VMware introduces a new program which is called “VMware Ready Desktop Solution”. It helps you to simplify your path to modernize the desktop infrastructure. These solutions are delivered by VMware partners who have extensive experience in the VDI space.

The first validated solution is a solution architecture for federal teleworkers.

From the website:

With VMware Ready Desktop Solutions, View solutions are validated end-to-end to conform to strict performance, cost and scale requirements. With the deployment of a Validated Solution Architecture under the VMware Ready Desktop Solution program, your organization can achieve faster time-to-value by reducing the risks of deployment. With the design and deployment done by VMware’s premier partners, you get enhanced security, risk compliance and business continuity, all while improving the productivity of your employees with anytime, anywhere access to their desktops from any device.

(Graphics source: http://www.vmware.com/files/images/screens_view/vrds-info-diagram.jpg)

Please check the following website to get an deeper understanding of the the solutions and their benefits.

Link: VMware

Vittorio Viarengo again published an interesting article which describes the current situation on the VDI market. The information in the article comes from a Goldman Sachs survey which was published in January 2011.

Link: JourneyToCloud.com

Vittorio Viarengo published a very interesting article about the VDI market shares on his blog. The data from Morgan Stanley Research shows that Citrix and VMware have almost the same share in the installed base. Check Vittorio’s article for more information and some graphs.

Link: JourneytoCloud

Two weeks ago I’ve decided to update my Zimbra Desktop Client 2.0 to the new beta version 7. All went well so far and I could see the new look and feel. Really nice changes to the UI. After a few days I had to change my domain password which is also my Zimbra password because the server is connected to the Active Directory. So good so far but I couldn’t open my Zimbra Desktop Beta 7 Client anymore. I always got the error message: service.FAILURE: system failure: Unable to unmarshal response for AuthResponse. I could find a thread in the Zimbra forums which helped me a bit and also a colleague was facing the issue and he could fix it. I’ve tried to fix the issue with his instruction but it didn’t worked.

He gave me the following hint:

Delete your email signature and reset the language to English via the Zimbra web interface.

In the forums I found some information which said:

If your signature or any of your other account settings in ZWC contain UTF-8 characters you will get this error. You can get around the problem for now by removing those characters from your signature.

Bug 56547 – Unable to sync account if signature contains UTF-8 content

I’ve tried that workaround and deleted the signature and set the language to English but still no chance to login via Zimbra Desktop.

After a few thought I came up with another idea! Checking the zdesktop.log file might be a good way to get more information on the issue. On Mac OS X you can find the file in the path /Users/christoph/Library/Zimbra Desktop/log. Of course it helped me. I found out that there where more UTF-8 characters in the AuthResponse. Both the signature and the Out-of-Office notification contained the UTF-8 characters. After deleting also the OOO-message I could login again. That’s a first workaround but I think this will be fixed in the next beta version of the Zimbra Desktop client. I hope this helps.

For quite a while now I’ve tried to get Zimbra Desktop working with my Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) but I couldn’t get it running. I’ve always received an error message saying: account.INVALID_ATTR_VALUE: zimbraPrefForwardIncludeOriginalText must be one of: …” for me just something like: $&%°!%!" so I left it for a while. But again I thought there must be a way to get it running and I investigated the issue.

Read the rest of this entry »

VMware released the new version 3.0.1 of Fusion this morning. The download is available at the VMware website. Version 3.0.1 is a maintanance release and freely available for all Fusion customers. Check out the release notes and the what’s new document.

Read the rest of this entry »