I don't expect for one moment that the people who read my blog (and, by the way, we have now reached the monumental landmark of over 200 unique visitors and 600 page views, which I am incredibly pleased with considering I've only been doing it 2 months, so thanks very much for visiting!) are not also loyal devotees to Brian Madden's website but just in case there are one or two unaware of Brian's work, I thought I'd bring this to your attention.
There is an Israeli company called Qumranet who have a remote display protocol called Spice. Brian regards this as being "one of the most amazing things I've seen in this industry in a long time". The remote display protocol (Citrix = ICA, Microsoft = RDP which is also used by VMware) is one of the most critical components of a good user experience in Virtual Destop environments, but possibly yet more important is the hypervisor that the whole thing runs on. Qumranet uses KVM as its hypervisor, Citrix and VMWare obviously use their own. So Brian and his pal Gabe Knuth are going to do a bake-off.
I love bake-offs and, in my opinion, vendors are far too reticent about participating in them. If you're confident about your technology being as good as you keep telling us it is, go ahead and prove it...! Anyway, this one will stack Qumranet's "Solid ICE" VDI product up against Citrix XenDesktop (using XenServer as the VDI host) and VMware's VDI solution.
As Brian freely admits, this test will be paid for by Qumranet but anyone who has met Brian would not doubt his technical independence and integrity, regardless of financial compensation. So, to avoid any complaints once the results are released, he wants your input on how you think the tests should be designed and carried out. Feel free to offer your 2 cents' worth here.
I, personally, cannot wait for the results. I would like to make an educated prediction at the winner but I am not really technically capable enough. So I'll hazard a not-very-educated guess, bearing in mind the hypervisor is being tested and not the protocol, so in other words weight and origin of hypervisor, basic virtualisation technique and amount of VMs on a machine will probably have more significant effects than just remoting capability:
1. Citrix
2. Qumranet
3. VMWare
We did a bake-off here at COMPUTERLINKS recently with ADCs (Application Delivery Controllers). We tested Juniper, F5, Packeteer, Blue Coat and Citrix. Don't tell anyone but Citrix WANScaler actually came out the best - and by quite some margin too. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?
No comments:
Post a Comment