Virtualization Executive Summit Event Review

Last week I attended the Virtualization Executive Summit, a great event attended by almost 100 Senior IT Executives (CTO’s, CIO’s, CEO’s, VP’s, Director’s etc..) from very large, international organizations. As the name suggests, the event focused on Virtualization, with a large proportion of the end user interest being in Desktop Virtualization.

I have to say, it was a very well organized and thought-out event, with each of the delegates having individual time tables based on their areas of interest. These time tables accommodated both vendor boardroom presentation sessions along with 1:1 meetings with the vendors too, so a busy two days for all involved.

As part of our sponsorship package, I was presenting in the AppSense Boardroom Session. It appeared to be very well received (with some of the attendees saying it was the best session they had been to <- queue big ego boost for me lol). There was a great mix of people in the room, some who had deployed Desktop Virtualization and some that had also done stateless / non-persistent Desktop Virtualization with a user environment management solution (like AppSense ;-) ) which was a great validation for the others in the room who are still in their planning stages.

Nearly all of the many meetings we hosted focused on the attendee’s plans for desktop virtualization in 2010, and I am glad to say, they were also asking how AppSense could help enable them to adopt the non-persistent virtual desktop model.

Thanks to all of those who helped make this a great event, and thank you also to all those who attended and are driving forward with desktop virtualization..

Looking forward to the next one :)

DABCC Podcast – AppSense (Martin Ingram) And Doug Brown Discuss Citrix XenDesktop 4 & User Environment Management

Douglas Brown interviews Martin Ingram, Vice President of Strategy at AppSense. Douglas and Martin discuss the recent release of Citrix XenDesktop 4, what this means for the desktop virtualization, AppSense, and VMware. Martin also talks a bit about their upcoming “user installed applications” technology which will allow end-users to install their own applications and have those apps roam with the user while allowing IT to centrally manage these ‘one off’ applications centrally.

The podcast is hosted on DABCC.com and can be found here

DABCC Podcast

Migrating User Profiles And Existing Personalization Settings to Win 7 with AppSense

A major challenge in migrating existing users to Windows 7 is user profile data and desktop setup scripts. It’s highly unlikely that anything the user has done to their existing machine to personalize it will be compatible with the new Windows 7 desktop. The result? All upgraded employees have to re-personalize their desktop – not a quick task, especially as the process to make such personalization changes may require changing options and settings in new menu locations.

One of the most important things to consider in your Windows 7 migration project is the retention of all user-specific information (we call it the “user personality”) from the ‘old’ desktop and simply injecting this back into the new Windows 7 desktop following upgrade, ensuring a seamless experience to the user and a de-risked Win 7 migration. 

AppSense Environment Manager has been providing user profile migration solutions for global companies for several years, and fast becoming an essential component in many Win 7 migration projects.  AppSense automatically identify all existing personalization settings on the current OS platform, separate them from the desktop and store them independent of the desktop itself.  These settings can now be re-applied to the new Win7 OS platform, regardless of how the OS is hosted or delivered, either physical, virtual or provisioned..

For more information, please download our free Windows 7 Overview  here or visit www.appsense.com/solutions/migration

Win7 Migration

Some activity on the personalization front.

Sumit Dhawan over in the Citrix XenDeskop group has posted a very interesting article in the run up to VMworld 09.  I’m also hearing some interesting rumors about activity in user personalization space.  Sumit makes some very important points….which are all based on actual customer implementations. 

I’m also over in San Francisco attending VMworld this week and no doubt will hear about lots of upcoming companies and technologies, aiming to address the challenges of virtualized desktop management.  It’s great we have so many brains fixed on these issues now, but remember it’s all about what can actually be implemented in a customer environment.  We have to be pragmatic.  Through working with a substantial stable of customers, we know there is a right way to address the challenges of user personalization in desktop estates, and agree with the points Sumit makes in his blog.  Looking forward to more dialog on this!

Pete Rawlinson
VP WW Marketing, AppSense

 

Here is a quick excerpt from Sumit’s blog post along with link:

‘On the run up to VMworld 2009, there seems to be an increasing amount of activity on the subject of user personalization in VDI.  Even Gartner has written about dynamic workspace, which has user personalization as a key element of the stack. What does this mean?  What is user personalization all about? And, where does it need to be? Let’s take a closer look…….’

The full post can be found here.