Welcome to Kraft Kennedy
Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.
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Why is VDI as a desktop replacement a non starter for so many law firms? I attempt to answer this question pointedly in this post based on my experience over the last 18 months when talking to different law firms about VDI. However, let me take a step back and frame the question. While I don’t have actual statistics, I would make the statement that most law firms are still on Windows XP and have thought about or are planning a Windows 7 desktop in the near future. Invariably, this will result in the firm entertaining a VDI (for desktop replacement) solution for their planned Windows 7 desktop. The conversation usually doesn’t get far after that…. Why is that? This post is a look at why VDI environments are non starters in law firms or specifically, why they have not seen the traction that the industry (Citrix, VMware, Gartner) would have you to believe. I’ll preface once again that VDI might be seeing traction in other industries, however I’ll focus on the five reasons why I feel VDI is not gaining traction in the legal space.
(As an aside, this post is only talking to VDI and in particular as a desktop replacement and not other use cases that may include, but are not limited to training rooms, war rooms, remote access, etc.)
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Kraft Kennedy is pleased to announce achievement in 8 Microsoft Gold and Silver Competencies (and counting!) for 2011.
The requirements to participate in the Microsoft Partner Program have recently evolved to help differentiate technical and business capabilities among participants; Kraft Kennedy has risen to the challenge by quickly exceeding the goals set forth by the program.
Each competency requires specific individuals with deep technical skills, Microsoft verified customer references, and challenging certification exams to be completed. This commitment demonstrates our breadth, deep specialization, and proven expertise across a range of Microsoft technologies.
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About Kraft Kennedy
Kraft Kennedy provides business and technology-related consulting services to the legal community. By combining outstanding technical skills with an intimate knowledge of our clients’ business and information needs we tailor solutions that enhance attorney productivity, effectiveness, and client value.
We focus on the business needs of the client and ensure that technology is used to enhance, not inhibit their business. KK’s talented staff of strategic consultants, project managers, and network consultants have years of experience with hundreds of projects for firms from small to large. Our services portfolio includes advanced infrastructure projects, business continuity and data center consolidation, desktop deployment, network design and implementation, storage design and replication, and messaging systems migration among others. Our Microsoft specialties include: Desktop, Server Platform, Unified Communications, Portals and Collaboration, Search, Systems Management, Virtualization, and Small Business Specialist Community.
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Kraft Kennedy’s Niraj Patel and Jeff Silverman have recently achieved the Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for Virtualization certification. This industry recognized certification demonstrates technical expertise with products such as Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp.
The Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer for Virtualization certification is designed to certify breadth of knowledge across Citrix virtualization solutions. The CCEE offers experienced IT professionals the opportunity to develop and validate their ability to combine the coordination of operational planning efforts with tactical design expertise and integration know-how.
Niraj and Jeff have a well established reputation for helping law firms adopt thin-client technologies and best practices around enterprise desktop and application management. It is exciting to watch server-based computing strategies mature as new virtual desktop solutions, such as VDI and application virtualization, have become more mainstream. Not only are these new tools offering firms technical improvements, but also significant operational efficiencies and flexibility over traditional desktop and server-based approaches.
On behalf of the team, Congratulations to Niraj and Jeff on your accomplishments!
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Last week, I installed the Citrix XenClient on a test laptop and got a chance to play around with it further. To recap, this is Citrix’s Type 1 client side hypervisor to solve the offline VDI problem that currently exists for XenDesktop. I posted six months ago when the product was announced at Synergy, but last month Citrix released the 1.0 version of the product, so I figured I would give it a whirl.
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For quite a while there has been confusion over how VMware’s Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) feature works with vSphere 4 running on Nehalem (or other modern) processors. Many people were noticing that it appeared that TPS was not actually working anymore and looked for ways to fix the problem.
In my recent post on the effects of ASLR in vSphere the comments turned into a discussion about TPS on modern processors. And there are countless posts about this issue on the VMTN forums where folks are looking for a fix. In reality nothing is broken and there is no need to fix the issue.
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In Q4 last year, Citrix made its NetScaler physical appliances available as a virtual appliance. Labeled as the “VPX”, the full featured virtual iteration of the appliance dropped its price point and made it more accessible to SMB customers. Citrix has now made the Access Gateway (CAG) and Branch Repeater physical appliances also available as VPXs. At this point, Citrix has made three of their ‘core’ Networking products available as VPX appliances, which are recapped below.
Citrix NetScaler VPX
- Released last year in Q4. Initially, this virtual appliance was only released for XenServer, but now has full support for ESX. Expected to support Hyper-V in the late summer.
- Licensed by throughput and available in 10 Mbit, 200 Mbit and 1000 Mbit flavors.
- Free “Express” edition with 1 Mbit throughput limitation available for lab and PoC environments.
- Standard NetScaler “Advanced”, “Enterprise” and “Platinum” flavors available.
Citrix Access Gateway VPX
- Released earlier this month. Currently only supports XenServer. Support for ESX and Hyper-V expected in the next 6-12 months.
- Provides same feature as Model 2010 Access Gateway physical appliance.
- Free “Express” edition exists that provides access to 5 concurrent users that are valid for 12 months.
Citrix Branch Repeater VPX
- Released in Q1 of 2010. Currently only supports XenServer. Support for ESX and Hyper-V expected in the next 6-12 months.
- VPX Appliance does not support the following features available in the physical appliance:
- Group Mode
- Ethernet bypass card
- Still requires Citrix Repeater appliance, which is not available in VPX format.
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This week at Citrix Summit/Synergy, Citrix finally revealed details behind their much anticipated client (bare metal) hypervisor. To recap, for the folks who are not following, this will finally bring “offline VDI” to XenDesktop. It will also match (and potentially beat) VMware’s current offline VM checkin/check out functionality currently available in View.
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When VMware released vSphere 4 last year, one of the changes they made was a completely re-written software iSCSI initiator. This was done to optimize performance which is great considering how popular iSCSI SANs have become. They also gave the ability to use Round Robin MPIO (mutlipathing) in the software initiator in addition to Fixed Path and MRU which were previously available.
I’m working on a vSphere implementation using Dell EqualLogic SANs and wanted to configure Round Robin on all of my datastores. Dell has a great whitepaper on how to set this up, but unfortunately the document fails to mention one key thing: this doesn’t change the default path selection plugin (PSP) from Fixed to Round Robin. That means that you’ll have to set the multipathing policy to Round Robin on all of your existing datastores and will have to remember to do that on all future datastores. When you’ve got multiple ESX hosts with lots of datastores this can quickly become a pain.
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I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about VMware’s Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and how it is affected by ASLR in Windows 2008/Windows 7. I wanted to see if there was any real measurable reduction in shared memory when using ASLR vs. when it was disabled. First, let’s talk about what TPS and ASLR actually are and what the acronyms mean.
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For years organizations have relied on tape drives and changers for backup and recovery of their critical data. Despite many predictions to the contrary, tape is still alive as we begin 2010.
When virtualization became popular it presented a challenge to those looking to continue to use their tape drives in fully virtualized environments. If you were using VMware you could use SCSI pass-through to present a tape drive or changer directly to a virtual machine but that prevented you from using any advanced features like VMotion. It also tied your tape drive and VM to a single host containing a SCSI card, making things complicated if that host were to experience a hardware failure.
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