Netapp Integration

Duhh ... Did you notice that NetApp integration is BUILT-IN to XenServer ?? Anyway, did anyone read the Press Release far down enough to learn what Platinum is ?? Well, I'll explain just in case.

Platinum includes PROVISIONING SERVER (from the Ardence acquisition.) What this buys is that a SINGLE OS IMAGE can be STREAMED over the network to the VMs hosting the desktops. Therefore, instead of housing 1,000 9GB desktop images, they can store ONE 9GB XP or Vista OS image and STREAM it over the NETWORK via PXE boot to an awaiting DISKLESS VM !!

If that were not enough, they can then stream the apps INDEPENDENTLY of the OS through the old Citrix technology XenApp (AKA Presentation Server) thus DECOUPLING the apps from the OS sparing not only DLL HELL, but meaning only a SINGLE OS IMAGE needs to be patched, scanned for viruses etc. If an upgrade breaks someting it can instantly be rolled back just by rebooting the guests.

Basically, that means 1,000 desktops can reside on a 35GB or disk. Think that pisses off EMC ???

I am guessing that is what Ashlee meant by storage LIGHT.

instead of posting childish whiny cryptic junk ...

Why not explain what you are talking about, with maybe .... oh .. examples ???

Are you trying to say that in 1995 some company was PXE booting entire Win95 images over a 10 megabit network, and THEN streaming apps onto it ??

If they were. do you think perhaps the technology was possibly not yet robust enough to accommodate the technique ??

Feel free to use buzzwords, in your reply, but CONTENT and facts would be nicer..

And how does this differ..

From the usual thin client desktop?

Citrix pretty much invented the concept of a mutiuser, remote terminal windows server (of course, unix had been doing that long before, but xwindows is hardly "thin desktop")

Over a decade ago, their winframe product was delivering complete desktops to wyse dedicated terminals (or dos based 386/486 machines running a client) using ICA to stream the display and keyboard/mouse events in each direction (plus share the local drives in the case of the dos machines). This is what eventually became the Terminal Services (RDP) app that comes with almost all windows servers now.

at the same time, DOS machines were pxe booting from and loading a complete win3.11 environment from netware servers, running applications (from the same servers) selectively depending on if they did (or didn't) have permissions to them at the netware level.

either way, I can recall this technology being in place a decade ago - ok, its a *lot* harder to just run modern software from a remote server; apps have got much, much bigger and rely on registry keys rather than easily-redirectable ini files, but I am not seeing anything new or novel here.