Category Archives: Virtualization

vCloud Air, Virtualization, VMware, vSOM, vSphere

VMware Licensing and Product Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

VMware dropped some news this week regarding their product and licensing lineup. VMware announced the End-of-Life (EOL) of some familiar friends, slight additions to other products, and increasing and decreasing pricing.  There are a lot of moving parts so sit tight and let me walk you through what’s going on.

First some VMware licensing goodbyes

Like rolling your pants and B.U.M. Equipment t-shirts, some things just go out of style, and the same holds true for vSphere Enterprise, vSphere Standard with Operations (vSOM) and vSphere Enterprise with Operations (vSOM.)  VMware will no longer offer these three products starting June 30, 2016.  So what are your options?

  1. Continue to purchase vSphere Enterprise, vSphere Standard with Operations (vSOM) and vSphere Enterprise with Operations (vSOM until June 30th. You can continue to renew your subscription and support until March 2020.
  2. Buy vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSOM Enterprise Plus instead. For existing vSphere Enterprise and vSOM Enterprise licenses, VMware is offering a 50% off upgrade promotion until June 25, 2016
  3. If you are standardized of vSOM Standard, you will now just purchase vSphere Standard and vRealize Operations Standard 25-Instance Pack

Cue the memorandum music.  It was nice knowing you.

Price Increase to note: vSphere Enterprise Plus with Operations increasing by $150 per CPU

Well hello.

vRealize Suite is introducing a new flavor; vRealize Suite Standard Edition. Like vRealize Suite Advanced and Enterprise, vRealize Standard edition will include Operations Advanced, Log Insight Analyst, and vRealize Business for Cloud. vRealize Advanced adds Automation Advanced and vRealize Enterprise adds Automation Enterprise and Apps Monitoring.

vRealize is moving from a 25-Instance model to a per CPU license and will include a Portable License Unit (PLU.)  PLU includes 15 OSI’s (Operating System Instances) to be used in the cloud (i.e vCloud Air, Amazon etc. allowing you to switch from on-prem hosts and public and non-public clouds).

vCloud Suite is releasing version 7 and the new suite will simply be two products.  The new vCloud Suite 7 will include vSphere Enterprise Plus (like it always has) and one of the corresponding vRealize Suites:

  • vCloud Suite Standard:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Standard
  • vCloud Suite Advanced:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Advanced
  • vCloud Suite Enterprise:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Enterprise

vCloud will continue to be licensed by the CPU and it will also come with 15 PLU instances.

vCloud Enterprise will no longer include Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Enterprise, as this can be purchased a la carte via a 25-VM pack.

Sidecar.

vCenter Standard Server and Log Insight are teaming up to form one product. Moving forward, vCenter Standard Server will include 25 instances of Log Insight for vCenter Server. There are no changes to vCenter Foundation Server, however, there will be a price increase of $1K for vCenter Standard.  The new MSRP for vCenter Standard w/ Log Insight will be $5,995.  Log Insight retailed for $5K, so the addition of it is actually a cost savings. Like Cognac, Cointreau and a touch of lemon, I hope the new vCenter Server leaves a good taste in your month.

Run Down on Price Changes

All price changes effective March 1st.

  • vCenter Standard will be $5,995 up $1000 (however it includes Log Insight which was a $5K value)
  • vSOM Enterprise Plus increasing +$150
  • vRealize Advanced down -$500
  • vRealize Enterprise down -$2,200
  • vCloud Suite STD increasing +$500
  • vCloud Suite ADV increasing +$500
  • vCloud Suite ENT down -$2,000

 

Try a free vSphere Optimization Assessment 

If you have any questions or are looking for more details, please reach out.

 

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales and Renewals

 

Photo Credit: blog.iheartradio.com

Virtualization, VMware

Want Your Team in the Super Bowl? Download a Virtualization Optimization Assessment (VOA)

We’re coming to the end of the NFL Playoffs. When I wrote the first draft of this post, there were four teams remaining with a chance to make the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, CA. After yesterday’s action, it’s down to two (being a huge Patriots fan this is difficult to swallow).  There is a very good reason why the Patriots, Broncos, Cardinals and Panthers were still remaining heading into yesterday’s conference finals games.  They built teams with solid defenses and offenses, created the perfect schemes to run, pass, and defend, and drafted or brought in the perfect player to fulfill their schemes. These winners did their research. They diagnosed and found out what their needs were and rectified, fixed and solved the issues that may have prevented them from being successful. Teams like the Browns, 49ers, or Chargers did not. Sorry if you’re a fan of one of those teams, but, the reality is, based on their records, these teams likely didn’t make the correct investments to ensure long term success and obtain a return on their investments. They didn’t implement a system to help them understand where their shortfalls were, allowing them to correct them. They made investments on the wrong players (hello Johnny Manziel) and now they are stuck with an underachieving asset.

Does this remind you of your virtualization infrastructure at all? Do you have the tools to find out how your investments are running? If not, it would be a great idea to run a free VMware vSphere Optimization Assessment (VOA) to get a better understanding.

VMware vSphere Optimization Assessment (VOA)

VMware vSphere Optimization Assessment (VOA) is a tool that can be downloaded that essentially allows you to install vRealize Operations to monitor your vSphere Hosts. It runs on your environment for a month or so and is different from a trial because it documents how your virtualized environment is running. It will let you know if you’re over-provisioned and provide capacity planning. It’s proactive in identifying issues and will even help fix them. At the end of the assessment, it will provide a detailed report of your environment and help you identify any potential weaknesses in your infrastructure. If you download the tool from GreenPages we will review the report with you and if additional software and licenses are required, we will work with you on the logistics.  Yeah, ok there’s the rub, we’d like you to purchase more licenses, if necessary; however we’d also inform you if you’re oversaturated with licenses and prevent you from over purchasing licenses you don’t require.

It’s always a good idea to step back and assess where you’re at when you’ve invested a lot of money and resources over the years in an area of your IT environment. When reviewing monitoring and management toolsets with a broad stroke, it’s easy to say they’re nice to have but not absolutely necessary. Yet if you dive deeper, there are many features and functions that make the investment worthwhile in the long-term growth and planning of your virtualization environment.

What the VOA can help identify

vRealize Operations enables IT to not just see immediate issues but also potential future problems which can have a dramatic impact on reducing unplanned outages. With Predictive Analytics and Smart Alerts, it proactively identifies and remedies system issues, while dynamic thresholds automatically adapt to environments to provide fewer and more specific alerts resulting in a 30% decrease in time to diagnose and resolve performance issues. That’s three hours of your day you get back allowing you to work on improving and emerging your environment rather than troubleshooting constant alert noises and notifications.

The old saying, it’s better to be safe than sorry, speaks volumes in a virtual environment and especially in over-provisioning.  Research has shown that 9 out of 10 virtual machines are over-provisioned. While this may not seem like a bad thing on the surface, it leads to diminishing efficiency and optimization within the virtual infrastructure and, more importantly, increased infrastructure costs. Having the ability to manage your VMs more closely and effectively with vRealize Operations (vCOPS), allows you to be able to finely tune each VM, allocating the resources that are really necessary and as a result save in potential hardware costs. This solution provides a holistic overview of your virtualized environment and provides deep insight into the health of your infrastructure which would otherwise be invisible.

Capacity planning is another key feature of the vRealize Operations toolset allowing you to model future resource needs and alert on constraints before those constraints result in unexpected system downtime.

As I said, I wrote the first draft of this post before yesterday’s games. The example I had in here originally involved the Patriot’s Malcom Butler. Well guess what? I’m keeping it in. Malcom Butler was an unknown defensive back out of University of West Alabama.  He was an undrafted free agent that the Patriots signed in 2014. Butler went on to make the game saving interception against the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX allowing the Patriots to win their fourth Super Bowl title.  It wasn’t sheer luck that the Patriots signed Malcom Butler. A lot of scouting helped identify key traits that he had that perhaps other teams missed. Once on the team, solid coaching and hard work allowed Butler to exceed. Due to this, the Patriots had the utmost confidence to put him in during the most crucial defensive play of the season. The Patriots could have easily drafted a much more touted defensive back from a larger school, but they didn’t want to assume a more recognized player would do the job. They made an investment and didn’t assume the easier model of managing their draft was a better model. They implemented a system to strategically provide them a better resolution and a stronger outcome and the reward for that was a Super Bowl.

The VOA is no cost tool and a no-brainer investment. The long term results of implementing such a tool could be very rewarding for your environment.

 

Click to start your free assessment

 

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales & Renewals

 

Microsoft, Office 365, SQL Server 2005, Virtualization

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 End-of-Life: What You Need to Know

On April 12th of 2016, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will reach its end-of-life (similar to what happened recently with Windows XP). This means there will no longer be any more support or updates from Microsoft. Think of the critical data you may have that exists in your environment that runs on the platform. If you don’t move off of SQL Server 2005 and it breaks (i.e. maintenance program that isn’t operating properly, bad bit of data getting into the data base, etc.), you could be in some serious trouble. You need to look at the workloads you have in SQL and what the impact will be if you stay on the platform. Watch the video below as I dive deeper into the topic.

If you’re looking for more information around Microsoft technologies, I will be hosting an upcoming webinar around Office 365 that I encourage you to register for.

 

Click here to view the video on our YouTube page

 

*Also, please note in the video I said you have 8 or 9 months to get this fixed. We filmed this video a while back but waited to release it a little closer to the EOL date when it would be on people’s radars. Again, the EOL date is April 12, 2016.

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server, SMBs, Virtualization

Is the Laptop Dead for Businesses?

“As workers enter the workforce, they demand the ability to run business applications via smartphones. There is simply no point in fighting the mobile wave—resistance is futile.” ~ Drew Robb, Small Business Computing.   Consumerization of IT in SMBs The way small businesses operate has heavily changed over the last 10 years. Organizations are reducing investments […]

The post Is the Laptop Dead for Businesses? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Citrix, Citrix XenAp, Citrix XenApp Support, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server, Remote Desktop, Virtualization

What to Consider when Purchasing Citrix XenApp Support

Citrix recently announced that XenApp 7.6 and XenDesktop7.6 would be released in September. It’s therefore worth noting that every new release comes with its own support options. Hence with a new version ready for release, customers have to closely look at Citrix XenApp support options so that they can plan their migration strategies. Citrix normally […]

The post What to Consider when Purchasing Citrix XenApp Support appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Featured, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld 2015: A Summary of Major Announcements from VMware

Earlier in the week, I posted recap blogs from Monday and Tuesday’s general sessions at VMworld. Below is a summary of the major announcements from VMware that came out of the event (with my own minor tweaks).

 

vCloud Air:

Disaster Recovery OnDemand™: VMware will add a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing option to VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Customers will pay a flat fee for each VM protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs. When a DR test is run or a DR event occurs, customers will only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.

Site Recovery Manager Air™: Site Recovery Manager Air is a SaaS offering that will provide VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery customers with a comprehensive management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralized business continuity and disaster recovery plans. VMware Site Recovery Manager Air will enable fast, reliable and orchestrated recovery of multi-VM applications and data centers protected in VMware vCloud Air.

VMware vCloud Air Object Storage – VMware vCloud Air Object Storage is a portfolio of highly scalable, reliable and cost effective storage services for unstructured data. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is based on Google Cloud Storage and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is based on EMC ViPR, offered by EMC Cloud Services and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage will be easy to setup and exceptionally durable and available, and will reduce the need for data protection with built-in redundancy. It will support global access use cases with easy access from any device, anywhere, anytime.

VMware vCloud Air SQL – VMware vCloud Air SQL is a new database as a service offering that will provide easy access to scalable, cloud-hosted relational databases. Delivered in a cost-efficient pay-as-you-go model, and built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, vCloud Air SQL will support hybrid data solutions that seamlessly and securely extend on-premises databases to the cloud. VMware vCloud Air SQL will support Microsoft SQL Server, with a variety of memory, compute and storage options, and plans to support other relational databases in the future.

SDDC:

VMware NSX™ 6.2 – VMware NSX 6.2 enables organizations to achieve application continuity through disaster recovery and metro-pooling for more efficient use of resources throughout a single data center and across data centers. With VMware NSX, customers can reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80%. VMware NSX 6.2 also adds better integration with physical infrastructure, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data center network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Finally, new capabilities such as Traceflow and Central CLI further simplify operations and visibility.

VMware vRealize™ Operations™ 6.1 – VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 will deliver a consistent management framework as organizations evolve from the private cloud and adopt technologies for the hybrid cloud. With the new Intelligent Workload Placement capability, VMware vRealize Operations will match the workload to a customer’s specific IT and business needs, and recommend the best placement location. Proactive Rebalancing enables customers to continually meet those needs. Operating system and application monitoring will be available natively in VMware vRealize Operations and predictive analytics help IT proactively identify and avoid potential issues across infrastructure and application stacks from a unified self-learning management solution.

vRealize Log Insight™ 3 – New features in vRealize Log Insight 3 will include double the scale and performance to 15,000 messages per second, improvements in fault tolerance around clustering, analytics improvements with new charting options and query snapshots, improved integration with vRealize Operations, and improvements in Big Data style query execution.

VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 – VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 will be based on OpenStack Kilo, making it current with upstream OpenStack code, and will include an industry-first seamless upgrade capability that will address one of the largest deployment and operational challenges for OpenStack clouds. VMware Integrated OpenStack will also include enhancements such as load-balancing as a service, Ceilometer and Heat Auto Scaling to make VMware-based OpenStack clouds more scalable, performant and resilient. VMware also announced VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available to service providers through the VMware vCloud Air Network program. Read this blog to learn more about VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 – VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 will integrate with VMware NSX 6.2, enabling IT to use network virtualization to simplify disaster recovery management and accelerate recovery in the software-defined data center. VMware Site Recovery Manager will orchestrate the live migration of VMs at scale between sites by automating cross-vCenter vMotion operations, enabling zero downtime disaster avoidance and data center migrations. VMware Site Recovery Manager will interoperate with VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management to enable automatic, policy-based disaster protection for VMs. VMware Site Recovery Manager will now add support for stretched cluster solutions including EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller. Read this blog to learn more about Site Recovery Manager 6.1.

VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering – VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering will enable ecosystem partners including Asigra, EMC, Infinio, PrimaryIO, Samsung, SanDisk and StorageCraft to offer third party software-based data services such as replication and caching. These data services will be fully integrated in vSphere and managed through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, which is the same framework used to manage all the software-defined storage services in vSphere.

 

GreenPages is hosting a webinar on 9/16, “How to Increase Your IT Equity: Deploying a Build-Operate-Transform Model for IT Operations” . Learn how to create long-term value for your organization and meet the increasing demand for services. Register now!

 

By Chris Ward, CTO

Featured, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld 2015: Day Two Recap

In this post, I’ll recap Day 2 of VMworld 2015 (you can find a recap of day 1 here).

Over the past several years, Tuesday’s general session has been focused on the End User Computing space, and this year was no exception. Sanjay Poonen, the head of VMware’s EUC business unit, kicked things off by talking about how the overall VMware SDDC strategy is making the desktop/application virtualization story stronger than ever. He highlighted tighter integration between AirWatch, Horizon, and NSX as being keys to the future success of the EUC business unit. There was a lot of focus on VMware’s recently released Identity Management solution.  This solution comes in two flavors, one being embedded in specific editions of the AirWatch mobile management platform and the second being a standalone product which does utilize some of the Airwatch back end functionality. Both are primarily SaaS base offerings. In my mind, this is a shot across the bow of Microsoft as more and more customers continue to migrate data into O365. VMware sees this as a huge threat, not because of the email migration, but because many customers are also deploying O365/Azure based Active Directory services and they see Microsoft “owning” or becoming the authoritative source for all authentication to all apps.  VMware wants to be in the game of being that hub at the center of the authentication chain. 

Sanjay then brought up Jim Alkove from Microsoft to the stage.  So, you’re probably thinking, based on the last paragraph, “why would VMware and Microsoft be holding hands on stage at VMworld?” Well, Microsoft is a big company and while there is a lot of competition between the two in some areas (Azure, Hyper-V, etc), there is a good amount of cooperation in others (Windows 10 in this case). Jim and Sanjay talked about how VMware has made use of some of the new Windows 10 embedded management features to greatly expand the AirWatch platform capabilities around Windows 10 management. While this won’t have an immediate impact, as organizations make the move to Windows 10, AirWatch can provide a very solid management platform that spans just about any type of device a user could have (iOS to Android to a Windows based desktop/laptop/tablet). Along with this was the announcement of Project A2.  This is a combination of AppVolumes application virtualization capabilities being managed by AirWatch to enable virtual apps to be pushed to physical Windows 10 based machines.  Again, a big expansion of mobile management into a more traditional desktop/laptop platform.

Next up, finally, was Pat Gelsinger (CEO of VMware).  His presentation was much different this year as he focused very high level and in general (non-VMware specific) terms about 5 imperatives for businesses across any vertical to succeed in the mobile/cloud world.  Below is a synopsis of those 5 imperatives.

1. Innovate like a start-up, deliver like an enterprise: Nimble startups are thriving in the mobile-cloud era, while large, stagnant corporations are being threatened for failing to innovate. As Eric Pearson, CIO of IHG, said earlier this week, “It’s no longer the big companies beating the small companies, it’s now the fast beating the slow.”

2. Embrace Unified Hybrid Cloud: The journey to the cloud is maturing as the industry shifts from experimentation to professional delivery. Unified hybrid cloud is bridging the gap between personal and private cloud so that organizations can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

3. Architect with security in mind: Instead of adding security in as a last minute feature, organizations need to choose solutions that have robust security capabilities built in from the start. Virtualization helps provide the foundational level of security to protect the people, apps, and data that keep organizations running.

4. Automate everything to predict (almost) anything: The next major wave of innovative technology is automated smart technology that knows what to do before you tell it to. Apps, big data, and analytics are the building blocks behind these emerging forms of proactive technology, and the businesses that know how to use them will come out on top.

5. Take risks to stand out: Businesses that don’t take risks and focus on innovation will not survive the next decade. And, as IT professionals, we must constantly lead the charge for change.

In the next post, I’ll summarize all the major announcements around the VMware solutions set that came out of the event.

 

GreenPages is hosting a webinar on 9/16, “How to Increase Your IT Equity: Deploying a Build-Operate-Transform Model for IT Operations” . Learn how to create long-term value for your organization and meet the increasing demand for services. Register Now!

 

 

By Chris Ward, CTO

 

Featured, SDDC, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld 2015: Day One Recap

It was a long but good week out west for VMworld 2015. This year’s event was kicked off by Carl Eschenbach (COO) who said there were roughly 23,000 attendees at the event this year, a new record. Carl highlighted that the core challenges seen today by VMware’s customers are speed, innovation, productivity, agility, security, and cost.  Not a huge surprise based on what I have seen with our customer base. Carl then went into how VMware could help customers overcome these challenges and broke the solutions up into categories of run, build, deliver, and secure. The overarching message here was that VMware is keenly focused on making the first three (run, build, and deliver) easier and focusing on security across all of the various product/solution sets in the portfolio.  Carl also hit on freedom, flexibility, and choice as being core to VMware, meaning that they are committed to working with any and all vendors/solutions/products, both upstream in the software world and downstream in the hardware world.  We’ve heard this message now for a couple of years and it’s obvious that VMware is making strides in that area (one example being more and more Openstack integration points).

 

Carl then began discussing the concept of a single Unified Hybrid Cloud.  In a way, this is very similar to GreenPages’ CMaaS messaging in that we don’t necessarily care where systems and applications physically reside because we can provide a single pane of glass to manage and monitor regardless of location.  In the case of VMware, this means having a common vSphere based infrastructure in the datacenter or in the cloud and allowing seamless movement of applications across various private or public environments.

Carl then introduced Bill Fathers, the general manager for vCloud Air.  Apparently, the recent rumors regarding the death of vCloud Air were greatly exaggerated as it was front and center in both keynotes and during Sunday’s partner day. As far as vCloud Air adoption, Bill said that VMware is seeing the most traction in the areas of DR, application scaling, and mobile development.

Bill brought Raghu Raghuram, who runs the infrastructure and management (SDDC) business, up on stage with him. Ragu, again, kept the conversation at a high level and touched on the rise of the hybrid application and how VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud strategy could address this.  A hybrid application is one in which some components (typically back end databases) run in the traditional on premise datacenter while other components (web servers, middleware servers, etc.) run in a public cloud environment. This really ties into the age old concept of “cloud bursting,” where one might need to spin up a lot of web servers for a short period of time (black Friday for retail, Valentine’s day for flower shops, etc.) then spin them back down. This has really been a bit of science fiction to date, as most applications were never developed with this in mind and, thus, don’t necessarily play nice in this world.  However, VMware (and I can personally attest to this via conversations with customers) is seeing more and more customers develop “cloud native” applications which ARE designed to work in this way. I would agree, this will be a very powerful cloud use case over the next 12-24 months. I see GreenPages being very well position to add a ton of value for our customers in this area, as we have strong teams on both the infrastructure and cloud native application development sides of the equation.

Another tight collaboration between Bill and Raghu’s teams is Project Skyscraper; the concept of Cross-Cloud vMotion, which, as the name would imply, is the process of moving a live running virtual machine between a private cloud and vCloud Air (or vice versa) with literally zero downtime.  Several technologies come together to make this happen including NSX to provide the layer 2 stretch between the environments and shared nothing vMotion/vSphere replication  to handle the data replication and actual movement of the VM.  While this is very cool and makes for a great demo, I do question why you would want to do a lot of it. As we know, there is much more to moving an existing application to a cloud environment than simply forklifting what you have today.  Typically, you’ll want to re-architect the application to take full advantage of what the public cloud can offer. But, if you simply want an active/active datacenter and/or stretch cluster setup and don’t have your own secondary datacenter or co-lo facility to build it, this could be a quick way to get there.

Following Raghu was Rodney Rogers CEO of Virtustream, the hosting provider recently acquired by EMC and the rumored death nail to vCloud Air.  Rodney did a great job explaining where Virtustream fits in the cloud arena. It is essentially a place to host business critical tier 1 applications, like SAP, in a public cloud environment.  I won’t go into deep technical detail, but Virtustream has found a way to make hosting these large critical applications cost effective in a robust/resilient way. I believe the core message here was that Virtustream and vCloud Air are a bit like apples and oranges and that neither is going away. I do believe at some point soon we’ll be hearing about some form of consolidation between the two so stay tuned!

Ray O’Farrell, the newly appointed CTO and longtime CDO (Chief Development Officer), was next up on the stage.  He started off talking about containers (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) in a general sense.  He quickly went on to show some pretty cool extensions that VMware is working on so that the virtualization admins can have visibility into the container level via traditional management tools such as the vCenter Web Client.  This is a bit of a blind spot currently as the VMware management tools can drill down to the virtual machine level but not any additional partitioning (such as containers) which may exist within virtual machines.  Additionally, Ray announced Project Photon. It’s basically a super thin hypervisor based on the vSphere kernel which would act as a container platform within the VMware ecosystem. The platform consists of a controller which VMware will release as open source and a ‘machine’ which will be proprietary to VMware as part of the Photon Platform but will be a paid subscription service.  Additionally, there will be an integrated bundle of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform bundled with Photon as another subscription option.  It’s apparent that VMware is really driving hard into the developer space, but it remains to be seen if workloads like big data and containers will embrace a virtual platform. I’ll post a recap of Tuesday’s general session tomorrow!

GreenPages is hosting a webinar on 9/16, “How to Increase Your IT Equity: Deploying a Build-Operate-Transform Model for IT Operations” . Learn how to create long-term value for your organization and meet the increasing demand for services. Register Now!

 

By Chris Ward, CTO

Mac, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, RDP Client Mac, Remote Application Server, Virtualization

Why is Parallels RAS the Best Option for an RDP Client for Mac?

Right from its inception, Apple has been a major contender in the technology segment. While it poses a great challenge for Windows in the desktop OS segment, it also owns a major portion of the mobile OS market share. IDC reports that Apple shipped a record high number of devices (2.34 million Macs) in Q3 […]

The post Why is Parallels RAS the Best Option for an RDP Client for Mac? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Citrix, Citrix Workspace Suite, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server, Virtualization

Citrix Workspace Suite Features vs. Parallels RAS

Citrix offers a range of products that cater to different virtualization needs of business networks. XenApp is a software that virtualizes applications and publishes them to remote users. XenDesktop software lets you deliver virtual desktops across remote networks. The main drawback with Citrix virtualization products is that you have to purchase licenses for each one […]

The post Citrix Workspace Suite Features vs. Parallels RAS appeared first on Parallels Blog.