Daniel Feller

Protection from antivirus.  Are you wondering if you read that correctly?  Yes, it is correct.  Odd isn't it?  Anti-virus is there to protect us, but we also need to be protected from antivirus. Antivirus solutions are critical, even in a virtual desktop environment. Many people believe that because a hosted VM-based virtual desktop image is created from a real-only image that they are immune from virus.  That is only partially true.  When you reboot, the virus goes away because the changes to the base image are destroyed (including the virus), but what about that time period between getting infected and the next reboot? Those few hours are dangerous. If using hosted shared desktops or hosted VM-based VDI desktops, those virtual desktops are located within the data center with other critical systems.  If a virus made it into the data center, the entire infrastructure... (more)

Cloud Computing Is a Big Whiteboard

Daniel Feller's Blog Am I the only one who has trouble understanding Cloud Computing? Is Instant Messenger considered cloud computing? Is my company's enterprise deployment of XenApp on XenServer considered Cloud Computing? Is the iTunes store considered Cloud Computing? Why is Cloud Computing so hard to figure out? Well, look at it from a different perspective. Have you ever laid down on the grass and looked at the sky and tried to figure out what a cloud looked like? You might think one cloud looks like a puppy and another looks like an airplane while someone else thinks your pu... (more)

Windows 7 Migration Is Here

The migration to the new operating system was a challenge. We had a mass of people going to each user's desktop to copy their data and  rebuild the operating system.  We thought we planned appropriately but ran into all sorts of issues like: We didn't have the correct hardware drivers for some of the computers, which required searching the Internet and oftentimes using try and error until we found the right driver.  There were too  many occasions where we were unable to find a driver for the new operating system.  We just hoped the user wouldn't notice. We sometimes found out th... (more)

Estimate Bandwidth Requirements

Do you ever wonder how much bandwidth you need to do a desktop virtualization implementation? Regardless of the flavor of virtual desktop being implemented (hosted shared, hosted VM-based VDI, local streamed, etc), the network plays a critical role. That should not be surprising (if it is, we need to have an even bigger discussion). If you don’t plan your network bandwidth appropriately, you will have unhappy users, who will make you unhappy, which is one of the 10 biggest mistakes to avoid when doing virtual desktops As we would expect, the user experience degrades as the latency... (more)

Big Bang with Desktop Virtualization

Do you believe these statements? In order for me to see any value in doing desktop virtualization, I have to move all of my users to a hosted VDI model. I don’t need a VDI type desktop as I can simply use hosted shared with XenApp. I’ve had many discussions with people who have these, as well as plenty of other statements about desktop virtualization. This leads me to believe that many are seeing desktop virtualization as a big bang effect (great TV show by the way), that is in an all or nothing approach. This couldn’t be further from reality. Many of the organizations doing desk... (more)