Post to Twitter
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 20th and visit the HP sessions and exhibits! Enjoy.
The launch of Windows 7 fills me with dread and excitement. The dread comes from coordinating Citrix Global Platinum sponsorship of this launch with North America Roadshows, Virtual Live Events, TechEd EMEA and local launch events. The excitement comes from the promise of Windows 7 after the relative disappointment of Vista (I must stress the word "relative"), as the performance of Windows 7 is definitely promising to live up to the hype.
So, why would Microsoft invite Citrix to be a Global Launch Partner for an operating system launch?
Normally when you want a new OS, you just go on the web, buy a new PC, and use the CD to install the OS or, if you are like me and technologically incompetent, you get your IT Department to install it. However, the technology landscape has shifted. Now there is an alternative way to get your instant Windows 7 desktop with Citrix and Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, which delivers Windows desktops as an on-demand service to any user, on any device, anywhere.
The combination of Citrix and Microsoft gives customers the fastest way to deliver Windows 7 realizing benefits of increased efficiency and simplified IT Management. In addition Citrix HDX Technology offers up to 10X better Flash multimedia performance compared to alternative solutions, delivering a user experience that is indistinguishable from a local PC.
7 Ways to get up to speed on Citrix and Microsoft Desktop Virtualization for Windows 7
1. Check out the Citrix Desktop Virtualization Live, "Secrets, Lies and VDI" event on the 20th October - register here
2. Attend the "Harness The Power of Virtualization" events with guest speakers from Citrix, Microsoft, Intel and HP - register here
3. Microsoft New Efficiency Virtual Live Event
4. North America Windows 7 Roadshows in 65 Cities for Technical Decision Makers and IT Professionals
6. Check out your local events
7. Check out Win7 Community Central to see how the Citrix Partner Ecosystem helps deliver Windows 7 - Click here
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!
What are people saying about HP and Citrix? Check out the feeds. Select the ones you want to see. Better yet - suggest your favorite HP focused feed - we might just add it.
Make sure to view and rate the HP Thin Client videos on Citrix TV!
Got a technical question re HP and Citrix environments - odds are someone else has had a similar question and the Forums portlet displays the recent and common threads presented in the Citrix Knowledge Base - no searching required!
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 release new Monitoring Agents for XenServer 5.5
Version 8.2.5 is working with XenServer 5.5
Get it here: http://budurl.com/yc3m
Cheers
Danny
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!
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).
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 ....?
One of the many great speakers at Geek Speak Live! (see James Rabey's post for the lineup) is Russ Daniels, HP CTO for Cloud Services Strategy. Russ Daniels was previously the CTO for HP Software, before moving into this new role last year.
In 2006, Infoworld named Russ Daniels a part of its Infoworld CTO 25.
"Historically, the enterprise management category was viewed as network and systems monitoring, and not much else," Daniels says. But today, he argues, it should be viewed as a way to manage IT assets and services – and measure their effectiveness in furthering an organization's business goals.
Daniels also co-leads the company's Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which combines virtualization with various datacenter automation technologies to form a malleable foundation for service-oriented IT. The automation efforts are focused, he says, on activities that, when done manually, tend to inject errors into systems. The ultimate objective is for enterprises to spend less on operations and more on innovation.
Although his background is in software development (including work on Web services standards), and he embraces the intricacies of datacenter management, Daniels is keenly aware that technology must always prove its value: "We have to be able to understand the performance of computing systems in business metrics, not IT metrics."
According to his bio, "Daniels speaks widely at conferences and works closely with key HP partners and its largest and most demanding enterprise customers. Daniels has more than 25 years of industry experience specializing in software architecture, enterprise management, and software development methodologies. Prior to joining HP, he spent 15 years at Apple Computer. He has a bachelor's degree from Ohio University."
Daniels is a highly sought after speaker at technology conferences. Russ Daniels participated in a "fireside chat" at Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco last year. You can read the transcript here. He also participated in MIT's CIO Symposium in 2006 in a discussion of Software as a service. You can listen to a podcast of this discussion here
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 Geek Speak Live!.
Shawn Bass wrote a good blog about the new PowerSmart Utility
In his blog, he explained his take on our choice of of using WinRm and server vendors's out of band management products. It's a good read.
One thing I need to clarify is that it is fairly simple to configure this version of PowerSmart to power on HP servers if you follow the user guide. We'd like to hear your experience and improve the tool and its documentation.
Shawn was right that if you just want to give the tool a quick try without reading much, the out of the box default configuration will allow you to try it without much restriction. It will even work in a virtualized environment. Please see the minimum requirement section of the download page. The trade-off however is that this default configuration won't power on servers. A good default power on mechanism is hard to find because user environments are likely to be very different. The included HP script won't work with IBM servers for example. We thought this default is a safer option and it can lead the users to think about the best way to power on servers. Plus this default makes it easier for users to have an alternative mechanism to power on servers. For example, users can use windows scheduler to schedule a script to power on servers. Yes, the HP scripts we provided can be easily modified to do so.
We thought about using Wake On LAN as default. But we soon realized that it has many limitations too. Please see the FAQ page for more details. However If you know WOL well or you can get some experts such as Shawn to help, it may very well work for you. I heard a large company had successfully used WOL to save millions of dollars by powering off idle desktops. In the data center, I expect administrators may have more control over the servers and thus WOL may have a higher chance to be useful.
Please share your experience with others so that we can benefit from each other.