Sooner or later even the graphic cards had to be virtualised.

To achieve this task three components are needed: a chipset providing some sort of I/O virtualisation technologies, a virtualisation platform that can support it, and a display card that can handle the requests to access its GPU coming from different virtual machines at the same time.
The first three companies that made this possible are Intel, which provides the I/O virtualisation technology (VT-d), Parallels, which provides the platform (Workstation) and NVIDIA which provides the GPU (Quadro with SLI Multi-OS).
Looking at this from a virtual desktop perspective the day is fast approaching where the percived limitations of using highly demanding applications will soon be over. There are many vendors now that are reducing the gap, and the benefits to businesses once this occurs will be massive. It is possible today to run many 2D and 3D applications with in a virtual environment on specific hardware, but once virtualisation companies such as VMware can achieve this through software then we will truely be there.
With VMware’s next release of its View product many 2D applications will be supported to run in a virtual environment either using TCX from Wyse a software verison of Teradici PC-over-IP or the RGS protocol from HP.
As you can see things are really starting to change for the virtual desktop and with the economy as it is, VDI could now start to offer the savings it always promised.

Here we are today some 10 years on since the first database exploits still preaching about security and the reason we are still doing so (apart from the fact it keeps us in a job !) is that people are still not getting the message when it comes to securing the database.  The reasons are many, scared that a patch might break things, misconfiguration, lack of knowledge, the list goes on…

So what’s this got to do with virtualisation you may ask, well actually a lot.  Your Virtual Center relies on a back end database, your VDI (VIEW) implementation relies on a back end database.  Many other third party applications that support VDI, like RTO, Appsense, guess what all rely on a back end database.

If you don’t secure these enough then you will certainly loose the keys to your kingdom.  You may well be able to recover a VC failure whether it be malicious or not but you try and recover from a Database security compromise in a VDI (View) deployment quickly, the answer is you won’t.  All those nice replica’s to mess up…

In the mean time your users will be demanding blood as they can no longer access email, business apps and the business will be loosing revenue.  Time to get your coat and head for the door!!

Or maybe not, maybe you thought for a moment and looked at the security of the database and so can sleep at night….

Wading through the sales and marketing spin reveals that under the hood NxTop is a bare-metal hypervisor built on top of Xendesktop.  Which shouldn’t really come as any suprise when you look at their investors, Citrix has invested $15 million dollars in them.

The bare metal hypervisor is depending on your viewpoint a nice feature, gets rid of the bloat that you get with a traditional OS.  Then the features and functions that make up NxTop (some of which they claim are unique and in reality are not) give you a solution that uncannily resembles VMware View!

The race is on, it is just a question of who gets there first the tortoise or the hare!

Whilst at VMworld in Vegas I came across this cool looking gadget!!!

Leveraging virtualisation technology (vmware) at the backend you can now push down desktop applications to this device and provide a very secure and efficient environment for your workforce.  The device has no OS, holds no data and has no moving parts!  If anyone steals it all they have is a very sexy looking Silver Cube but that’s it.  For more info check out the pano website (www.panologic.com).