Friday, July 09, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 693 views | 1 comments
When Apple launched the iPod it was largely seen as a music revolution with a slick new device, excellent online access to music and most of all one of the most brilliant marketing gimmicks ever. The iPod was not a new invention in the music scene and in fact prior to its launch there were many MP3 players available on the market but Apple seemed to do something better than everyone else, sell the device virally.
Thursday, July 01, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 2185 views | 18 comments
In my opinion there have been some rather interesting developments over the past few weeks with relation to the VDI space, none more than VMware’s announcements that View is to ship late and more so, without its profile management technology.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 2800 views | 29 comments
Its been a while now since the initial flurry of activity around the beginnings of the Desktop Virtualization space and today, many organizations are starting to piece together the puzzle in search of that alluring reduction in TCO. What we are beginning to experience is the realization that additional software is needed to fill the gaps in technology not current catered for by the VDI vendors whether this be security, personalization, management or application provisioning which is further leading to confusion. We are entering a space where there is no reference architecture, no early groups who walked the walk and know the mistakes and no firm recommendations as to exactly what is needed – this is new territory for many.
Friday, March 12, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 286 views | 0 comments
I’m always amazed to read about new data leaks or customer information making its way into the public domain but more so when it is in relation to USB drives. There is an abundance of software available to prevent such things so there really is no excuse when it happens.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 1288 views | 16 comments
The title of this article may be a bit misleading as when I refer to security I’m actually talking about things like forensics. Computer forensics have been very prevalent in IT for many years in some cases even providing the backbone for dismissal cases and law suits but with desktop virtualization now in the mix, has this been considered and has the landscape changed?
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 3356 views | 8 comments
Now that the dust is settling and the tweets are dying down about the VMware acquisition of RTO I thought that I would put a little of my perspective on how the deal affects the bigger organizations such as RES Software and AppSense. As someone who has firsthand experience of dealing with competition in the personalization space, I will try and give an honest idea of how this move affects the mentioned organizations and what’s next for them.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 175 views | 0 comments
Congratulations to all at RTO software – Vmware has just announced that they have bought three of their products for incorporation into View. RTO goes forward with Tscale, their performance management product and they will presumably continue to innovate with more products in the future.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 552 views | 3 comments
On February 22nd 2010, VMware acquired certain assets of RTO Software, namely their Virtual Profiles technology as well PinPoint and Discover products. The organization goes on to mention that the R and D efforts of RTO will now be merged into those of VMware.
A PDF document on the VMware website gives answers to various questions such as those around support, the future of the product and how the software will be used.
Thursday, January 07, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 774 views | 5 comments
I love the Windows 7 taskbar with it's jumplists and other functionaility but one thing that really irks me is the messenger icon that hangs around even when i've got no active conversations. If you remember prior to Windows 7, if you minimized messenger the toolbar icon / button wasn't there however with Windows 7, it remains...
Thursday, January 07, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 352 views | 0 comments
Following on with my current theme of under-used tools I thought I would point out another little gem which provides the ability to pipe command window output to the clipboard. CLIP.EXE originally used to be a resource kit tool which found its way into the operating system in Vista and 2003 and allows you to easily pipe the output of a command to the clipboard.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 614 views | 3 comments
Over the past few days I’ve seen a flurry of activity over something which is being referred to as “God Mode”. It would appear that somebody found a small applet that gives an administrator a single window with links to perform a whole array of tasks but what is more bizarre is how some people are treating this like it’s some form of secret or discovered hidden functionality. What prompted me to write this post was a CNET News post about the feature and I wanted to put a little tech-thought into the mix.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 836 views | 0 comments
A couple of things always seem to amaze me, the under-used power of some of the built-in Microsoft tools and even more so, the types of administrators who are not aware of them. WHOAMI.EXE is a perfect example of this, a tool that appears simple but can actually give you a huge amount of information...
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 442 views | 0 comments
A tweet (or rather a community feed) got my attention a day or so ago which was the replacing of the boot logo in Windows XP. While this was an older trick, it did lead me to do a quick search as to doing the same thing in Windows 7 which in turn let me to a really interesting article...
Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 484 views | 2 comments
Now although I know this isn't exactly desktop or server virtualization information, I did have to post a note about this. It would appear that California have passed a law which will restrict the electricity consumption of TV sets by third within 2 years. This does beg the question of how will all of those houses look on MTV cribs after this time?
Saturday, November 07, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 4128 views | 12 comments
One of the little things that Windows 7 appears not to have which Vista did was a screensaver at the logon screen. A user recently inquired about how to enable this on the Microsoft Answers forum so I thought I would put together a little post to help...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 1293 views | 10 comments
There were a couple of articles floating around recently which sparked various discussions around VDI with some people saying it was relevant and some saying it wasn’t. There were also a few hints at having an open public debate with the industry leaders about VDI and venues such as BriForum were suggested.
Here is my suggestion –
Let’s have a debate about Desktop Virtualization, Virtually?
Monday, November 02, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 629 views | 0 comments
VDI is not stupid. Recently, Eric S. Perkins on his blog proclaimed that VDI is Stupid. Well, actually, the way our competitors have been treating VDI is problematic; which might have led to Eric's assertion that VDI is stupid. So, I want to take this opportunity to go over some of his concerns.
In this Citrix blog, Victor Thu responds to Eric Perkins...
Sunday, November 01, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 266 views | 0 comments
Administrators are used to the idea, that running applications under Application Streaming will permit poorly written applications to run in a multi-user terminal services environment. For example, if the application wants to write to the \Windows directory, no problem; the application will believe that it wrote there and later if it reads the same stuff, it will see what it put there and generally, the application will work. What is less known is that that Application Streaming and XenApp publishing can be used to reduce the rights of the application at execution so that it has a reduced chance of hurting the machine.
Sunday, November 01, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 367 views | 1 comments
Having trouble getting acceptance with your VDI or XENAPP environment? There’s an APPSENSE for that! Do your User profiles get corrupt leaving you to resetting your user profiles? There’s an AppSense for that! Do your users complain about logon times? There’s an AppSense for that! Having trouble with silo servers overwriting User profiles? There’s an AppSense for that! Do Executables take up all the CPU or Memory on your servers or desktops? There’s an AppSense for that! Do you have multiple VDI images due to application compliance and security? There’s an AppSense for that!
Saturday, October 31, 2009 by Jon Wallace | 423 views | 0 comments
Grab yourself a free copy of the EBook "Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2" by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker...
Older Articles