Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Nathan Day, the CTO of Softlayer and ask him a few questions surrounding cloud computing. Back at Synergy 2010, Citrix launched seven turnkey cloud solutions, focused on practical cloud use cases and delivered by proven cloud providers, that let enterprises take advantage of cloud economics to address pressing business and IT needs. Citrix Cloud Solutions let enterprises leverage existing investments, including third-party virtualization technologies and tools, to migrate application workloads to the cloud without having to overhaul existing applications or their underlying infrastructure. Citrix Cloud Solutions offer an open, pragmatic approach to cloud computing.

In the coming weeks I will focus my blogs around On-Boarding to the cloud and highlight:

1. How applications are on-boarded to the cloud with minimal effort without the need to re-architect the application and/or network stacks.
2. How applications can be bundled into application workloads that encompass key components such as directory services, storage, data access and web services that the application may need once on-boarded to the cloud.
3. That there is no dependency on the premise datacenter virtualization platform when moving to the cloud, where various virtual machine formats are supported enabling heterogeneous format support.
4. That once on-boarded, application workloads will function as if they are still in the premise datacenter coupled with robust management capabilities.

Let's have a look at what Nathan Day has to say about cloud computing...

Pete: What is a Cloud to Softlayer?

Nathan: SoftLayer views Cloud as another tool in the toolbox for application owners to deliver their application. Cloud at SoftLayer can be used in conjunction with Dedicated Servers and Virtualized Servers to provide the environment for our customers that fits their business and technical needs.

Pete: What are some hurdles to moving to the cloud?

Nathan: Hurdles to moving to the cloud usually revolve around education of what the Cloud is best used for. The advantages to running a workload in the Cloud should be considered carefully so as to set the proper expectations so that the success of the project is properly evaluated. For example, rapid provisioning of compute environments is a characteristic of the cloud that can be exploited to solve technical challenges, while a workload that has high I/O requirements might not be best suited to running in the cloud.

Pete: How does Citrix's On-Boarding Solution help?

Nathan: Being able to move a workload to the cloud can help with business, technical, and operational challenges. The consumptive cost model of the cloud could help the bottom line, rapid provisioning could solve scalability issues, or providing additional capacity helps the operations team in the case of power challenged datacenter space.

Pete: In the Citrix On-Boarding Solution, what is your favorite aspect?

Nathan: The ability to extend a network from a local facility to the cloud using the cloud bridge is an awesome part of the Citrix On-Boarding Solution. This enables the ability to obtain compute resources, in effect increasing the power available to run applications and have it appear as if the applications are running locally on the same network segments.

Pete: If I am a VMWare administrator, will On-Boarding help me in moving to your cloud?

Nathan: Absolutely! At SoftLayer our customers can obtain compute resources using a variety of virtualization solutions. Customers have the option of migrating their virtual machine images to a new host running the same hypervisor, or customers may use a V2V tool such as Citrix XenConvert and migrate the Virtual Machine to XenServer. Either solution is available and customers should pick the solution that fits their technical and business requirements.

Well I want to take this time to thank Nathan for his time and for you to check out Softlayer at: http://www.softlayer.com/

For more information on the Citrix On-Boarding Solution: http://tiny.cc/on-boarding_pdf

Stay tuned for some great topics surrounding on-boarding!

For those of you who have not yet experienced a XenServer Master Class, now is the perfect opportunity.  We are holding a live webinar (with after class discussions) covering High Availability and Disaster Recovery on XenServer.  As with past Master Classes, future topics are defined by you, so help direct the discussion!

Not yet registered? Register now!

If this is the first time you have heard of the XenServer Master Class, please follow our official Facebook fan page, LinkedIn group and Twitter feed.  That's where you'll find the latest XenServer news, information and events.

Follow us on Twitter: @XenServerArmy 
Become a fan on Facebook: Citrix XenServer 
Join our LinkedIn group: Citrix XenServer Events

For more information on XenServer, visit the Citrix XenServer product page.

XenDesktopやXenAppのユーザーですと、ライセンスサーバーについて馴染みがあるかと思いますが、XenServerユーザーにとってはライセンスサーバーの設定は初めてになるかと思いますので、ライセンスサーバーの設定の方法を書いてみました。
ライセンスサーバー仮想アプライアンスのダウンロードの起動後の設定はその手順に沿えば問題ないとは思いますが、起動後ブラウザで管理画面にアクセスした後、戸惑うかと思いますのでそちらについて解説ます。

1. https://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=2301285&productId=683148より、mycitrixアカウントでログオンし、License Server Virtual Applianceをクリックし、License Server 仮想アプライアンスをダウンロードし、手順に沿って設定

2. ライセンスサーバー管理コンソール（Webベース）にログオン

3. "Administration"をクリック

4. "Vendor Daemon Configuration"をクリックし、"Import License"をクリック

5. V6 ライセンスファイル(*.lic)を選択し、"Import License"をクリック

6. "Administer"をクリック

7. "Reload License File"をクリック

8. "The license file was successfully reread."というメッセージが出たことを確認

9. "Dashboard"をクリックし、"Citrix XenServer xxx Edition"がリストされているか確認

以上

Kimihiko Kitase
Product Marketing
twitter: @kkitase
仮想化技術情報wiki: http://v12n.jp

VMware has been playing the "we invented the cloud" drum-roll for a couple of years now, but has yet to deliver its first enterprise-ready cloud product - vCloud - which is being developed in a project codenamed Redwood. It is likely that vCloud will be formally announced at VMWorld later this year, but with an announcement today of the OpenStack project, the open source community has re-asserted its claim to leadership in cloud computing, offering a complete open source cloud infrastructure platform developed by a powerful community of collaborators that share a commitment to free, open source, hypervisor and API-agnostic, standards-based cloud infrastructure that will meet the needs of enterprises and service providers alike.

The OpenStack effort is chaired by Rackspace whose Cloud Servers and Cloud Files implementations will be contributed to the project, and NASA, whose Nebula cloud orchestration layer will form a key component of OpenStack. The Rackspace Cloud is built on XenServer - the Citrix supported version of the open source Xen Cloud Platform, which itself draws on over 20 other open source projects including kernel.org and openvswitch.org. But a key tenet of OpenStack is openness and as such it will be hypervisor neutral, and while Citrix will be a leading contributor to OpenStack, the strength of the OpenStack effort is its large contributor base, and the fact that it contains both leading clouds and infrastructure vendors. The full list of participants at the OpenStack design summit held last week include: AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks, ThoughtWorks, Zenoss and Zuora.

The OpenStack community is founded on a belief that proprietary, closed source, single-vendor cloud offerings such as vCloud are wholly at odds with the concept of cloud computing, which can only succeed if openness is mandated at every interface. And we are not the only folks who think this way. Tim O'Reilly, the famous tech pundit and founder of O'Reilly Media is quoted on the OpenStack community site thus:

"If cloud computing is the future, then understanding how to make that future open is one of the great technology challenges of our day. Rackspace and NASA are taking an amazing step towards my vision of an open cloud future."

Today, then, is a day for VMware to recognize the creativity and leadership of the open source software movement, and its role in providing a vehicle to support the shared business goals of more than 25 ISVs that stand ready to deliver on the true promise of cloud computing - something that VMware can never offer. Whereas Redwood promises to offer a modestly scalable cloud orchestration platform with single-vendor support for the VMware vCloud API and VMware vApps and VMs, the OpenStack community will offer a completely open sourced cloud infrastructure, for enterprise or service provider use, with all of the key attributes that customers ought to expect of every cloud infrastructure - whether public or private. OpenStack brings:

• A commitment to compatibility, workload portability and openness: OpenStack will support both de-facto cloud APIs from major providers and emerging standards from the DMTF (including OVF, which VMware calls vApp, and which it has already begun to extend in a proprietary manner), and other standards organizations. Moreover, OpenStack will support a range of API bindings. If you insist on talking to OpenStack using VMware vCloud API, that will work too. And the community will ensure that OpenStack based clouds will federate with cloud resources from any other provider. In addition OpenStack clouds will be hypervisor agnostic, and (courtesy of XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform, as well as organizations such as CloudSwitch) will run any VM from any hypervisor.
  By comparison today "...there's no simple way to use vCloud with vSphere 4 ...VMware is working on that capability but the current vCloud APIs don't mix and match with existing VMware installations. For instance, vBlock users cannot smoothly shift workloads and virtual servers from vSphere to vCloud Express".

• Scalability and security born of real world deployments: Whereas project Redwood will probably scale to support a couple of thousand servers, and likely will be useful for private clouds, OpenStack will benefit from the contribution of code from the industry's largest clouds such as RackSpace's and those used by the scientific community at NASA, that demand scalability to tens or hundreds of thousands of servers, with guaranteed correctness in the face of complex systems faults and security born of real world deployments in hostile environments. There are now several XenServer based clouds in excess of 10,000 servers in size, and the management architecture for such a system is radically different from that of vSphere and what I've read about Redwood - which both suffer from many single points of failure.

• Architected for multi-tenancy: One of the most important requirements of any cloud infrastructure is the need for isolation of different tenant workloads on the infrastructure. In the enterprise, multi-tenancy enables IT to guarantee that different IT user groups or applications are properly isolated, which in turn is a requirement for regulatory compliance including PCI. At the virtual infrastructure level multi-tenancy begins with the hypervisor and its security architecture. Beyond security, the platform needs to offer guaranteed SLAs to different workloads, and a way to account for resource. XenServer (and the open source Xen Cloud Platform - XCP) delivers everything that is required here. Beyond the hypervisor, the virtual network must guarantee isolation, and resource guarantees. In the case of OpenStack, the new open source virtual switch that today is part of XCP and that is developed at openvswitch.org provides unparalleled granularity of control as well as an open architecture for control and management of the virtualized fabric. Finally, multi-tenancy extends into storage, which can take the form of block or object stores. XenServer manages the block store and the Rackspace Cloud Files implementation offers an object store.

• More than enterprise virtual infrastructure at scale: Whereas VMware's focus with vCloud is to get its virtual infrastructure platform to scale, and to offer APIs for virtualized compute, networking and block storage, OpenStack includes the Cloud Files object store from Rackspace, and in so doing enables any enterprise to implement its own private S3-like object store, with the choice of which objects to host privately and which to replicate into the cloud. OpenStack will offer a fully-featured cloud service suite to enable next generation cloud-based applications to scale elastically, with granular resource control and full SLAs.

• Engineered for cloud, from the get-go: One of the principal benefits of cloud-based infrastructure is the fact that it provides granular information for charge-back, to enable IT administrators or service providers to appropriately bill for services delivered. OpenStack has been engineered to provide powerful role-based management and granular accounting for resource use, from the get go.

• Support for differentiated, value-added services: Cloud service providers that implement vCloud will face two nasty challenges. First, all cloud providers that implement vCloud will be simply offering the same services as their competitors. Second, they will certainly pay a lot more money for the privilege of doing so than they would by adopting a free virtual infrastructure platform such as XenServer or KVM, and the OpenStack suite. OpenStack does not attempt to define the entire cloud, and leaves plenty of room for service providers to add and integrate (courtesy of its openness and open source code base) other service offerings.

Finally, it's important to note that OpenStack is not the only open sourced cloud stack available. Cloud.com, Abiquo and Eucalyptus all offer open source orchestration platforms today. If OpenStack is to succeed it will need to continue to draw on the contributions of the ISVs that have joined RackSpace and NASA in the announcement. Citrix is certainly committed - more clouds running XenServer, OpenVSwitch and our value-added VPX virtual appliances is good for us - the commoditization of the cloud orchestration business will leave several vendors puzzling over their strategies. I've counted over 20 such vendors in the market, with new entrants showing up all the time. Most recently Nimbula, founded by ex AWS execs, joined the scene with respectable investors.

Whilst the ultimate winners in the cloud infrastructure vendor category remain to be chosen, it is clear that the business of cloud orchestration will be commoditized. What's fascinating is that in this case the key commoditizers are cloud vendors themselves, who recognize the importance of openness and compatibility, and the need for a platform that supports value-added features that enables them to compete. More importantly, for enterprise customers, with the ready availability of entirely free virtual infrastructure and storage platforms, the addition of open source orchestration means that the business of building an open, compatible cloud of your own will be simple, and that there is a clear set of alternatives to VMware's lock-in agenda.

It's time for VMware to admit that as far as cloud is concerned, the game is up, and that its monopolistic, ISV-antagonistic business model has no play in the infrastructure as a service market. The open source community brings to the table a richer, more secure, more scalable, and open platform not simply because it has an idealistic notion of cloud, but because it taps into the strengths of a diverse ecosystem of contributors, each of whose business interests are best favored by the rapid adoption of an open cloud architecture. If you're an enterprise customer of VMware, OpenStack promises to serve you better than vCloud will, and if you're looking to purchase cloud services, OpenStack and other open source based clouds will offer you a richer set of features, with a proven security model and better performance than you will find from service providers that simply adopt vCloud to offer their customers just another way to consume VMware licensing.

Avianca Accomplishes Strategic and Tactical Goals with Citrix XenDesktop

• Leveraged refresh budget to virtualize 1,200 PC's

• Locked down corporate data by centralizing desktops

• Reduced desktop management costs by 50%

Avianca is one of the largest airlines in South America with 7,000 employees and 1,200 in their operations center in Bogotá, Colombia. Like many large companies, Avianca has been living with high maintenance costs, and an inflexible PC infrastructure for years. They were looking for a solution that would make maintenance many times easier, improve data security and also support onboarding employees of recently acquired companies. As described in the Citrix case study, Avianca chose Citrix XenDesktop to deploy an aggressive desktop virtualization strategy.

Rather than immediately getting back on the PC refresh treadmill, Avianca deployed 1,200 HP thin client terminals to employees and virtualized 140 corporate applications using Citrix technology. Having done this, they had total freedom to leverage XenDesktop FlexCast technology, meaning that Avianca could deliver virtual desktops and/or applications to their thin clients using single image provisioning. Most importantly, all desktop processing now take place in the data center, locking down corporate data and vastly simplifying desktop management. Added benefits are a significant reduction in power and cooling costs along with overall higher desktop availability.

The Chief Information Officer of Avianca, Gabriel Rios, described security benefits in the case study: "When the workload runs on centralized servers, the security level is increased because risks, such as the use of USB memory sticks, are eliminated. In this way, the possibility of information theft or the acquisition of viruses and Trojan horses on the corporate network is enormously diminished."

The bottom-line benefits of the project were also evident at Avianca. The company has estimated that the investment will pay back in only three years since their cost of PC maintenance has been reduced by more than 50%. Savings were driven by centralized management, a common desktop platform, rapid data restoral, and ultra-reliable thin clients.

I see this as a key example of how Citrix XenDesktop is the obvious solution for any company that is facing the prospect of replacing their existing PC's. Avianca, by taking a step back and evaluating virtualization technologies, found a better way to deploy desktops and get them out of the PC refresh cycle. With the help of their Citrix partner, Compufacil Consulting Services, Avianca was able to separate their apps from the desktop OS using on-demand apps, freeing them to easily virtualize their desktops and deliver them to any endpoint. Make sure that you have a look at the complete Citrix case study and see how Avianca leveraged XenDesktop to grab the "holy grail" in desktop virtualization: TCO, agility, and security.

Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with the support of our products. One of our initiatives is to increase the ability of our Partners and Customers to leverage self-service avenues for finding answers and resolving problems. A key area that the Support teams focus on is development of troubleshooting and health checking tools.

Citrix Support have been developing tools to help You, our Partners and Customers to troubleshooting your Citrix environments for many years now. Over the past year I have developed some video demos and wrote blogs to increase the awareness of these tools. Below you will find the full list of tools available from Citrix Support along with links to useful resources.

Let me know if I am missing any. Thanks.

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter - @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with our products. We are working on multiple items to help make it easier to find answers and solve problems via self-service avenues, all of which are available to all our Partners and Customers to leverage.

Last November we launched the How To video initiative and to date have over 130 videos covering 13 products available on Citrix TV.

To make it easier for you to find these videos, we have added technotes on the Knowledge Center linking back to Citrix TV.

The following is a list of the articles per product series.

• XenDesktop
• XenServer
• XenApp
• NetScaler
• Provisioning Services
• Access Gateway Standard Edition
• Access Gateway Advanced Edition
• Access Gateway Enterprise Edition
• EdgeSight
• Password Manager
• Web Interface
• Workflow Studio
• Citrix Receiver/Merchandising Server/Dazzle

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter - @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

Kaviza, the folks that won the "Best of Synergy 2010" award in the Business Efficiency cateogy, have just released "VDI-in-a-box 3.0" featuring Citrix HDX technology and full support for XenServer. It's a simple plug-and-play desktop virtualization solution designed specifically for SMEs and departmental budgets. Since it doesn't require shared storage or multiple management servers, Kaviza says VDI-in-a-box 3.0 can deliver virtual desktops at a total cost of under $500 per user (minimum 25 users). And since Kaviza is licensed to use Citrix HDX technology, VDI-in-a-box delivers an uncompromised "high definition" user experience. Kudos to Kaviza!

Derek Thorslund
Citrix Product Strategist, HDX

Citrix Education announced the long-awaited availability of the Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for Virtualization and Citrix Certified Integration Architect (CCIA) for Virtualization. These advanced certifications, the first ever of their type, help engineers and architects develop and prove the real-world skills required to deliver end-to-end virtual computing, from the data center to the desktop. Here are a few quick facts: 

• The CCEE certification focuses on the ability to combine operational planning skills with tactical design expertise, showcasing Citrix solution integration know-how. To attain the CCEE, students must pass several product-specific exams for Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer. The final requirement of the CCEE exam, A15 Engineering a Citrix Virtualization Solution, features complex simulations, enabling students to showcase their extensive knowledge in a performance-based setting.
• The CCIA certification is the highest Citrix designation and focuses on best practices for virtualization analysis and design. CCIAs possess the skills required for successful implementations, and help organizations reduce costs and time while increasing performance. To achieve the CCIA, candidates must have achieved the CCEE, and pass one more final exam, A16 Architecting a Citrix Virtualization Solution.
• Candidates who achieve either of the new certifications are guaranteed to be current for a period of three years, thanks to our new advanced certification policy. 
• Those candidates who possess earlier versions of the CCEE and CCIA may be eligible for the update path, which allows them to attain the CCEE and CCIA by just passing the respective final exams. To learn more about this option, including recommended experience and training, go to www.citrix.com/CCEEupdate or www.citrix.com/CCIAupdate.

For more info on the CCEE and CCIA for Virtualization, visit us at www.citrixeducation.com.

XenServer's Workload Balancing (WLB) team released a tool this week that could make your life a little easier – the Workload Balancing Administration Tool. (Workload Balancing is the XenServer feature that lets you balance VM workloads and power off unused servers at night.)
The Workload Balancing Administration Tool is a little utility that has three big advantages. It...
• Displays monitored pools and server status
• Simplifies changing the WLB communications account - no reinstallation necessary
• Lets you configure richer WLB logs for troubleshooting
The WLB Admin tool CTX125365 only takes about a minute to install. All you need to do is unzip the .exe from the download package and drop it in the Agent folder (C:\Program Files\Citrix\Workload Balancing\Agent folder on Windows Server 2008).

Why do I care about service status?

The WLB Admin tool lets you find out what pool Workload Balancing is monitoring and whether its services are up and running. Why do I care about service status? Well, verifying service status is the only way you can tell if Workload Balancing installed correctly - see CTX124482.

Changing Communications Accounts

Happily, this tool also lets you change the Workload Balancing communications account without having to reinstall Workload Balancing.

Basically, you just (1) create the new account on the WLB server, (2) specify it in the Accounts tab of the WLB Admin tool, and (3) go into XenCenter and specify the new WLB server credentials in the Connect to WLB Server dialog box (WLB tab -> Initialize WLB button).

Setting Richer Logging

The WLB team also included a feature that's handy for troubleshooting: the Logging Options tab.

Selecting tracing options in this tab lets you increase the amount of detail that appears in the Workload Balancing log file (found in C:\Users\All Users\Citrix\Workload Balancing\Data\LogFile.log on Windows Server 2008, as described in CTX CTX124479).

Notes
One thing to note about the tool. If you are logged in with an account that isn't a local admin or doesn't have database rights, it can be a bit tricky to get the tool to run, so be sure to read the instructions on the download page CTX125365.

According to computing.co.uk, the Cooperative Group has essentially abandoned their VMware virtualization infrastructure to standardize on Citrix and Microsoft for an aggressive desktop virtualization rollout.

• World's largest consumer-owned business with 123,000 employees

• Initial rollout of 3,000 XenDesktop users

• Joint Citrix/Microsoft solution displaced incumbent VMware ESX infrastructure

The Cooperative Group, based in Manchester, UK, is a United Kingdom consumers' co-operative, and, after the acquisition of Somerfield supermarkets, is the world's largest consumer-owned business, with over 4.5 million members and 123,000 employees across all its businesses.

According to the report, Co-operative will begin its rollout in its new Manchester headquarters, deploying 3,000 thin clients and laptops that will run virtual desktops based on Citrix XenDesktop. This approach was proved in with a successful 250 user pilot on HP thin clients. The Co-operative also made a strategic decision to switch from all-ESX infrastructure to a combination of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008.

"We started off with VMware but it (VMware) started playing games on discount levels which we were not happy with," said Dave Murrell, head of servers, storage and desktops at The Co-operative Group. "XenServer became a no-brainer for financial reasons as well as support, and we have a big datacentre licence for (Windows 2008) Hyper-V going forward anyway, so we will move away from VMware."

By deploying the joint Citrix/Microsoft solution across the company, the Co-operative expects to drive significant savings on desktop support and "up to £1.53m per year on desktop PC upgrade costs, plus £459,000 a year on lower server, storage and desktop PC energy bills," according to the computing,co.uk report.

Make sure you read the full article here. We are seeing more and more reports like this one, from companies both large and small. The Co-operative Group deployment is significant, in my opinion, for one, coming from a cost-conscious consumer-owned company competing in a tough retail market and, secondly, given the huge number of endpoints involved long-term.

Fresh off a long U.S. holiday weekend and what should I stumble across this morning but iXen for the Apple iPad.  It looks like a cool little app that enables customers to perform basic management functions on XenServer installations remotely from their iPad. 

According to Inpirationlabs (I haven't yet had the chance to try the product), the current version enables the following functions:

- Add remote hosts
- Remove remote hosts
- Store your passwords securely in the keychain
- Activate SSL encryption
- Option to ignore SSL certificate errors
- Show virtual machines on the remote host
- Show the status of the virtual machine (RUNNING, SUSPENDED, HALTED)
- Booting the virtual machine
- Shutdown the virtual machine
- Suspend the virtual machine
- Reset the virtual machine (if the PV - driver or the guest OS aren't responding)
- Turn off the virtual machine (if no clean shutdown possible). 

Beyond the obvious (a cool new app for XenServer), iXen caught my eye simply because, until it went live, no one here even knew this product was in development!   And while it really isn't a surprise in the world of the App Store (and existing apps like Citrix Receiver for iPad and GoToMeeting App for iPad) - it does take some adjustment. 

So as I wandered down the hall to mooch an iPad so I could try this out, it occurred to me that not only does it provide another example of the diverse ecosystem that is out there developing products for a large and growing XenServer base but, more broadly, is a great display of what happens when the concept of openness is fully embraced. 

Yes - the openness of XenServer is why cloud providers like Rackspace have chosen to standardize on XenServer. It is also what swayed customers like Tesco and TomTom when looking at alternative solutions. Openness is also a big part of why over 45,000 organizations - and 45 percent of the Fortune 500 - have chosen XenServer. 

But more importantly, openness means organizations avoid lock-in.  It means the platform can be customized for particular needs. It also means that innovators are free to innovate - in any way they see fit.  That freedom to create encourages the organic, grass-roots development of new products like that introduced by Inspirationlabs. It also means that customers can expect to be continually surprised by an ecosystem rich with innovative products for XenServer for a long time to come. 

Openness = Freedom so, to borrow a phrase, let freedom ring! 

Know of other projects like this?  Share them here.

Hosting IT as a Service has been around for 20 years.  Just ask the guys from Connections for Business, a Managed Service Provider in Fort Lauderdale, who has been in business for the past 30 years.  Yeah, I said Fort Lauderdale.  You may ask, I thought the only business in South Florida is tourism?  What is a technology company doing there?  Well, they are making a business... a good business and have been around for many, many years helping the SMB get out of the IT business. 

According to Jonathan Garber, VP of Business Development for Connections, they were The Cloud before there was one.  When I tapped him for more on this statement, he merely replied that they have been providing IT as a Service to the state of Florida before the "Cloud" ever existed.  That companies across the state have been using Connections as a way to off load all of their IT needs and focus on the things that make them money.  In one particular case, Jonathan told me about a firm who was more than willing to cut a check each month for thousands of dollars to Connections because the flexibility to use an outside service provider increased his profitability by leaps and bounds.  Connections provides services to scores of companies with the same value proposition.

It was refreshing to hear from a service provider who not only knows their stuff, but has the background and customer references to show what a top notch IT as a Service company looks like. In fact, they have been so dedicated to this business, they actually developed their own Network Operations Center software front end.  It's called Connect Smart and it worked so well for them, they decided to put some shrink wrap around it and sell it to other service providers.  Now Connections for Business runs their own IT as a Service business, sells their NOC software and is poised to be a market maker in the southeast region of the U.S.

They have the ear of a large U.S. telco as well who is looking to use them as an incubation center for SMB IT services.  You can imagine that with all of this success, Connections was elated to hear about the Citrix Service Provider program. In fact they were one of the first to sign up. Jonathon told me, "Citrix provides us with the scalable solution to deliver Enterprise level power to the SMB market and access via the widest range of end devices. We are looking forward to expansive growth as this market continues to emerge. The SMB is ready for IT as a Service and we believe that together with Citrix, we can deliver."

Connections is one more example of a company who is seizing the opportunity to meet the demand of the SMB in the IT as a Service space.  If you're looking for a company who can do the same for you, just check out our partner locator.  Once you're on the landing page, just click on the "Hosting Providers" tab. You can find Connections for Business and over five hundred other CSPs worldwide to help you out.

Citrix XenDesktop Delivers Cost Efficiencies for Hospital

• Needed to streamline desktop delivery while supporting multiple campuses.
• Construction of new main hospital limits staff onsite, therefore remote access for staff are remote sites are critical.
• "...without the centralized management capabilities of XenApp and XenDesktop, I would need twice as many people."

Alameda County Medical Center

Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, California, serves as the healthcare safety net for the county, providing care to all residents regardless of their ability to pay. The medical center has six campuses that include two hospitals, ambulatory clinics, rehabilitation services and a psychiatric facility. There are approximately 2,700 employees.

The challenge: streamlining and tailoring desktop delivery to reduce IT workload

As user requirements evolved, the IT team began looking at ways to tailor the standard desktop being delivered to all clinicians and staff. "For simplicity, we created one published desktop with all the applications that the clinical and support staff could possibly require. Unfortunately, even if they didn't use all these applications, people tended to click on the icons to see if the applications would work - and call helpdesk when they didn't. This situation added to our workload - and with multiple campuses, we were already stretched very thin. We needed to find an easier way to build and deliver customized desktops with only the applications each person needed to do their job."

Expanding the Application Delivery Infrastructure from Citrix

When Citrix introduced Citrix® XenDesktop™ for desktop virtualization, Alameda County Medical Center decided to add this solution to its application delivery infrastructure. Bennett selected the Platinum Edition of XenDesktop to enable delivery of tailored, virtualized desktops to about 200 users.

In addition, the medical center turned to another Citrix solution - server virtualization - to support a planned disaster recovery site. "We have a small datacenter located about 13 miles away from the main campus that we want to use for disaster recovery," said Bennett. "To save money and optimize flexibility, we decided to implement Citrix XenServer and Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters. Virtualization will reduce the amount of server hardware needed in the failover site, and will accelerate server provisioning during an interruption."

Policy-based desktop virtualization enhances control, efficiency and flexibility

Bennett looked at XenDesktop as a way to leverage the existing Citrix XenApp environment, but manage it more easily and efficiently with a small IT staff. "XenDesktop offered us the ability to use policies to tailor desktops to the particular needs of different users. We can provide a basic desktop and then specify the required applications for each user or group of users. For example, based on policies, registration clerks will get all the applications and resources they need - but no more. With XenDesktop, we don't have to spend time building each desktop or worrying about adding a new resource - everything is automated, and the correct desktop is dynamically assembled each time the user logs in."

With XenDesktop, policies can also be applied to control the user's environment, such as limiting the ability to upload files if the user is connecting from a home PC, to support confidentiality of medical information.

He added, "And Citrix technology has improved the performance of our picture archiving and communications system, or PACS, enabling us to include it and any other problem application together with XenApp hosted applications in the virtualized desktops. XenDesktop gives us more flexibility in what we can deliver to our users, and avoids the need to run applications locally."

"Overall, Citrix enables us to accomplish more with the staff we have. In fact, without the centralized management capabilities of XenApp and XenDesktop, I would need twice as many people."

A consistent user experience on any device

With Citrix virtualization technology, the medical center's employees can access their desktop from any device in any location, such as a cart on wheels, or a PC in a doctor's home office. "Some of our doctors want to connect remotely in order to work outside the medical center," said the IT director. "XenDesktop supports that by delivering a desktop with same look and feel they are used to in the hospital."

Another benefit of XenDesktop will come into play when Alameda County Medical Center begins rebuilding a portion of its main hospital to meet earthquake standards. During construction, only a limited number of staff will be able to work on the main campus, and many will have to be relocated to remote sites. "XenDesktop will help facilitate this project because we can centrally deliver desktops anywhere, with the same user experience. We expect this to ease the disruption for employees and my IT team."

A cost-effective solution for server virtualization

In addition to providing flexible, consistent access to applications during normal operations, Alameda County Medical Center is working to ensure uninterrupted delivery in the case of a disaster. With Citrix® XenServer™ and Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters, the organization not only will benefit from rapid provisioning of virtual servers in its new failover center, but is saving money in the process.

"Public hospitals today face severe financial challenges, so any time I can get more bang for the buck I need to do it. We compared XenServer to the competition and found that we could achieve the same results but at a definite price advantage. I estimate we saved 30 or 40 percent with XenServer, and we got the Platinum Edition to boot."

Bennett concluded, "We have had phenomenal success with Citrix products and now we are expanding on that success with desktop and server virtualization. Citrix is changing the way we look at application delivery and opening new doors for the medical center."

Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with our products.
One of our initiatives is to increase the ability of our Partners and Customers to leverage self-service avenues via our Knowledge Center.

Find below the Citrix Knowledge Center Top 10 for June 2010.

Top 10 Technical Articles

Top 10 Whitepapers

Top 10 Hotfixes

Top 10 Presentations

Top 10 Tools

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For the last few years, Citrix has been busy building out the next generation cloud computing platform. Between the open source XenServer hypervisor and the Xen Cloud platform, Citrix offers key building blocks for hosting and managing cloud workloads. Industry leaders such as Rackspace recognize the value of these technologies in the cloud marketplace.

However, our efforts are not limited to open source code. As a board member of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Citrix has been working to standardize key elements of the cloud technology stack. The aim is create interoperability between private, enterprise and hosted clouds, maximizing opportunities to truly innovate in cloud computing on top of standard interfaces.

The DMTF has set forth the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard for representing virtual machines on a file system. As detailed in their informative white paper, OVF tackles two problems: how to represent a set of related VM's (or a "virtual appliance") in a single package; and how to create a portable package format. The OVF standard continues to gain momentum in the industry with support from IBM, Oracle's VirtualBox, VMware and Citrix.

The release of Citrix XenServer 5.6 marks a key milestone in merging the technology and standardization efforts. From the XenCenter management tool, XenServer users can now import and export OVF formatted virtual machines and virtual appliances. However, unlike many other implementations, Citrix didn't pay mere lip service to the interoperability aspect of OVF. Instead, we have expended considerable effort to enable import of OVF packages from other vendors. Already have a legacy investment in OVF packages exported from VMware? No problem! XenCenter will import the OVF, repackage the disk images, and update the drivers so the virtual machine(s) will boot on the XenServer platform.

As a companion benefit of this work, a similar wizard in XenCenter can also import raw VMDK, VHD, WIM (Windows Imaging Format) and even VDI disk image files. Just supply the hardware parameters to the import wizard and XenCenter will apply the same disk and driver fix-up process to make the image bootable in your XenServer-based cloud.

With such an ambitious charter for an initial release, we expect this XenCenter feature to be a boon to IT departments looking for flexible and interoperable VM management tools. However, we also expect that modern IT departments will find some new challenges that we didn't anticipate. So, if this initiative interests you, download XenServer 5.6 and give it a test drive. Let us know how it works, both the successes and the areas with room to improve. Leave comments here or head over to the XenServer support forums.

(When I'm at a loss for a quick breezy title of my own to sum up the subject at hand, I resort to song or album titles. Thanks this time to the late Peter Allen – I considered Leonard Cohen's "New Skin for the Old Ceremony" instead, but, on the one hand, it might be too obscure... still, on the other, it's Leonard Cohen! But to the point...)

You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting a pundit talking about cloud computing. (For that matter, there's probably an online service that will rent you a virtual dead cat to swing for $0.07 an hour, and market it as Dead Cat as a Service, or DCaaS.) And while many have seen great promise from cloud computing concepts, others have been asking – especially in the context of enterprise computing – "Haven't we seen <concept X> before under another name?" And it certainly can appear that vendors and venture capitalists in search of The Next Big Thing have dug up computing concepts of the 1990s (or 1970s), glued fluffy cotton to them, and sold them as "clouds."

So... new technology, or new names for old? Not to confuse the issue, but: a bit of both, building on things we've seen before, on trends that have ebbed and flowed before, but with characteristics and priorities that make all the difference.

Let's start with the basics.

Is "Software as a Service" (SaaS) the new Application Service Provider (ASP)? Yes, but.

From consumer apps to core business capabilities, the companies that have started up as SaaS providers or survived the transition as the lucky few who climbed their way out of the ASP graveyard have made their mark by building offerings that are distinguished by their web-friendly user experience, their pay-as-you-go-and-grow economics, their ability to support multiple tenants/users/organizations securely, and in most cases, web-services APIs for "mashup" integration with other SaaS offerings as well as your own custom systems. Meanwhile, most of the ASPs in said graveyard got there by taking enterprise apps, sticking them on a farm of servers in their datacenters, installing a copy for every customer, and slapping a usage meter on the front.

And what about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)? Are public IaaS clouds the new colos? Are public PaaS offerings the new shared hosting? Are private clouds the new clusters? Yes, but.

Oracle's Larry Ellison made waves a couple of years ago when he mocked the entire notion of cloud computing, calling it a fashion, insisting that "private clouds" were just the nom-du-jour for clusters (and, after all, they've been doing clusters for years, so what's the big deal?) – with a lot more insult and scorn along the way, of course, because, well, that's how he rolls. But as with SaaS, the key is in the evolution, the essential attributes that make clouds clouds.

The user experience of the cloud – public or private, IaaS or PaaS – must reflect its networked nature. While there are some functions that require or benefit from specialized clients, the bulk of the user experience must be as web-based and light-weight as possible. Self-service – bounded, of course, by policies driven by security, organization, and economic constraints – is a fundamental need.

Whether internal or external, the cloud is distinguished by its economics. And by this, I don't mean that resources are fundamentally cheaper in the cloud – cases can be made simultaneously for both sides of that argument, and supported by significant data – but rather, that their costs are transparent. For public clouds, whether the commodity is compute power, storage, or application access (or, of course, all of the above), the charges are well-defined in terms of processing time, storage capacity, network traffic, and the like – there they are on your web console, your invoice, and your credit card. Internally, though, the same economic assumptions are necessary: the dynamic resources of the cloud make it possible and necessary that resource utilization be tracked – and potentially charged back, whether against real budget funds or CorporateITBuck$(TM).

...All of which enables multi-tenancy, another important attribute of cloud implementations. If resources are to be used dynamically, they must be sufficiently provisioned to address peak demand – but with both sufficiently fine-grained control (of capacity over time) and sufficient sharing to ward off a repeat of the "just-buy-more-servers-sprawl-is-our-friend" 1990s. With external clouds, the argument for multi-tenancy is clear; in premise-based implementations, the tenants are likely to be divisions or projects, but the same concerns hold.

The approach that delivers the greatest flexibility and savings is the combination of public and private – what is sometimes called the "hybrid cloud" – the cloud-extended datacenter. By meeting capacity and flexibility requirements according to a 90-10 rule (or 80-20 or 95-5 – your results may vary), organizations can meet most of their own requirements while relying on one or more cloud provider to handle the exceptions. While some of these exceptions are intermittent use of the same sorts of resources used internally – burst capacity to deal with peak usage periods, offsite recovery and business continuity services to deal with exceptional failures – some of these "exceptions" may be ongoing exceptions to in-house expertise, such as integrated use of specialized web-service-integrated applications.

That openness to integration is another hallmark of the cloud: APIs, typically web-services based RESTful interfaces, that expose applications, operations, storage, compute power, and other resources for use in end-to-end business processes – making (for instance) your in-house accounting applications and offsite protected storage fit together as well as your Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets, and Flickr photos. One of my managers, back in the olden days when FORTRAN dinosaurs walked the earth and I wrote the occasional line of useful code, once told me, "Never write anything twice. Or, if you can help it, once." Fine-grained accessibility of sockets to cloud-based resources increase reusability – and, through it, both productivity and quality.

Each of these aspects that differentiate cloud computing from what has come before it – utility computing, capacity on demand – drive further requirements. For instance, to build a cloud-extended data center securely and cost-effectively and to take advantage of fine-grained control and integration of services, you need to protect and extend both the network for access and the directory for authentication and authorization. These are among the gaps that need to be filled (or, to be more technology-specific, bridged) for cloud-extended datacenters to be mainstream for businesses of all sizes.

So, to return to the original question: haven't we seen all this before? Yes, but... not really.

(Which is a lot like the conversation: "Isn't this online apps thing just "thin client"/X Windows/3270 terminals?")

Meanwhile, gotta go – I have a virtual dead cat to tweet about.

(Thanks to Citrix's Brian Young for "DCaaS" – just when I think things can't get any more surreal, he turns the dial to 11.)

OSI Layers 1 - 7 ~ virtualized

Citrix owns the virtual stack, OSI Layers 1 through 7 that is. There isn't any other solution that can claim the fact that they can install Virtual Machines on bare metal, run a Virtual Layer 2 Switch, a Virtual Layer 3/4 router, and applications all the way up to Layer 7.

If you haven't virtualized your infrastructure, it's time to do so, because Virtualization is radically changing datacenter and branch architectures. It is not just servers that are getting virtualized. Applications, hardware resources and everything in between can now be in its own virtual container. This is huge in providing you the capability to reduce costs, and increase your computing flexibility.

The vNetworkStack solution virtualizes switches, routers, load balancers, network firewalls, application firewalls, SSL VPN, IPSec VPN, intrusion prevention, content switching, compression, caching - all of the application delivery controller features - along with your virtualized application servers and virtualized desktops.

You can check out how to do it at http://vNetworkStack.com, or follow the blueprint we built just for this Proof of Concept.

The blueprint.

See it live.

It's Powerful!

The XenServer engineering team is nearing completion of a pre-release ("beta") build of our distributed virtual switching technology and are seeking customers and partners interested in working closely with us prior to it's final release.

This is a private opportunity with limited availability. If you are interested please see http://www.citrix.com/xenserver/beta for more information.

Thanks for your support of XenServer!

Carl, on behalf of the XenServer engineering team

XenServer 5.6 includes a tech preview feature for Multi-GPU Passthrough that I think is going to be a winner with customers using XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro Graphics. Until now, multi-user hypervisors have not offered GPU access. As a result, there has been no choice but to use physical machines to deliver 3D professional graphics applications that demand the hardware acceleration of a graphics card to efficiently render very large models (millions of vertices) like airplanes and automobiles or a CT scan of the human body. While this approach has provided the outstanding performance that power users require, it gets expensive since you need one physical data center workstation (typically a blade or rack workstation) per concurrent user. That's where Multi-GPU Passthrough comes in. Now you can share that host workstation across multiple users, one per GPU card. Since high-end CAD/CAM, GIS and Medical Imaging applications often do most of their processing on the GPU, there's generally plenty of CPU to go around on a multi-core processor, not only for the 3D graphics users but also for regular XenDesktop office workers. So, a host workstation with four GPUs could serve four simultaneous 3D graphics power users and also, if desired, some number of regular knowledge workers who don't need expensive server-side graphics hardware acceleration. Pretty cool, huh?

If you'd be interested in evaluating this new capability, please email me and I can send you a soon-to-be-published Tech Note on this topic.

Derek Thorslund
Citrix Product Strategist, HDX