News and information about server virtualization
The Citrix Innovation Award is "designed to recognize Citrix customers that strategically leverage application delivery to gain a competitive business advantage". Last year's winner, Cox Communications, is a great example of this.
The voting is now open for this years Citrix Innovation Award
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...the three finalists for the annual 2008 Citrix Innovation Award: Bechtel Corporation, Cocamar Cooperativa Agroindustrial and Mutual of Omaha. These finalists were chosen by a panel of IT industry experts, including an industry analyst and a past Citrix Innovation Award winner. The finalists were selected in recognition of their innovative use of Citrix application delivery and virtualization solutions to address organizational or market challenges and advance their businesses. The three finalists will be recognized for their significant accomplishments at the upcoming Citrix Synergy™ 2008 conference, held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston from May 20 to May 23. The winner will be determined by votes cast both online and during the conference by registered attendees and will be announced on May 21 in the keynote session. To cast your vote now, go to http://www.citrix.com/innovationaward .
The Citrix Innovation Award is for Citrix customers who innovate in utilizing technology to make a significant impact on their business. Ultimately, information technology is about delivering applications to end users so they can perform business transactions. These three nominees have innovated in their use of Citrix technology to cut costs, reduce time to revenue for projects, and to mitigate risk.
Here is the video from Betchel Corporation -
Next up is Cocamar Cooperativa Agroindustrial-
And finally the video for Mutual of Omaha (yes, the Wild Kingdom guys for those who remember that show) -
The judges for this years Citrix Innovation Award are listed below -
•Josh Nelson - vice president of network and information technology, Cox Communications (Winner, 2007 Citrix Innovation Award)
•Steve Greenberg - founder and president of Thin Client Computing
•Michael Rose - associate research analyst, IDC
• Abolfazl Sirjani - senior director, advanced products, Citrix
•Wes Wasson - senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Citrix
How to Vote
You can vote now for the Citrix Innovation award online at http://www.citrix.com/innovationaward. The winner will be named during the keynote session at Citrix Synergy 2008 on Wednesday, May 21st. Citrix Synergy will be held on May 20th to May 23rd at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.
If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy..
You still have time to get your vote in for the XenDesktop Video Tips Contest here. As of this posting, there have been almost 200 votes. Currently "VDI Made as EASY as Pie" by Gareth James maintains a slight lead.
The creators of the top three video tips as voted by you will receive prizes including an Apple iPod Touch 16 G, an Apple iPod Touch 8 GB, and a Apple iPod Nano.
In a posting on his blog, Chris Hoff laid into some comments I made to security SearchSecurity.com, in which I remarked that "Virtualization vendors [are] not in the security business."
He quotes me as saying "While virtualization vendors will do their role in protecting the hypervisor, they are not in the business of catching bad guys or discovering vulnerabilities, said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of Citrix Systems." and then goes on to berate me for that position. He says "The fact that the "industry" has "decided" that "third party vendors are required to secure any platform" simply points to the ignorance, arrogance and manifest destiny we endure at the hands of those who are responsible for the computing infrastructure we're all held hostage with"
I reckon that Hoff, who is normally fairly clued-in, has put the smoking end of the cigar in his mouth before thinking through this argument. He's horribly confused, but as smug as always, so let me clarify what I said, and what it means.
What I said is that Citrix is not a security vendor for guests of the virtualized infrastructure. We do not spend our days and nights looking for evil types that wish to attack guest OSes by looking for virus signatures or other security techniques. That is not our business, and never will be. There is a strong and vibrant ecosystem of security vendors whose job it is to protect guest operating systems in physical and now virtualized infrastructure. There are challenges that arise as a result of virtualization, and we and those vendors will work to fix them, but it is not our role to specifically protect any OS or its applications through OS/app specific knowledge in the virtualization layer. The industry has long looked to third party vendors to add security to infrastructure deployments. This is why vendors such as Symantec and McAfee exist - as customers' preferred partners to implement security for their apps/OSes. The same will be true for virtualized environments.
In terms of the hypervisor, we are manically focussed on security, as is VMware - though they appear to be more retrospectively focussed on security, judging by their incredible rate of patches (more than one per week, on average). Xen supports TPM, AMD SVM, and Intel TXT, and trusted platform boot using platform based attestation is on the roadmap. Xen does not contain drivers, and implements a multi level secure architecture. The Xen community is putting Xen through common criteria level 5 certification, which is way beyond the typical enterprise software EAL 2, or even VMware's EAL 4. Xen implements the features of IBM sHype, and has benefited from contributions of Xen security modules from the NSA and other key security research groups and agencies. Xen is open source and is available for inspection and testing by the community at all times, so bugs found are quickly fixed and vulnerabilities, should they exist, are rapidly explored. Xen is massively and continually tested by the community and there are scores of university research projects related to security that use Xen and work on Xen, including honeyfarms, Xen virtual appliances for security and more.
The largest virtualization deployment in the world, Amazon, uses Xen, and more Xen hosts face the Internet every day than VMware hosts, simply because Xen is open source and available. Xen is used in most major clouds too, and those folks really care about security. The community is are justifiably proud of the security record of Xen and its open approach to security research and vulnerability assessment.
The security of any Xen vendor's product is simply up to them. Citrix focusses very heavily on the security of XenServer. it is tiny, often embedded in read only flash on industry standard servers, doesn't run any network services except for a single secure protocol, and enforces security principles of MLS throughout. We are proud of the fact that we have only ever issued 3 hotfixes for XenServer, two of which were in beta periods. Compare that to VMware's 48 patches for this year alone! How anyone can consider software that has to be patched at a rate of more than one patch per week to be enterprise class, let alone secure, escapes me.
But we are not in the business of specifically securing guests or their applications, other than through offering a secure virtualization platform. Even VMware with VMsafe simply exposes APIs to third party security vendors, so that customers can choose their preferred security partner to secure guests. I think that the VMware Determina acquisition was very smart, and that hints to me that VMware sees itself having a greater role in the security of guest OSes, since it could choose to be in the vulnerability checking business without 3rd party security vendors, but thus far they are working very openly with the ecosystem.
In summary an assertion that the virtualization platform vendor has to fix the sad state of the OS/App world by making it secure is demanding too much. It would mean that we have to be experts in every piece of system software including all of the vulnerabilities of all OSes and their apps. In my view the reason the state of security is poor now is because of the monolithic approaches of traditional OS and app vendors. We will focus manically on our layer, make it secure, tiny and bulletproof to attack in its own right. And we will work closely with experts in security of OSes and Apps to give them an opportunity to implement guest-level security outside the guest, through privileged interfaces that themselves are secure.
In my previous post on Geek Speak Bar Camp (May 21st at Citrix Synergy), we had foruteen of the twenty speaking slots filled. As of now, all twenty speaking slots for the first ever Geek Speak BarCamp are filled. (Read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).
The line up now includes three Citrix Technology Specialists, four consultants, two Escalation Tech Support Engineers, a VDI Specialist from VMWare, four Product Managers, an HP Print Driver Developer and a Senior Architect from a large healthcare company.
I am looking forward to flying to Houston and getting this event started. I think that after seeing this line up and the list of technical sessions in the other tracks, I think you will agree with Shawn Bass when he wrote -
I'm getting the general feeling like this might just be the most technical Citrix iForum ever
I am still working on juggling the time schedule to meet everyones equipment requirements and time constraints. I expect to finalize by Monday or Tuesday.
If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.
This part we will understand more about the OEM relationship between Citrix and Dell including factory integration with Dell PowerEdge servers and OpenManage Systems Management software.
Instead of typing it away, I will share a video where Simon Crosby elaborates on this topic.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
Dell has recently announced it will integrate XenServer as the hypervisor for their PowerEdge line of servers. I have gathered some more information on how this will actually work out...
Dell factory will integrate Citrix XenServer into Dell PowerEdge platforms, Citrix and Dell provide a simpler deployment and management environment that speeds adoption of flexible, cost-saving server virtualization technology, making it the optimal choice for virtualization on Dell systems.
Highlights include:
- Quick Start-up - An embedded hypervisor and intuitive interface into Citrix XenServer Dell products ensure easy installation.
- OpenManage Integration - The only virtualization solution integrated with Dell OpenManage, Citrix XenServer management console allows users to monitor and manage physical and virtual machines from a single console, with simple drag and drop controls.
- High performance - With a thin layer of code, true 64-bit hypervisor architecture and full use of hardware virtualization optimization from Intel and AMD, Citrix.
cheers,
Gus Pinto
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It is time to start taking votes for the best XenDesktop Video Tip. The creators of the top three video tips will receive prizes including an Apple iPod Touch 16 G, an Apple iPod Touch 8 GB, and a Apple iPod Nano.
Here are the XenDesktop Video Tips -
XenDesktop User Experience Comparison
VDI Made as Easy as Pie
XenDesktop User Personalization with AppSense
20 Desktops Delivered in 2 Minutes
XenDesktop with SC VMM and Hyper V
XenDesktop from Germany
Vote below for the best XenDesktop Video TIp -
| Which Video Tip is the best? | Results: (193 total votes) | |||
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| XenDesktop User Experience |
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| VDI Made as Easy as Pie |
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| XenDesktop User Personalization with AppSense |
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| 20 Desktops Delivered in 2 Minutes |
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| XenDesktop with SC VMM and Hyper V |
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| XenDesktop from Germany |
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Voting will remain open until next Friday, May 16th.
We now have fourteen of the twenty sessions at the Geek Speak BarCamp filled (read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).
I have put together a tentative schedule of the sessions we have to date. The sessions, title, and schedule could still change, but the overall schedule is coming together.
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We are still working to fill the final six slots. Please submit your session topic now. You can use the comments in this thread, or you can email me at citrixblogger @citrix.com . You can also IM questions to citrixblogger on MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.
If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.
We now have twelve of the twenty sessions at the Geek Speak BarCamp filled (read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).
1. Virtualization Defined - Joe Shonk
2. The Stress of IT - Jim Kenzig
3. Virtualization Oriented Architecture over VDI - Jaymes Davis
4. What is High Availability - Michael Bilancieri
5. Ultra Mobile Gadget Tech - Adam Marano
6. HP Print Drivers in a Citrix Environment - Robert Tuft
7. Citrix WorkFlow Studio Examples - Vishal Ganeriwala
8. Fifteen Years with Citrix - Steve Greenberg
9. Web Interface Internals - Jason Conger
10. Provisioning Best Practices - Pete Downing
11. Performance Matters on the Edge - Tim Mackey
12. Server Virtualization Best Practices - Peter Blum
Geek Speak BarCamp has twelve tech sessions so far to go along with the nine industry experts speaking at GeekSpeak Live. There is also the long list of technical sessions in the iForum and Application Delivery tracks.
We are still working to fill the final eight slots. Please submit your session topic now. You can use the comments in this thread, or you can email me at citrixblogger @citrix.com . You can also IM questions to citrixblogger on MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.
If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.
I think this is the most useful post ever!
Seriously it has always been hard for me to find where and what are the latest hotfixes for the Citrix products... but this picture has changed.
With the new revision of Citrix's Support site (support.citrix.com), now it's easier to find the latest fixes and patchs for your Citrix products.
Here's the list:
Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 - x86
Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 - x64
Presentation Server 4.0 for Windows Server 2003 - x86
Presentation Server 4.0 for Windows Server 2000 - x86
Access Gateway 4.5 Advanced Edition
Access Gateway 4.5 Standard Edition
Access Gateway 8.0 Enterprise Edition
Provisioning Server 4.5
Citrix NetScaler 8.0
Citrix NetScaler 7.0
Citrix WANScaler 4.x
Select the products you have, subcribe to its RSS feed and stay in-sync with all later patches and fixes for it.
This is wicked useful!
Cheers,
Gus Pinto
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