Monthly highlights – April 2010

Every month I will try to wrap up some highlights about virtualization news, personal experience or other IT related items which had my attention, this time April 2010:


April was quite a busy month, working on several projects from working on a SharePoint (for Document Management) infrastructure till extending a Citrix XenApp based infrastructure. This last one is an interesting one, because we will combine Citrix XenApp, VMware vSphere, Microsoft App-V and RES PowerFuse to deliver a real state-of-the-art user experience.


Because of the busy month, I’m still catching up on some articles, so this time a short wrap up.



The Microsoft Management Summit 2010 was held in Las Vegas, this is where the System Center products are put in the spotlight. There’s a lot to talk about, new releases, product announcements, to have a closer look; view the keynotes, keynote 1 and keynote 2.

To pick a few highlights from MMS:
1) Virtual Machine Manager vNext, with the announcement of adding App-V Server. This means that Microsoft is aiming at using Hyper-V for OS virtualization and App-V for virtualization of services. For easy deployment and recovery. And of course this fits in the Microsoft Cloud strategy. This new version of SCVMM is already in the pipeline some time, so hopefully we can get our hands to the beta version soon.
2) Configuration Manager vNext, User-Centric computing is the keyword. It seems to me that Microsoft embraces the Citrix vision. Allowing the definition of the relationship between the users and their applications in a way that the admins don’t have to worry about where that user is. They can trust the system that the user will have the right application at the right time in the right place suitable for the device they are on. Sounds a bit like FlexCast to me . Next to that it will be possible to enforce compliancy with desired configuration management in this new release.
3) Windows Intune, it’s like a Configuration Manager Essentials from the cloud. But there’s more; if you are a Windows Intune customer you have access to MDOP, which means you are allowed to run App-V. For App-V you still need your own (local) infrastructure. In the future it’s a small step to add “App-V from the cloud”


We can’t escape anymore, the cloud is coming. MMS 2010 was about the could as well (and for the European attendees it was literally about the (ash) cloud ). The end of the Next-Next-Finish generation is nearing.



InstallFree Bridge 2.0; InstallFree Bridge announced a new release, for me it was time to get some hands-on on this product, my first impression can be found here. InstallFree Bridge is a product to watch, they are doing real application virtualization.


Next month highlights are probably filled with information about Citrix Synergy and hopefully the release of the Citrix XenClient.