Today I was talking to a customer about their VDI installation which is hosted on VMware vSphere 4.1 but the broker solution used by them is not VMware View. Currently they’re in a difficult situation as an update of the broker software requires them to have Windows 7 Embedded on their thin clients. Why? Because the broker has dependencies on a special Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player version which is not available on Windows XPe. For them that means that they’ve to invest a great amount of money to update to a new thin client operating system. Isn’t that weird? VDI should help customers to reduce complexity and dependencies on client hardware and software. In this case it’s all about offloading media content from the virtual machine to the endpoint for getting a better user experience. Think about that!

PCoIP uses host based rendering and has no dependencies on the client side. There’re people who say that that will affect the consolidation rate of desktops per host but is it really that bad? I guess no, and with the new Teradici Offloading cards it’s even better!

This customer will migrate their VDI installation to VMware View as they already own the licenses.

Thanks to @VirtualClarity (http://www.virtualclarity.com/) for posting an interesting link on Twitter.

The video features an interview with Tony Kerrison, CTO at ING who’ve rolled-out VDI into theit IT landscape.

Link: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns517/ns224/case_study_ingcustomer.html

A few weeks ago VMware announced the new vSphere 5 version and with that they started a new licensing model based on the VRAM of virtual machines. VMware now announced some changes in the vSphere licensing. Raj Mallempati, Director, Product Marketing, End User Computing yesterday also updated the article on the EUC blog. Check it out for the changes.

Link: VMware EUC Blog

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

Michael Klein (Twitter: @michael__klein) brought a link to Terdici’s website to my attention, which gives an overview of the Teradici PCoIP Server Offload Card. The Server Offload Card features a brand new TERA2800 Processor and is designed to meet the needs of VDI.

There are two videos up on the website which show how to increase the VDI consolidation ratios by 2X.

Link: Teradici

Devon IT today announced that their VDI Blaster is certified for VMware View 4 now. VDI Blaster is a solution which repurposes PC’s and turns them into thin clients. Companies can download VDI Blaster to their PC’s with USB key or  via network install.

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