Recently I was shown a nice little presentation about Zenworks desktop management.

As far as desktop management technology goes it does look like a good suite of tools. But in the same meetings they also mentioned about Zenworks Application Virtualization. I hadn’t heard about this product previously. So I decided to have a look to see if this option is any better or worse than the ones I have already looked at.

I won’t go too much into the detail, you can check this out yourself here.

The install of the Zap tools was quick and easy and it works in a similar manner to Citrix and VMware’s products. The basic procedure goes something like this:

1. build a clean installation machine. I like to use virtual machines for this as you can revert your changes easily.
2. Run the ZAP tool
3. Take a pre-install capture
4. Install the programs you want to virtualize
5. Take a post-install capture
6. Build the applicaton

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Cloud Computing is still getting a lot of press these days. Some of it is negative, but most is positive.

I haven’t really been following all the developments in this area as they do not have a direct effect to my workplace. But things are starting to get interesting as the various Cloud provides are starting to introduce services based on the proven technologies such as VMWare and XenServer.

VMWare’s vCloud beta looks interesting and provides a good option for launching cloud based services. VirtualizationAdmin.com has put this together this interesting demo about the VMWare vCloud product and what it does right now.



It looks quite interesting to me.

Would I throw all my servers in the Cloud? No way, but there has certainly been improvements to what is being offered.

Microsoft has announced a number of upcoming licensing changes. Included in those changes are some new licenses for VDI (Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure) implementations on Microsoft products.

There will be two new licenses:

• Microsoft VDI Standard Suite
• Microsoft VDI Premium Suite

These new licenses will match the other well known license normally associated with VDI, Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD).

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XenServer 5.0 has not been released for that long, but already a minor update has occurred. XenServer 5.5 is out now.

While largely I think XenServer 5.5.0 is a release to address some general bugs it also adds improved support.

The features added as part of the update are:

• Improved Backup and snapshot support
• Active Directory Integration
• Workload balancing
• Improved operating system support
• XenCentre improvements

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