I’m excited to announce that we’ve shipped our first major release in 2008, and the first since Michel Roth, Rick Mack, Jeff Pitsch and I joined Quest Software.  This has been very exciting for us, as we’ve been very involved in beta testing, providing development feedback and direction.  It really is amazing to be able to say “it would make customers very happy if the product did “X”, instead of Y” and to see the feature added or changed based on your comment/feedback.

5.9 was released to the public in December of 2007, and had one service pack, so the following are features that are new to version 5.10.  In the next couple of weeks we’ll do detailed blog entries about each these features.  The 5.10 binaries and admin guide should be available on our website on Friday, July 25th.

Web Portal - Web-IT:

• Web-IT migrated to ASP.Net 1.1 to ASP.Net 2.0
• Web-IT config files migrated from text to XML files to support future automation
• Web-IT Integration With Juniper Secure Access
• Smart Card login support

Clients:

• Ticketing - Secure tickets will be issued per connection request, obviating the need to embed hashed user credentials inside .pit connection files
• Enhanced Multi-monitor support
• Updated Linux and Java Clients
• PXE Boot Linux Client
• LiveCD Linux Client
• All AppPortal Client settings can be stored in a single configuration file
• Java Client fully supported via Secure Gateway

Connection Broker & Management Console:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Support for Virtual Iron 4.3.x
• Dynamic Computer Group Auto-expansion - Auto Provisioning of new computers
• Server Provisioning
• Delete computers that have not been used in a specified number of days
• Realtime enumeration of running processes on Managed Computers
• Termination of running processes on Managed Computers.
• Power Management of ACPI and WoL (Wake on LAN) capable computers and servers
• MSI Package Deployment to Computer Groups or Managed Computers and servers
• Disable/Enable Computer Groups or Managed Computers during maintenance cycles
• Unique Computer names enforced across Desktop Groups and Data Centers
• Display Realtime License Usage
• Retrieval and display of VM Template Sizes
• Wizard Driven Managed Desktop creation
• Streamlined Softgrid Integration
• Option to bypass proxy settings for Console to Broker communication
• Verification of sufficient disk space on target storage when provisioning servers or desktops.

Task Automation for Power Management (multiple recurrence options or single instance):

• Power Off
• Power On
• Reset
• Resume - for VMware and Hyper-V
• Standby - for ACPI & WoL Devices
• Suspend -for VMware and Hyper-V
• Wakeup - for ACPI & WoL Devices

Task Automation for Operating System operations (multiple recurrence options or single instance):

• Log off user
• Reset Session
• Restart O/S
• Shutdown O/S

Task Automation for Virtual machines (multiple recurrence options or single instance):

• Delete VM
• Delete VM not accessed in a specified number of days

Task Automation for Miscellaneous Tasks (multiple recurrence options or single instance):

• Copy file to computer
• Enable/Disable Computer
• Initialize Computer
• Run Program/Script on Computer

Task Automation for MSI Packages (multiple recurrence options or single instance):

• Install MSI Package
• Update MSI Package
• Uninstall MSI Package

Setup Program:

• Wizard-based setup program to automate database creation, upgrade, and management of VMware trust store and Virtual Iron jar libraries
• Terminal Servers and Connection Brokers are automatically added to the Provision Farm in the Provision Management Console.

Experience Optimization Pack:

• Bi-directional Audio - Microphone Redirection
• Local Text Echo - Latency Masking for typing over latent networks
• Multi-media Redirection - seamlessly redirects multi-media content to the client CODEC for local playback. - This will be released as a separate 5.10 update, as it has not been released from QA yet.

If you ever read about the history of the Provision Networks division of Quest Software you’ll know that Provision Networks was originally a spinoff out of a Citrix Platinum reseller. The spinoff was a result of years of creating tools that helped people solve problems that Citrix did not allow them to solve. I recently re-discovered a feature in our product that is a perfect example of this: the App Wizard. The name does not do it enough justice because it allows you to bulk-publish applications in just about every way you can think of. Let’s take a short look at some of the features of the App Wizard.

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Recently Paul Ghostine, VP and General Manager of the Quest Software Provision Networks division did a podcast with Virtual Strategy Magazine on the subject of our recently announced partnership with Parallels. Parallels’ Corey Thomas, VP of Marketing, also was a part of this podcast.

It’s a good podcast to listen to that is pretty insightful. Not only does it provide answer to questions we get a lot on the Provision Networks - Parallels partnership but there’s also several sneak peaks into the future in regards to where Provision Networks, Parallels and virtualization as a whole is going according to Paul and Corey.

Recommended listening: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/VSM-Podcasts/Quest-Software-and-Parallels-Inc.-Deliver-VDI-Solution.html.

A couple of weeks ago Patrick Rouse posted a demonstration of our Multimedia Acceleration feature for VDI and Terminal Services. Since then we’ve received a incredible amount of very cool feedback. In addition to Patrick’s demonstration we’ve been showing another, different demonstration video to our partners and customers. Since everybody was so excited about this, I decided to put it up here as well.

This demonstration video of Provision Networks Multimedia Acceleration for VDI and Terminal Services is a “side by side” demonstration video. In the demonstration, one Virtual Desktop shows the user experience using “just” the RDP protocol and the other Virtual Desktop shows the user experience with the Multimedia Acceleration components installed.

The demonstration was created by recording the user experience of two 800×600 Virtual Desktop sessions side-by-side. Since this yields a rather large video with a big resolution, I have re-rendered the video to a maximum width of 1024 pixels so that it should fit on most screens.

Provision Networks Multimedia Redirection Demonstration

Should you want to take a look at the videos at their original size, feel free to download them here.

Here’s an example of typical question we sometimes get from Quest Sales people:

“My customer just talked to a Citrix Reseller and they told the customer that they needed Citrix XenDesktop because it uses ICA, which is better than the Microsoft RDP Protocol that other VDI Connection Brokers use.  How do I respond to this?”

Here’s our answer:

“If we were talking about the ICA stack in XenApp (Presentation Server) I’d say that ICA is hands down better than RDP.

That being said, we don’t use the “out of the box” RDP protocol that ships with Windows and ICA that exists in XenDesktop is not feature equivalent to that of ICA on XenApp.

Quest Software, Provision Networks Divison licenses the RDP protocol from Microsoft. We add the following following features to the out of the box RDP protocol, regardless of RDP host, i.e. Physical Desktop, Virtual Desktop or Terminal Server:

• Seamless Windows
• Session Sharing
• Passthru, Kerberos, Smartcard and CAC Authentication
• Bi-directional Audio
• Local Text Echo
• USB Handheld Sync
• End-to-End Universal Printer Driver (for client and session printers, using PDF or EMF with configurable compression and a list of other features not in Citrix’ UPD)
• Multimedia Redirection
• Enhanced Multi-Monitor Support

Citrix ICA on XenDesktop is missing the following features that exist on XenApp:

• Smart card authentication
• Single sign-on using the Kerberos virtual channel
• TWAIN mapping
• USB PDA synchronization
• SmartAuditor
• SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration
• SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration
• SpeedScreen Latency Reduction Manager
• SSL Relay direct to the virtual desktop
• Session monitoring and control
• Shadowing / Remote Control of Sessions

 
They’ give customers GoToAssist (to address the missing shadowing feature) if they purchase XenDesktop Platinum at $395 USD per CCU, which is nearly 8 times what Quest’s VDI product costs.  XenDesktop has been reported to blue screen and reboot the OS if one tries to initiate a shadow session using remote assistance. If remote control is a requirement, this is a huge flaw.

As for futures, I anticipate that Citrix will add the ICA Features currently missing from XenDesktop in a service pack, feature pack or Platinum Edition. 

So what is Quest’s answer to this?

In June 2008 we demonstrated “prototype” Bitmap Acceleration Technology on Youtube and at Briforum.  This technology, which is analogous to Citrix Speedscreen, will erase the bandwidth usage and graphical performance differences between ICA and RDP (when it is released).

If the customer’s clients are all connected at LAN speed, then this ICA SpeedScreen advantage becomes a lot less. So ICA is a better protocol, but which ICA, at what price, over what connection, for what percentage of the user population, for how long and compared to what RDP?

In a few months will there be any difference between the performance between Citrix ICA and Quest’s Enhanced RDP?  We don’t think so, except that ours will continue to cost a fraction of what Citrix’ costs, and our product will continue to deliver IT Friendly features that don’t exist in Citrix”

Storage has always been a hot subject, especially in regards to VDI. One misconception that some people seem to have is that the storage requirements in VDI environments are so high that VDI would be a bad idea for most companies. Although I agree that the storage requirements for VDI are higher than for Terminal Server, I do not necessarily agree that this automatically renders VDI solutions cost-ineffective from the get-go. One reason for this is that VDI often gets implemented in environments that already have enterprise storage (SAN) in place. The second reason is that the storage requirements are not as large as some portray them to be. I’ve seen calculations based on 20GB of disk space per virtual desktop, which, in most cases, is a pretty high number. If you’re looking at VDI as a means to deploy Windows XP desktops, chances are 6-10GB per virtual desktop is more than sufficient to fulfill your needs. If you multiply that number by 500 virtual desktops, the difference is pretty significant. Another reason for my disagreement is that the choice of virtualization platform could very well dictate the storage requirements of a VDI solution. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, for example, is inherently storage-optimized. Using this platform as the foundation for a turnkey VDI stack, you will dramatically reduce the storage requirements, making VDI very similar to Terminal Server (Quest and Parallels have an exclusive VDI partnership).

By no means am I denying there is ample room for improvement in the way of reducing VDI’s storage requirements. Needless to say, reducing these requirements will certainly yield higher ROI. At Quest Software, we have been keenly aware of this fact right from the beginning. That’s why we have been working very diligently to further extend the already rich feature set of our virtual desktop management solution with an image management solution dubbed CIMS (Common Image Management System) which we publicly announced at VMworld 2007. I would like to take this opportunity to talk a little more in detail about CIMS.
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