Technical Architects Blog
DNM visit the briforum Conference
AS a leading virtualisation solution provider DNM Technology has a deep knowledge and expertise around many areas of server, desktop, storage and network virtualisation. Over the last number of years virtualisation vendors, virtualisation solutions, VDI solutions, thin client devices etc., have all done a great job on over complicating what is basically providing a workspace for your users!! DNM has naturally evolved as an agnostic solutions provider in this space. The knowledge sharing that is encouraged among consultants has resulted in some interesting customer “bakeoffs” on the virtualisation technologies that exist in this space today. These “bakeoffs” have been beneficial internally for improving experience and externally, enabling DNM’s consultants to demonstrate a best fit solution for customers. Having completed several demos in DNM’s demo centre we still felt that we had still had some questions for some experts in desktop delivery rather than technology providers. We wanted to hear the real story from similar minded consultants that had been deploying similar solutions.
In our constant strive for complete independence, DNM wanted to wipe away the myths, get the truth and nothing but the truth!!! In our search we came across a conference called “Briforum 2010” taking place in Chicago.
Briforum is the brainchild of industry analyst and blogger Brian Madden - who was voted the #1 speaker at VMworld Europe 2009. It describes itself as the only independent, deeply technical, application delivery conference of its kind with sessions that are 100% technical. They contain no commercial propaganda, and include plenty of hands-on labs. This was exactly what we wanted. The agenda consisted of over 50 technical breakout sessions covering the latest in server virtualisation, VDI, terminal services and application streaming.
The attendees from DNM were Wojtek Widurek, Virtualisation Architect and Richard Nunan Operations Director. The event is definitely one that is more community based without the marketing blurb that you would witness at most vendor type conferences. The sessions were split up into 4 breakout rooms which ran back to back over 3 days. Attendees were 500 extremely technical people.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to every session but here is an output of our thoughts as the sessions progressed:
Brian Madden’s speech echoed the fear of Windows 7. 90% of the audience were still running XP. Last year the key reason for people not upgrading to Windows 7 was that they were waiting to make a decision on their desktop virtualisation strategy. Here we were 9 months after the release of Windows 7 and people still hadn’t moved. In an enterprise environment there was defiantly a separation between “Server room people” and “Desktop management people”. It seemed to be a common opinion that there was no room for the “server” guy making decisions around the delivery of the desktop. Brian’s speech seemed to resonate that we were over complicating the PC while we were here primarily to simplify.
Session: Hyper-V architecture in a VMware world
Much of this was around how Hyper-V does VMware things. The interesting fact is that no one replaces VMware with hyper-V even though managing a VMware environment is quite slow when using Microsoft VMM (Virtual Machine manager). This was a good session to explain to VMware types, how to configure VMM. And guess what? Hyper-V sp1 is due out in Q3. Some new features that will appear in system centre virtual machine manager will be the ability to add memory dynamically, add hardware and to share memory amongst workloads.
The pro’s and cons that were spoken about were the ability to have a stretched cluster and the problem with Hyper-V’s support around identical CPU’S and difficulty when teaming broadcom NICs.
Session: WYSE
The purpose of a visit to this session was to find out what really was in a Thin or Zero client device. Wyse claim to have a Zero Client device, however it does allow processing on the Thin Client Device side so I wouldn’t entirely agree with their statement. However it does have a severely reduced OS, so statements of no software, no delays, no managements, no antivirus requirements is all true. Panologic is a Zero Client device, there is no processing on the client side and therefore totally stable and secure and there is Zero Client on the device.
Thin Client devices will have a short life. It seems that a laptop with dual function as a dual device (Thin Client, Thick Client) would be a far better investment. This would give the user access to their own personal workspace and access to their business work space using one device. There was much discussion also around BYOPC (Bring your own pc) accessing a locked down desktop solution in the data centre was presented as a secure solution.
WYSE and HP are the top two thin client vendors. It was emphasised that thin client is not for everyone. Wyse divides the world up into task workers (Thin Client Devices), office workers (Thick Clients), mobile workers (laptops with access to virtual desktops).
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