Yo! Twitter-ers, you can follow the Citrix and HP partnership on twitter here - http://twitter.com/CitrixHP It's fresh, live and twitter-tastic.  Ok - that was bad.      (but the twitter feed is good now, and the following is growing rapidly!)

My friends in HP Solutions Engineering tell me that historically capacity planning for server deployments was not a trivial task given the range of variables to consider, not to mention the time and therefore the expense required to do it right. And now add virtualization variables to the mix and capacity planning tasks can be even more challenging. YET, effective capacity testing can supply a big payoff by ensuring that your virtualized environment can be the best it can be, and that you gain all the cost savings and flexibility improvement benefits promised by virtualization. See here for a recent HP post on capacity planning in virtualized environments.

Of course it is not surprising that there are a number of innovative tools out there to assist in these efforts for Citrix environments, including HP LoadRunner, a popular load testing tool used for planning XenApp deployments, and the Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing server sizing and application performance testing solution.

We have a excellent new technical resource for capacity planning with ESLT - the recently released "Using EdgeSight for Load Testing ..." white paper developed by HP and Citrix describes how to implement ESLT tools and scripts to characterize scalability for various HP ProLiant servers with XenServer and XenApp. This paper is a great addition to the ever expanding set of technical papers published on XenApp and XenServer - visit here to browse the entire library.

Don't forget to register for the Citrix Live! Virtual Event, Secrets, Lies and VDI happening Oct 20^th and visit the HP sessions and exhibits! Enjoy.     
 

Ok, rather than bore you with copious platitudes about why and how HP is one of our most important partners, let's get right to Introducing the NEW Citrix and HP Community site and the cool resources available here and now. To quote my esteemed colleague "there's a Community for that!". 

Like all of the partner communities on the Citrix community portal, you will receive real-time feeds on all things HP and Citrix, get a glimpse at he most requested documents, latest hot-fixes & patches and participate in our forums.  I thought I would take a minute and highlight some new items to welcome you to the page.

First we need to mention the recent validation of Citrix XenServerwith HP Virtual Connect Flex-10. See the links in the highlights section. Virtualizing network infrastructure will soon become the next holy grail in our industry (previously discussed here) and HP and Citrix XenServer are delivering today!

Are you perhaps wondering if that new HP software you are considering is being used by others within Citrix environments? Find out now in the Community Verified portlet, and yes, you can share what HP and Citrix solutions you are using with the community via this portlet. Contribute and enrich the Citrix and HP community- share your experiences.  

Ok - now it is your turn. After you have explored the feeds, forums, knowledge and technical resources, on the Citrix and HP Community tell us what is missing, or new content sources you would like to see here ... We will be evolving this site based on your input! Brent. 

HP just announced their next generation G6 ProLiant and BladeSystem servers powered by Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processors. My engineering friends suggested that the new Hyper Threading Technology in the 5500 processors is worth reading up on ... see the link in Pat Gelsinger's blog post for more on this front. Previously we talked about HP testing, and new performance characterization work just completed by HP indicates that a 2P HP BL460c G6 server equipped with the Intel Xeon X5570 can provide optimal support for up to 402 users when running HP's most aggressive test workload in a 64-bit HP Server Based Computing environment. The HP test results demonstrated that Hyper-Threading Technology was able to enhance performance by 41%, and that Nehalem provides a 2x performance improvement over the previous platform. Get all the details for yourself in the HP paper here. This BL460c G6 paper is the latest in HP's extensive library of performance characterization papers covering XenApp and XenServer with HP servers.

The HP G6 product release includes six new HP ProLiant servers certified with the new free Citrix XenServer. XenServer is certified on the: HP ProLiant BL490c G6, BL460c G6, DL380 G6, DL360 G6, ML370 G6, and the ML350 G6 models. This takes the total number of XenServer certified ProLiant models to 27!

Yup - HP now offers no less than 27 server platforms certified with XenServer!

Sleeping on an airplane can be a challenge. Some folks use over the counter cold medicines to help fall asleep during airplane fights. Some people go straight for the designer pharmaceuticals! And there is the rare person that simply grabs one of those sketchy airplane pillows and voila - sleep ensues. I tend to like curling up with a nice marketing free, data rich, (graphs are the best) virtualization performance testing white paper! Assuming you still have budget for travel - on your next plane flight try reading one or more of the virtualization performance white papers linked below. Bet you can't finish one before cutting some zzzzz's!  

Kidding aside, HP publishes some awesome technical papers. HP is a long standing and strategic partner of ours and we value their commitment and investment in support of Citrix as evidenced by the performance characterization papers below. What's nice is these papers are pretty much marketing free. HP ProLiant Solution Engineering develops papers like these as part of their extensive and ongoing commitment to joint solution testing with Citrix. Whether you are traveling or not these papers are definitely worth a read.

Check out the ProLiant DL785 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 3%, and the ProLiant BL465 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 10%.  So without further verbiage, here are the links:

1. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant DL785 G5
2. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant BL465 G5
3. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with Xenserver and HP ProLiant BL685 G5
4. Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5
5. Consolidating servers with 32-bit workloads - XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5

Now where is that pillow!

Virtualize your servers, desktops, applications; the benefits are clear, it's a question of when not if - sure get that. Virtualization is not an end point, but an enabler of a more flexible and efficient compute environment - ok get that too. Ultimately virtualization must enable IT to contribute to better business results. What about other parts of the IT infrastructure beyond servers, clients and applications? Are we evolving to having islands of virtual clients and servers connected via a static network infrastructure? See this post in Archimedius for more on this theme.

Not to be left behind in the dust of server virtualization, network interconnects are also marching toward being enabled in dynamic virtual environments. Case in point is HP's recent introduction of its Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology, a new component in HP's Virtual Connect architecture. Flex-10 enables you to add 4x more NICs to each server blade without more hardware. In addition to supporting oodles of connections and NICS, Flex-10 provides the ability to dynamically adjust bandwidth for each network connection on the fly. With HP Flex-10 technology, you choose how many NICs are on each server and can adjust the bandwidth of each NIC in increments of 100 Mb.

This HP Flex-10 product is an example of how it is not just servers that can be virtualized and illustrates how the days of static infrastructure will soon be over. HP product details are posted here. Seems those HP hardware folks have some cool few new virtualization solutions to share beyond their XenServer based virtualization solutions. I'm now wondering how long before those virtualized server workloads are able to talk intelligently with the network infrastructure to automate and optimize the cloud ....?

The NY Times published an interesting front page article (Aug 9) and online post discussing how NBC attempted to block web sites hosting video clips and live feeds of the Olympic Games opening ceremonies in the United States. According to the Times article NBC "sent frantic requests" to web sites asking them to remove videos and feeds of the Olympic ceremonies - amounting to a game of "digital whack-a-mole". Web sites including YouTube (Google) and Justin.tv pulled down clips, but could not keep up with users who traded links via Blogs and Twitter to stay ahead of NBC. NBC was attempting to protect its' TV broadcast coverage of the ceremonies which were tape delayed and presented in the USA during the evening hours on Friday August 8, a full 12 hours after the opening ceremonies actually occurred.

So why is this interesting for a Citrix marketing type like me? This interests me because NBC had an opportunity to engage its user community - and didn't. User communities are a fundamental component of today's and presumably tomorrow's web, and at Citrix we are fortunate to have a long-standing and vibrant user community that Citrix needs to engage with and make successful. Citrix has a renewed focus and commitment to make our community more successful via the newly re-designed and enhanced Citrix Communities site. We care about our users and our community and are investing to help make our community successful.

Is there more to this NBC video thing beyond the notion that traditional media outlets like NBC apparently still don't get the net, or that video has finally arrived on the net? NBC is posting thousands of hours of its Olympic Games coverage online, using Microsoft® Silverlight™ technology, so they do get the net, or do they? (this Silverlight aspect is a topic for another blog - can you say DRM!) NBC's decision not to live stream coverage of the opening ceremonies might be considered somewhat odd. NBC is obviously working to manage access to its Olympic video footage in an attempt to maximize its audience so as to charge higher advertising rates. This all makes sense - old school sense - or rather cents!

I'm sensing NBC has missed a glorious opportunity to engage its community who could have supplied content snips from their perspective, content that could have extended the NBC viewpoint. This user supplied content could have been a great complement to live streaming feeds of NBC's "official" Olympic games opening coverage - if NBC had in fact supplied a live internet feed. They have the infrastructure -see myNBC.com. My searches on myNBC.com turned up 2 Olympic Games clips, both of which returned "the requested video is not available" message"...

NBC blew a significant opportunity to begin re-inventing themselves to be more than just a source of content created in-house and to begin engaging and fostering a user community of associate content providers. Many news outlets, CNN, Fox News are attempting to leverage user supplied content to support their official coverage - NBC missed the opportunity to build their community and leverage the Olympics.