Last week, I had the privilege to attend BriForum and represent our company, Virtual Bridges. This also afforded me the privilege to be with a community of people whose single purpose is fostering innovation in Desktop Virtualization technologies. It was by far the best industry event that I have attended – where the focus was more on ‘show/prove it to me’ rather than the ‘marketicture’.

Brian Madden has definitely become established as a ‘trusted brand’ for customers, partners and vendors alike. I recently came back from a two week trip to Europe visiting our customers and partners in the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary and Paris. Wherever I went people recognized BrianMadden.com as the trusted source for all desktop virtualization technologies.

In addition to meeting our partners and customers at BriForum, I also got the chance to attend several technical sessions. These sessions inspired me to put down the following thoughts:

1.       There is a lot of vigorous debate and religious views in the community about client-side hypervisor vs VDI. Some of our friends  even questioned the wisdom of having a ‘hypervisor’ on the client side.

My view to this is that people are missing the fundamental requirement that our customers ask us all the time – ‘how do we deliver a ubiquitous, portable, and consistent desktop experience to users whether they are online or offline across a range of devices without compromising security’. Once you start looking at this requirement, you don’t think it is VDI or client-side hypervisor [Type 1 or 2 does not matter] – but it is a problem that requires a fully integrated solution.

For example, as a regular user I would like to use my desktop from any browser [or thin client] – but when I go offline [on a plane], I would like to use the same desktop on my laptop and/or from a portable drive.  If I am typically offline, and I forget my laptop and/or USB stick, I still would like to access my desktop by simply walking up to any browser and launching my environment in a VDI mode.

This is the scenario that we often get presented with from our customers. The ‘magic’ that makes all this happen is ‘bi-directional data sync between VDI and Disconnected modes’. This provides users with a consistent desktop experience across the full range of access modes with availability to the same applications and data.

The underlying technology that makes this all happen is the ‘portable hypervisor’ that works on both VDI and disconnected (off-line VDI) mode.

When I first looked at the Citrix XenClient product after their big launch at Synergy, my first reaction to Citrix was “why would you launch yet another standalone solution?” Their approach of separating XenDesktop and XenClient into two separate solutions that require creation of separate desktop images, separate Mgmt infrastructures and separate user profiles – is really missing the point. But, then again, no one would ever accuse Citrix of being easy to use

2.       I was very impressed with all the innovation that is happening in the protocol space, particularly with the live demos of all the protocols side-by-side. That being said, I felt that there was too much emphasis on the image/video quality [frames/sec], types of compression, etc.. – but lacking any audio integration… There is hardly any video in the world that is useful without audio coupled with it..  The fact that the protocols did better with video on MUTE does not say much about any of the protocols. I think it is extremely critical to look at both audio and video [in sync] and also the bi-directional nature of it – particularly with VoIP type applications that we see more and more businesses starting to use.

It’s not often in life that one faces a chance to do something greater than himself. It’s even less frequent when that chance is actually one to change the world for the better. To me, this is my career with Virtual Bridges.

After spending the early part of my career in the Telecommunications industry, I first approached the company that is today Virtual Bridges, as a young engineer eager to make a difference in a new segment of technology. What I quickly realized is that our goal was truly special – no less than to transform the way people use and manage desktop computers through innovative, reliable, and real technology.

Nine years later, the goal remains the same, but the team is better than ever. I cannot imagine a more talented group of individuals working together every day with a single purpose in mind. This makes Virtual Bridges greater than the sum of its parts, and something truly special to be part of.

With a wonderful, experienced team, unique product, and powerful vision, Virtual Bridges is clearly the most innovative and inspirational company in its space. I am very, very proud to be part of this family.

Leo Reiter
Co-founder and CTO

Very few times in your career do you come across an opportunity that is simply too good to pass up. My theory in business has always been – give me a great product, in an exploding market and I will build the sales team and processes to drive revenue.

Well, VERDE is a phenomenal product and the Desktop Virtualization market is exploding. While our competitors are talking about their grandiose VDI plans, we are delivering value to our customers today.

I have worked for companies – large and small – over my 17 year career in high-tech sales. This is the first time I can honestly say the company which employs me is changing the world of business for the better.

Don’t get me wrong, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are phenomenal companies and I owe a great part of my success to them. However, Virtual Bridges VERDE is truly changing the way people work (for the better) while reducing costs all at the same time. This is a salesperson’s dream.

When I met with Jim Curtin for the first time and saw VERDE in action it was very similar to my first experience using a modem to ‘dial-in’ to get my cc:Mail. Or, the first time I opened a browser and accessed information that was thousands of miles away in less than a second…the first time I checked my hotmail account from my in-laws house. The light bulb went on, and it was very bright. Now, add the passion and experience of our management team and you have a real winner. This is why I joined Virtual Bridges.

When you have the opportunity to sell a phenomenal product, provide business value to your customers and partners and work with great people…consider yourself fortunate. I am very fortunate.

We’re going to start an occasional feature on our blog where some of the stars of Virtual Bridges tell why they joined our team. Today’s post is by Srini Gurrapu who is our VP of Product Management.

Desktop Virtualization is one of the most transformative themes in the IT that is about to disrupt the 26 year old status quo in the traditional desktop computing practices. The current desktop computing paradigm is riddled with complexity, security issues, and ultimately significant cost to own a pc. One could think that the PCs are getting cheaper every year, so where is the cost coming from? All the day-to-day activities such as installing/upgrading OS and apps, Hardware failures/upgrades, data backup, dealing with malware, data security etc, all result in significant operational cost.

The market needs a simple, easy to manage, secure, and cost-effective desktop computing for enterprises, SMBs, and consumers alike.

I personally worked at several Desktop Virtualization startups such as RingCube, Mokafive, and my own MySuperPC.com to realize this vision – and played with solutions from Citrix and VMware.

Unfortunately, there is more hype, inflated expectations from these incumbent solutions, works only in online/offline modes, and the TCO is difficult to measure or rather not there.

Virtual Bridges with its innovative VERDE technology that combines the best of both worlds from VDI and Disconnected use and add several new features such as Gold Master provisioning, State-of-the art distributed clustering, Cloud Branch Server == and finally, a single platform that works across Windows and Linux guest systems.

Innovation, passion, experienced management team and marquee partnerships such as IBM, Canonical, RedHat and Novell, excited me to be part of this team.

Finally, there is a promise and commitment to transform Desktop TCO by delivering Desktop-as-a-Managed Service from Virtual Bridges!

In case folks haven’t noticed, Brianmadden.com, a well-respected information source for all things VDI, has written a detailed review of Virtual Bridges’ VERDE.

Here is a link to the review:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/gabeknuth/archive/2010/02/25/a-first-look-at-virtual-bridges-verde.aspx

This is a very strong review that covers almost all of our functionality. Most impressive was that Gabe, who performed the review, is a complete novice to Linux and yet managed to not only get VERDE working quickly and easily, but also was able to grasp the full power of VERDE.

Two of the things pointed out in the review bear mentioning – the first is the upcoming addition of a complete management console for VERDE. This will make installing and managing VERDE even simpler for non-Linux administrators. The second is the upcoming inclusion of RDP as an option in our protocol repertoire, as well as NX.

These features will give us even more capability to deal with low-bandwidth use cases, for customers who are not yet ready for Cloud Branch, or where Cloud Branch might not be appropriate.

In a nutshell, VERDE 3.0 extends our somewhat unheralded leadership in VDI innovation by adding several exciting capabilities. VERDE 1.0 set the bar for VDI with a personalizable, gold master-based, stateless session management model on top of a distributed connection broker architecture that supports both Windows and Linux. VERDE 2.0 added support for managed desktops, disconnected use and client-side hypervisor as an extension of the VERDE 1.0 gold master provisioning model. This was the first product on the market to offer both VDI and CSH in one management model.

In a nutshell, VERDE 3.0 extends our somewhat unheralded leadership in VDI innovation by adding several exciting capabilities.

VERDE 1.0 set the bar for VDI with a personalizable, gold master-based, stateless session management model on top of a distributed connection broker architecture that supports both Windows and Linux. VERDE 2.0 added support for managed desktops, disconnected use and client-side hypervisor as an extension of the VERDE 1.0 gold master provisioning model. This was the first product on the market to offer both VDI and CSH in one management model.

With 3.0, architecturally, we have added what we call “Cloud Branch”. Cloud Branch replicates the centrally-managed gold master to remote servers, be they branches, managed customer sites, regional data centers, etc… This not only extends VDI to the branch level, but it also eliminates issues with WAN latency. So, instead of pursing the impossible goal of trying to run protocol intensive applications while also accomodating low bandwidth network connections at remote sites, we have architected the WAN out of the equation, without sacrificing centralized management and provisioning. The server(s) in the branch does not require any management or intervention whatsoever from the branch staff – they do not even need to know that it is there. This extends the power of VDI to the branch and desktop outsourcer without adding cost or complexity to the solution.

In addition to Cloud Branch, we have added support for Windows 7. Windows 7 is expected to drive a big refresh in desktops. Organizations need to couple this effort with a modern management model, and VDI – according to all the pundits – is it. We are ready. Are you? Windows 7 will take some planning and some ironing out with application compatibility and user training. While this is going on, it is strongly recommended that organizations lift up their XP and get it running on VERDE VDI. This allows immediate cost savings, effortless technical transition to Windows 7 and parallel introduction so that users can have side-by-side Virtual dekstops during the transition period – without extra desktop hardware or administrative cost. It even allows exploring alternative desktops such as cloud or linux-based desktops, all from the same infrastructure. All as easy as adding a new gold image and assigning it to a group or groups of users in Active Directoy, LDAP or whatever you happen to use. This is really cool.

We’ve added the ability for Mac clients to access this same infrastrcuture. Now Mac clients can access Windows (2000, XP or 7) or Linux virtual desktops in the same way that today’s Windows, LInux and Thin Client access points do today.

There is a lot more to the release. Have a look. Lets us know if you have any questions.

Here is a link to the full text of the VERDE 3.0 press release.

Here is a link to the virtualization.info story.

Happy holidays!

Here is a short video demonstrating the multimedia playback
capabilities of VERDE’s remote display protocol:

The distance between client and server is over 800 miles (or over 1300
kilometers), demonstrating that even across great distance and
relatively modest connection speeds, full-screen video playback is
completely acceptable with the VERDE VDI solution.  The client
location is on a small-business grade broadband (cable modem)
connection.  Obviously playback on a LAN segment is even better, so
there’s no need to demonstrate that!

Note that no special video codecs are used – this is just YouTube
displayed from a server-hosted virtual desktop session using VERDE’s
remote framebuffer and audio playback protocol.  Notice also the
audio/video synchronization, illustrating the timing and accuracy of
VERDE’s pure software protocol!

I respectfully contend that the “Madden Paradox” is fundamentally flawed because it is equating “VDI” with VMware and Citrix and not taking into account more complete offerings in the market such as VERDE from Virtual Bridges and IBM.

IBM gave a very compelling demonstration and presentation of the newly-announced VERDE 2.0 yesterday at CloudWorld in San Francisco.

If the world were flat then yes, the “paradox” is increasingly true. The gap between TS and VDI is increasingly negligible. But, the world is not flat, and there are vendors out there who offer truly innovative VDI, not just blatant extensions of the server consolidation paradigm with token efforts at incorporating innovations that address desktop-centric computing. Of the two, Citrix at least seems to understand the desktop better but they are the ones most caught in the teeth of the “Madden Paradox” – but that is another discussion.

So, if you come to see the world as round, you will see that Virtual Bridges’ VERDE has been designed from the ground up as a pure VDI product and addresses most of the issues that you have been insightfully pointing out are wrong with the flat-world comparison for TS and VDI.

When looking at The Paradox in the context of TS versus VDI, where VDI is defined as VERDE, then there are a number of distinguishing advantages of VDI over TS – and, I concede that TS still fills certain use cases better than VDI, but in meeting the needs of next generation desktop management, which is what VDI is all about, VDI has a number of distinct advantages:

1) VDI is superior for Public Clouds and MSP’s because of the better inherent segregation of users on the same servers. This is more cost efficient (HW, SW and operating cost), more energy efficient and more flexible for serving diverse populations efficiently.

2) VDI is superior in its ability to accommodate heterogeneous user environments – VDI allows one to seamlessly deploy a mix of XP, Windows 7 and Linux on the same infrastructure. This is important to not only future-proof your management and provisioning infrastructure, but also to make it more flexible in assigning the right desktop to the right job instead of a one-size-fits-all tariff on your desktop population.

3) VDI is superior in Application compatibility… (as referenced above). Not only are there applications that are not TS-aware or TS-friendly, but when dealing with sensitive legacy applications with finicky food chain dependencies, it is a lot easier/cheaper to isolate and provision these from a separate gold image than it is from a separate server as is required in TS.

4) VDI is superior in enabling disconnected use/local processing. Just because VMware and Citrix have no figured this out yet doesn’t mean others haven’t. VERDE has had support for disconnected use for several months. TS will never cross this barrier. VDI (VERDE) can do it today.

5) VDI is more flexible in accommodating distributed infrastructure whereas TS requires a centralized monolithic array of servers. This is currently unique to VB, and counter-intuitive to VDI, but the ability to have regional data centers and replicated branches that are centrally managed and dynamically provisioned as opposed as having to consolidate infrastructure into data centers gives VDI a practical advantage in situations where network reliability or bandwidth is an issue.

6) VDI servers are lower maintenance – VDI architectures are effective stateless when it comes to applications on servers whereas TS architecture needs to have applications installed on each server, and each server therefore requires more management and care. VDI involves running of desktop gold master images that are stored on disk. The applications are installed in the gold master images, not on the server.

7) VERDE VDI has built-in storage optimization. With its minimal persistent storage requirements this compares a lot closer to TS than Vmware for example. This isn’t really an advantage of VDI over TS, but it narrows the TS advantage

In the same vein, unlike the re-purposed server-oriented hypervisors like Xen and ESX, VERDE uses a more modern hypervisor approach so that densities of our desktop-oriented hypervisor are closer to TS densities than to the densities of antiquated server-oriented hypervisor densities.

So, in our view, VDI has several compelling and sustainable advantages over Terminal Services that will allow it to fulfill the high expectations that analysts and strategists have for it… but it will be a slow painful process if thought leaders continue to look to Vmware and Citrix for delivering on the promise.

Unfortunately, if you concede that there is a bigger world out there beyond just Vmware and Citrix, you will have to give up on your dream of the “The Madden Paradox” being your ticket to the Industry Lexicon Hall of Fame…

Link to Brian Madden’s “Madden Paradox”

Related articles by Zemanta

• NetApp goes native with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (computerworld.com)

Our VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product is the same as ourWin4VDI product but with support for Linux guests. When we developed the MS-free capabilities in our new product, we called it VERDE rather than “Win4VDI for Linux Guests”, because we wanted to emphasize the fact that there was no “WIN” in the new solution.

Now that VERDE has become so popular, eclipsing Win4VDI, we are moving to fold the Win4VDI capability of running Windows desktops into the VERDE solution. Now, instead of having to decide between VERDE and Win4VDI, you just need to deploy VERDE and decide how many, if any Windows sessions you will host on VERDE versus Linux guest sessions.

There is no difference in price between Windows or Linux guest sessions. There is no need to define a set number of Windows or Linux guests. You can mix and match and change on the fly in any way you want to allocate session between Windows and Linux guests as long as the total number of concurrent sessions is equal to or less than the total number of concurrent session licensed.

Folding Win4VDI into the VERDE brand makes sense. Users need to be able to seamlessly allocate resources between Linux guests and Windows guests and this move helps them do that while reducing any confusion from having two product names.

We have been getting lots of questions about what is the difference between Win4VDI and VERDE. So, to be clear, the answer is, none. They are the same thing. And, now they have the same name.

We will be synchronizing web pages and collateral over the next couple of weeks – but with the introduction of our new  VERDE Documentation Suite, we have begun the process of assimilating Win4VDI into VERDE.

The VERDE product documentation suite recently received a major
refresh. There are now nearly 200 pages of up-to-date, high-quality
information in PDF format covering the entire VERDE, Win4Lin
Pro, and Win4Solaris Pro product lines.

We are very excited about this refresh as it gives our customers an
enhanced learning and reference experience for our products. We also
remain committed to continue updating the set based on customer
feedback and new product developments.

The latest guide to the VERDE documentation suite, including links to
all references, is here:
http://www.vbridges.com/docs/VERDEDocumentationGuide.pdf