Now that XenDesktop 4 is a few days old and people are starting to digest the many new capabilities of the product, I thought I'd spend a little time what exactly "FlexCast™ delivery technology" means.

I find that it helps me to think of FlexCast more as a strategy for delivering desktops, than as a specific technology. It's about thinking of all your virtual desktop and application delivery methods as a toolbox that enable you to directly address the different performance, security, personalization and mobility requirements of all your users. This approach is dramatically different from the way most other vendors are looking at desktop virtualization. They try to force fit a single desktop virtualization approach to all use cases, even when it doesn't make sense. FlexCast is revolutionary in comparison, but the idea is quite commonplace if you think of some analogies.

For example, instead of talking about how to run an IT service, let's say I'm running a different kind of service - a restaurant. A hundred people come to my restaurant one night, and they walk in with the expectation that they can order what they like to suit their tastes and hunger. But instead of taking their orders, I don't even offer a menu, and I serve everyone a plateful of chicken, green beans with almonds and potatoes. For the lighter eaters, this is way too much food, and for the folks that skipped lunch, they are woefully underfed. Then there are those that have strict dietary requirements, like a nut allergy, and they can't eat any of it because almonds touched the plate! You might please a few patrons, but you've wasted your inventory by giving too much food to some, the wrong food to others, and not enough to the remainder. And at the end of the night, none of them want to come back ever again.
Of course, this would never happen in the real world, but for some reason this one-size-fits-all approach is how other technology vendors have treated desktop virtualization. XenDesktop 4 with FlexCast is your extensive menu of options for giving users what they want and what they need.

That said, I'll give a quick drill down on each of the FlexCast delivery models and describe them each as plainly as I can. The names we chose to assign each model might be a little different than the current lingo - but this was necessary to be more precise, because no one has ever really talked about them all in the same context before:

• Hosted shared desktops. If you are a XenApp customers today, you think of these as "published desktops," and we estimate that you are using this delivery model for over 10 million users today. The problem with that name is that the term "published" can describe nearly every delivery model! Not very helpful. Hosted shared desktops are built on the Microsoft Terminal Services (or now Remote Desktop Services) platform, where users share effectively one configuration of a Windows Server desktops via independent sessions. In this model, there's a lot of IT control over the configuration, and personalization is minimized or disallowed. This model is attractive not only for the standardization it enables, but also the maturity of the technology, its massive scalability and low TCO - up to 500 users could share a single server. These traits are what make it ideal for factory workers, retail clerks, bank tellers, nurses' stations and the like.
• Hosted VM-based desktops. You know these as VDI or hosted virtual desktops. Each user's desktop runs in its own virtual machine, enabling multiple users to share a single physical server while running their environments in isolation from each other. This affords each user more potential personalization, a familiar Windows desktop environment, and compatibility with applications designed to run on a desktop OS. Scalability is good, with about 50 production desktops per server, and getting better all the time - but still not of the scale of hosted shared desktops.
• Hosted Blade PC desktops. In reality, these could be blade or rack workstations, or simply PCs relocated in the datacenter. In this model, you have one user per hosted blade PC, so clearly massive scalability isn't your goal. Going back to the restaurant analogy, this is what you pull out of the kitchen when the local football team's offensive line comes in to eat . Workers with heavier computational requirements, like engineers, scientists, researchers, etc. would get these.
• Local Streamed desktops. This model is truly one of the hidden gems of desktop virtualization, often overlooked but very useful and cost-effective. You may have heard this type of model referred to as "network boot " or diskless PC. Let's say you have an environment with lots of standardized PCs that you've just purchased in the past couple years. Perhaps they are attached to some specialized peripherals that are particularly "chatty" with the desktop OS. Desktop streaming enables you to leverage the CPU and RAM of that PC and give a truly local experience, but also centralize the management of those desktops. A "provisioning server" in the datacenter streams the OS bits needed to run the desktop to local memory. A single server has enough horsepower to serve a few hundred users, so the scalability is somewhere between hosted shared and hosted VM-based desktops. The re-use of existing PCs also contributes to the cost-effectiveness of this model. You need fairly standard PCs and a LAN connection, but this works great for all those users that work from the office primarily anyway.
• Virtual apps to installed desktops. For current XenApp customers, this is what most of you are doing today. You are either hosting or streaming apps to rich clients with locally installed OSes. You get the benefits of reducing overall desktop management costs by simplifying application management - the more apps you virtualize, the lower your costs. This model is often the simplest, most "traditional" way to start with desktop virtualization. Virtual apps can be used both online and offline for mobile workers. Only issue is that you still have to deal with the OS at the endpoint, and this is something many IT shops are looking to desktop virtualization to solve.
• Local VM-based desktops. This model is enabled by a client hypervisor, which, to be clear, isn't quite here yet, although Citrix has publicly discussed and demonstrated XenClient. This model means that virtual machines live on the endpoint, and virtual desktops are delivered into those VMs. A robust solution incorporates encryption, security policies, and synchronization for OS, apps and user data with the data center. This client hypervisor would enable a centrally managed, virtual desktop to be taken offline, so it's ideal for the fast-growing laptop using population. This isn't part of XenDesktop 4 today, but it is definitely a significant part of our overall FlexCast delivery technology strategy.

So there you have it - a quick overview of FlexCast delivery technology in all its flavors. It's a powerful concept, and a technologically involved one. The real takeaway is that, for Citrix, despite involving many technologies, it is indeed ONE comprehensive strategy, designed to meet many requirements.

Learn more about Citrix XenDesktop 4

• Official Press Release - http://citrix.com/xd4/pressrelease
• XenDesktop 4 Virtual Launch Event - http://citrix.com/citrixlive
• XenDesktop 4 Web Site - http://citrix.com/xd4
• XenDesktop 4 Executive Video - http://citrix.com/xd4/video
• XenDesktop Developer Network - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xd
• XenDesktop 4 Blogs- http://citrix.com/xd4/blogs
• XenDesktop Product Page - http://citrix.com/xendesktop/

Follow XenDesktop on http://twitter.com/xendesktop

This was posted some time ago, but I suspect that there are many that may have missed it since there are so many new virtual desktop projects springing up all the time. So I'm bringing it back up to the top for more exposure!

This blog has been invaluable for our field, for our technical marketing staff and for our event demo preparations. It's called "Windows XP Performance Optimizations for XenDesktop and Provisioning Server vDisks."

There's more to be discussed on how to successfully make that P2V conversion of a desktop, and we are working on additional white papers that will outline some of the real world best practices we've uncovered - so stay tuned!

A couple months ago, I posted about a VMware-sponsored report that compared View 3 to an older version of XenDesktop. I've gotten a lot of good feedback on that response, and a lot of agreement that sponsored third-party analysis needs to be absorbed with a cautious eye. I don't think it at all means  that sponsored work isn't valuable or useful, but it needs to have a sound, transparent methodology and provide enough data and detailed context that it actually ends up being useful to the audience.

Regardless, any paid-for review is going to be viewed with skepticism, right? So that's why I'm so excited about this completely independent, non-sponsored pair of reviews that were conducted by Infoworld:

• "VMware View is good news, bad news: VMware's VDI solution makes virtual desktops real, but not particularly easy to manage" This is a brand new review of VMware View, with a final score of 7.5.
• "Citrix hits the VDI high notes: Citrix XenDesktop 2.0 leverages streaming applications, server virtualization, and swift tools for a scalable and manageable virtual desktop infrastructure solution" This review is a little older, from September 2008, based on our first "real" release of XenDesktop, and we scored an 8.3 way back then. Since then, we've added many new features and capabilities for both user experience and manageability.

We were really pleased with the XenDesktop review when it first came out, but we lacked the context of how it compared to an in-depth review of VMware's product. Now that the review of View is out, I personally think the score is even more impressive.

So if you're skeptical about paid reviews, have a look at the two independent reviews above! Then come back to www.citrix.com/xendesktop and learn more about the product and our latest enhancements.

I've just wrapped another long day at VMworld Europe in Cannes, France. I've got lots of thoughts on many things I've seen and heard here, but I thought I'd start with a topic that Brian Madden  brought up in his blog about how VMware is misleading everyone on TCO.

Brian saw the partner-facing version of the VMware View TCO session on Monday - I saw the same basic session repeated on Tuesday for the  general customer audience. By this time, the VMware representative must have read the blog and specifically noted, "This is not intended to compare View to other alternatives, like Terminal Services." Okay, cool.

Now the part that I have contention with is a part that I actually agree with VMW 100% on - let me explain. In the session, she talked about how the cost and ROI analysis should be broken into 3 buckets - capex (infrastructure acquisition costs), opex (support, management, adds/moves/changes) and then end-user costs/benefits. Rightly so, she point out that end-user costs/benefits are hard to quantify so approach with caution, and for the most part, the case for VDI will not be made on capex savings. That leaves the bulk of the savings being generated from efficiencies in Tier 1/2/3 support, application management, etc. Oh, and by the way, she repeatedly mentioned, Gartner put out a report saying that the TCO savings in this area were up to 50%. WHOAH!!!!

The slide was comparing traditional managed PCs to VMware View, and Gartner said you could save 50%?? That would be big news, wouldn't it? Wait a darn second... I get every Gartner report on the space and I don't remember seeing anything like that....

Turns out that the Gartner report being referenced is entitled, "Total Cost of Ownership Comparison of PCs With Server-Based Computing." If you are at all familiar with Gartner taxonomy, you know that VDI equates to Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD), and Server-based Computing (SBC) equals...... Terminal Services (TS) and XenApp. If I'm not mistaken, there's no TS or XenApp in VMware View (not seriously, anyway), so that leaves me to assume that VMware think the TCO case for VDI can be made by taking the numbers from a completely different solution architecture.

In Brian's "VDI vs. TS" session at VMworld (bravo, by the way, great session), he made a good case for VDI and TS to both be considered SBC. I buy that there are some inherent benefits that apply to any centralized, server-hosted infrastructure, so some generalization might be appropriate.  But Gartner get paid the big bucks to be VERY precise about taxonomy and TCO. They factor in things like server density, app patch management, etc. for SBC that are completely unrelated to VDI. Munging the two together is just a raw misapplication of the research and misleading to say the least!

That said, I have to mention that I think the only misleading part is associating the savings with View - the savings analysis fits perfectly for XenDesktop! With XenApp baked in as part of XenDesktop, you indeed get the benefits of SBC as part of the solution, as well as single image management from our provisioning services, user productivity from HDX technology, etc. So I think the approach for using the SBC TCO analysis in the context of VDI was spot on, it was just done for the wrong product!

Please visit this short survey and take a couple minutes to fill it out.

The data you provide will help us keep a pulse on the broad range of activities in desktop virtualization going on out there. This information will really help shape XenDesktop, so speak up!

Check this out, another bond in the relationship with our friends at HP:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090211a.html

Another proofpoint that the strategy around XenDesktop is not just about VDI, it's all about a flexible system for desktop delivery (whether they are hosted on VMs, hosted on blade PCs, or streamed to endpoints).

Recently we've seen a report circulating that our friends at VMware sent out. It's a report that they contracted the Tolly Group to write. The document attempts to provide a comparison of VMware View 3 with Citrix XenDestkop 2.1. Ironically, this document is being released just after we've launched XenDesktop 3, making the report immediately obsolete.

There's a prominent sidebar that in the report that states that Citrix declined to participate in the testing - this is true, and I was the one that actually made that call and discussed it with Tolly Group. To their credit, Tolly Group did call us prior to beginning the testing and informed us of the project and shared the statement of work prepared for VMware. We asked some questions and provided some feedback about the testing methodology. I had serious concerns that the proposed tests did not reflect true customer use cases. For example, the user experience testing was only for a few productivity applications in a LAN environment - that was all that was planned, and it didn't seem to realistic based on what we've seen in real customer environments. Tolly took note of our concerns and asked VMware as the sponsor of the paper whether they would alter their approach.  Later we learned that VMware (not surprisingly) had rejected our suggestions and was not open to changing the proposed tests. At that point, it was clear that it made no sense to participate because:

a)      The test would not be based on our current product at the time of publication

b)      The proposed testing environment did not reflect real world customer requirements 

c)       Critical elements of a virtual desktop solution were not going to be included in the test, things like application management, service level assurance, diversity in client endpoints, WANs, etc.

We've been having great success with XenDesktop, and we're winning consistently in competitive situations. And we've been winning based on precisely the types of scenarios and solution capabilities that were excluded from this testing.

Despite these fundamental issues with the report, people will still ask questions about the claims within it. So here's some brief responses to the 5 highlighted claims in the report.

Claim 1 - Complex Installation - This claim would hold some merit if the two products were comparable in terms of overall functionality. A spreadsheet is easier to install than an enterprise CRM or ERP solution - but that doesn't make it better suited for the job at hand.

Claim 2 - Simple Image Management - VMware claims that XenDesktop requires dedicated images in order to support persistent desktops, and that it needs third-party products to manage the user's personal environment. Both these points are invalid with XenDesktop 3. The report doesn't mention that VMware recommends or requires third party add-ons to achieve similar functionality that is built-in to XenDesktop.

Claim 3 - Manual Configuration of Active Directory & DHCP - Again this is not a valid claim for XenDesktop 3. Manual configuration of Active Directory is not required.

Claim 4 - Management of ALL VDI functions through a single, Web-based GUI - Xbox 360 game controllers have a lot of buttons. The Atari 2600 controller had one button.

Claim 5 - Equivalent end-user experience on LAN as Citrix for Microsoft Office applications - How about when the users start to use other apps, move to other networks, and access desktops from other client devices? Check out www.citrix.com/xendesktop3 and  www.citrix.com/hdx for information on our approach to user experience experience - be sure to check out the videos.

We fully understand that The Tolly Group's role is to validate the results of a testing methodology designed by the sponsor. We've commissioned several similar reports ourselves, and made every effort to make them as valuable to customers as possible.

To wrap this up: We didn't participate in this study because we knew it would be outdated at the time of publication. We also felt that the testing environment did not provide an accurate representation of customer requirements. Finally we didn't participate as the scope of the project only evaluated a subset of the functionality needed for a complete solution.

For every 200 licenses of more of XenDesktop Platinum Edition you place an order for, and you are entitled to a license of GoToAssist. It is actually a benefit of your active Subscription Advantage.

 I get a lot of questions about this, mostly starting with "Huh? Only 1 out of 200 of my users can get support?"

GoToAssist isn't licensed like other 1:1 remote viewing software, like GoToMyPC. In those cases you have software for each seat, both on the host and the guest side. GoToAssist is specifically designed for the tech support department, and the license goes to the support rep - NOT the user - who can then interact with as many end users as they need to. Since it's designed for even some of the largest external support teams (like vendors who supply support to their customers), it is also designed so that you can initiate a session with pretty much anyone, anywhere on the fly.

So, we took some industry data and came up with a starting place ratio of 200:1 - estimating that 1 support rep seat can handle about 200 virtual desktop users. This will be high in some industries and low in others, but it's a starting point.

The other thing to remember is that G2A isn't just remote viewing software. It's a complete remote tech support system, that can track end user feedback, rep productivity/efficiency, etc., and can integrate with your existing incident tracking solutions as well.

Now that the covers are off on our 2nd and 3rd big announcements of 2009 so far - XenDesktop 3 and HDX technology- I've been getting lots of followup questions.

• "Is it immediately available?" Soon! We officially said February 2009, so we have a few weeks yet in the month to stay true to that
• "What does HDX stand for?" The official answer is "High Definition User Experience" but I have seen "High Definition Xen" and "High Def Extensions" which are kinda cool, too - but wrong... So be an insider and get it right!
• "Is HDX just a new name for ICA or SpeedScreen or..." NO. HDX is a much broader technology statement and vision than just a protocol or individual technology. Just like they say it takes a village to raise a child - it takes a delivery system and a community of partners to truly create the best user experience. HDX signifies a strategy to essentially do whatever it takes to create that user experience - and we're not thinking just inside the boundaries of what a protocol can do...
• "Is Desktop Streaming related to Project Independence?" No - not at this time anyway. Desktop streaming is part of the way that we extend the concept of single image management and desktop delivery to LAN-connected office workers using fairly standardized PC hardware. Independence is part of our strategy for addressing mobile worker use cases and BYOC initiatives.

That's it for now, I'll add to the list as I get more frequently asked questions.

At last! A long time in the making and a long time in waiting silently, but now we can finally talk about Project Independence (be sure to watch the cool demo at the bottom of the page). As Brian Madden mentions, this is something that has been brewing for a while. Partnerships like this with Intel don't just happen overnight, you know!

This is really exciting for us to be working on, and I look forward to extending our solutions for dynamic, real-time desktop assembly all the way to offline mobile use cases. I think what's also great is that you are getting more insight, earlier, into where Citrix is headed and what the product teams are looking at. The 5 predictionsthat we made today in conjunction with the announcement - while somewhat tongue-in-cheek how they are phrased - have some real powerful ideas and commitments behind them. I mean, of course users will still ask for a better PC - but for different reasons perhaps than they used to. For example, I know that my wife - a college professor, well educated, and generally computer literate - has this knee-jerk reaction to any issue with her PC: wireless flaky? I need a new PC! Email virus? I need a new PC! App update kill another app? I need a new PC! Or my favorite - OS automatic update slowing down performance? I need a new PC!  The more we can protect and isolate hardware from OS and OS from apps and apps from personalization, the more we can stop these types of issues from creating the wrong sort of end-user reaction.

We've made a pretty big statement so far this year, and it's not even the end of January yet! As the year goes on, we plan to continue to share more about our roadmap, sometimes specific technologies like the client hypervisor, and sometimes more directional goals, like the 5 predictions.

  

Getting around to completing my thoughts from the previous post... 

The Right Desktop Provisioning Method

Once you know whether a group of users need a common desktop image or their own dedicated virtual desktop, you need to make decisions about how to provision that image at the lowest storage and management costs. XenDesktop includes Provisioning Server technologies that enable thousands of virtual desktops to be delivered from a single master image, streamed on demand, in real time. Only the master image needs to be patched and updated - all users will get the benefit the next time they log on. This "pooling" method provides the lowest management costs, fastest provisioning,  and lowest storage requirements - capable of saving up to 90% on storage costs and up to 40% on desktop  maintenance costs. This model is usually suitable for the great majority of users, including productivity workers, as well as some knowledge workers.

The knowledge workers that often make customizations that are not supported by pooled desktops require a different provisioning approach, such as "cloning" - replication of a base master image. Users can install applications and customize as needed - with a tradeoff in higher storage costs. In addition, these desktop clones are more costly to manage than pooled desktops, because each desktop has to be managed as unique entities.  NetApp's FlexClone, directly integrated with the XenServer console, provides this functionality that helps to simplify the creation of desktops.

The select few power users in an organization can get their blade PC-based virtual desktops via XenDesktop's provisioning capabilities, however, using a "private" image rather than a standard shared image. This maintains the bare metal performance of the blade PC, while offering the flexibility of being able to move desktops across hardware resources to optimize utilization. Like cloned desktops, this requires storing and maintaining a unique image per user and, therefore, comes at a much higher capital and operational cost than pooled desktops.

Extending Cost Savings with Storage Technologies

Once you know what types of desktops to deliver and how to provision them for best cost advantage, you can then factor in how your storage investments can extend savings and performance. The desktop images, user profiles and end user data can create an avalanche of fast-growing storage. Deduplication technologies can dramatically increase effective primary storage utilization and slow growth by removing identical copies of data within a volume. This process is transparent to the user and typically occurs when the desktop is not in use. The result is up to 35% less storage for user profiles and data.

"Thin provisioning" storage features can also maximize storage utilization and eliminate the guesswork of allocating storage by dynamically assigning capacity as users consume disk space. For pooled desktops, thin provisioning can be leveraged for user data and write back cache. For assigned desktops given to knowledge workers, thin provisioning means no longer having to commit large, mostly empty volumes for user data that may never get fully utilized.

Lastly, the cache on storage controllers can enhance the performance of the Provisioning Server features in XenDesktop, which aids in scalability and thus can help reduce some server infrastructure costs.
Citrix and NetApp have worked together on some lab environments and papers  that you can find here.
 

When implementing a virtual desktop solution, IT has got to account for two significant cost contributors: the capital costs for the increased storage requirements and the operational costs of managing and maintaining the desktops themselves. I think these are the keys to giving yourself a shot at getting good ROI and reducing the TCO of VDI, and to date, it's been something of a stumbling block. Also I've seen customers fail to account for the image management part, while focusing solely on the storage costs. I've done a lot of customer visits recently and I thought it might be useful to share a simple discussion guideline that has helped us get at a model for the solution:

-          What type of virtual desktop fits user needs best?

-          What is the lowest cost method to store and provision virtual desktop images?

-          How can we leverage 3rd party storage technologies to provide further benefits?

In the first part of this blog, I want to introduce and get your feedback on this segmentation of use cases for virtual desktops, and get your feedback on the basic model that fits each one. Next time I'll talk about the technologies that would support these. Matching Users to the Right Virtual Desktop

Just as different users today get different desktop images, PCs and applications depending on the type of work they do, they should be given different virtual desktops that match their requirements at the lowest cost of ownership possible.

Enterprise typically have a large number of productivity workers  - people that typically have limited administrative rights and only basic customization requirements. They can be adequately served by pools of standardized virtual desktops, based on a common, shared image that is personalized through the use of portable user profiles.

 A typically much smaller segment of users, knowledge workers, may need more control of the desktop, including the need to install their own applications. They are candidates for receiving their own "assigned" virtual desktops, so that all their settings and custom applications persist.

Lastly, there are usually a few power users who have a need for elevated administrative rights, but also need the dedicated processing power associated with blade PCs. XenDesktop can deliver any of these types of virtual desktops, offering IT the greatest possible flexibility.

Many enterprises also have task workers, those that have very structured work, use only a limited set of applications and really don't need the functionality of a full desktop. Depending on the industry, this may be a small percentage of the overall user base or quite large. These workers are best suited by a very low cost, simple, and locked-down shared server desktop and  thin clients, and Citrix XenApp today delivers over 10 million desktops of this variety. While these desktops are not the focus of this discussion, it is important to keep this alternative in mind.

What do you think of these characterizations of use cases for virtual desktops?

I spent some time with our friends and partners CSC, both at their Aldershot UK headquarters and at VMworld Cannes. In case you missed it, we just announced a partnership around "CSC Dynamic Desktops" last month. The guys I met were real veterans of VDI, really sharp and above all, great guys to work with. Turns out, they built what had to be one of the first - if not the first - VDI implementation, over 2.5 years ago! (They did it prior to joining CSC.) To hear their war stories, both political and technical, it was truly an incredible journey. Just imagine if the guys who first invented the wheel met with such resistance:

• "Came up with idea for a better way to move stuff around. No one will give us any tools though, so we are using our fingernails to dig some curvy bits into a rock we found.
• Finished our curvy rock, needs some more refinement and funding so will present to the bosses later this week.
• Presented to bosses, they said they couldn't understand why this was any better than just having a bunch of servants carry things around. Servants are cheap, we need rocks to build huts, they said. Told us to go away.
• Decided to make our own tools out of twigs and twine, finally finished our first real prototype, made of wood this time. Much easier to work with than rock!
• Presented it again, bosses said they needed the wood for kindling, burned our thing that we called a "wheel" and sent us home again.
• Made another set of wheels, and demonstrated how it could carry a whole deer back to the camp with little effort. Now they want more wheels, and more deer."

Okay, it's a silly metaphor, but it's not much of an exaggeration for how much bootstrapping there seemed to be, and how uphill the battle was to get the concept off the ground. They've seen it all in VDI - as much as there is to be seen so far - and determined that Citrix has the right goods. Regardless, they have taken their considerable expertise to CSC. And CSC has selected Citrix as the partner to go to market with under the CSC Dynamic Desktops solution offering.  I really look forward to working with them and posting some of our experiences here.

I Calvin Hsu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Citrix Presentation Server, and I just wrapped up a visit to the UK and Southern France talking to analysts and journalists about Citrix views of virtualisation (I sticking with the Euro-spelling in the spirit of things) all layers of IT: apps, desktops, servers, storage...

The people that helped arrange meetings told me that people were pretty keen to sign up to talk to Citrix about virtualisation and get our perspectives on it. Some of that I attribute to just wanting to latch onto anything related to the topic, knowing that their readership would eat it up. No surprise there since it such a hot topic and a buzzword these days.

But there also seemed to be a genuine desire to hunt down meaning amongst the technical bits. Sometimes we get so involved in explaining the technology and in defining the nuances of how things work, that we lose a sense for why we care. know that I personally as a product marketing guy have been guilty of that - it a rut that easy to get dragged into, especially in crowded or emerging markets. Having been in and around virtualisation technology companies nearly 8 years now, I heard (and created so many technology-driven definitions of what the various flavors of virtualisation entail that it maddening.

So part of the mission of my trip was to get back to basics. Let talk about virtualisation, sure, but let not go down the death-spiral before we get it clear that the main reason anyone is interested in it at all is primarily because it does one basic consolidate. Consolidate servers, consolidate disks, and in the case of CPS, consolidate applications. It does this by separating the physical from the logical - but at the end of the day, the reason we care is because we need to consolidate.

This approach seemed to resonate with the people I talked to, because it offered a way to link virtualisation with consolidation of applications - which in turn supports strategic business initiatives like securing intellectual property and confidential data, outsourcing, business continuity, remote working, pandemic preparation, etc. That led to discussions about customer deployments and business value, rather than focusing purely on the IT operational challenges of configuration and networking and bandwidth...