporting 4.1 , but I get notified of a version release.

 

In addition to the 4.1 support , the following features are added :

– Support for 64bit Windows 7 virtual desktops

– Support for linked clones with Citrix XenServer 5.6

– Support for CAC (Common Access cards) smartcards

 

Sadly I’m not actually able to test any of these apart from the first as I use nested ESXi – which does not support 64 bit guests 🙁 I’m also out of smartcard readers. What I did go through was the upgrade process , which while it was well documented by Kaviza would be a little bit fiddly in a large environment for those of you who shy away from a command line. I think they could take a leaf from vKernel’s book – they too started of with appliance based updates that required you to break out puTTY but now as long as the appliance has some form of internet access , the updater is built into the web GUI for the appliance. This is something I feel is quite important as when you are using an “appliance” , having to dive under the lid is a little bit undignified – especially if you are in the SMB space where time can be limited.

As well as an update to the appliance , the Kaviza agent that sits in each desktop also requires an update. this took me a couple of goes to get working , I suspect the reboot after agent removal wasn’t as clean as I’d have hoped , so the HDX install kept failing. An extra reboot set that back up. I wonder if there is a neater way for this to be done ?  I hope this isn’t the last you’ll see of the product from me , especially if I happen to win a full licence was part of Greg Stewart’s Giveaway on vDestination.com

 

http://vdestination.com/2010/09/21/win-your-own-personal-vdi-solution-from-kaviza/

 

and finally – I thought I’d see what I could get to talk to my Kaviza VDI in a box solution , so installed a Citrix Receiver on my aPad android based tablet. Its not quite as swish as an iPad – but it was a lot cheaper and certainly gives me ideas for the future !