Cameron Sturdevant

Citrix XenDesktop 2.1 delivers virtual Windows XP or Vista desktops to users, thereby centralizing OS and application management tasks such as OS and application updates and patches while also significantly reducing help desk calls by preventing permanent end user tampering. Even though XenDesktop 2.1 provides a good desktop virtualization infrastructure platform-aptly doling out clean desktops […]

Desktop virtualization is beginning to draw interest from enterprise IT managers, who don’t have to look far to see the benefits that can be derived from the technology. The big brother of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), server virtualization, has set off a veritable gold rush of IT projects that are paying off with drastically reduced […]

I’m a sucker for shiny objects. I love to try out new software utilities–usually in the network monitoring arena. This has often resulted in a problem that Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet described based on a lament of ExtremeTech’s Loyd Case. Loyd reported a marked slowdown in his Windows PC startup–the side effects of code rot […]

I expect that the current recession will last through all of 2009 and will accelerate the adoption of virtualization technology. Up until now, virtualization–especially x86 server virtualization–has been pushed forward by the huge hardware and operational savings accrued from app server consolidation. Sadly, the consolidation of whole businesses will likely become one of the main […]

In Apple‘s keynote at Macworld, CEO Steve Jobs was played by Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. It was an evolutionary keynote with just a few points of note for enterprise IT managers. Don’t get me wrong. I was personally filled with the urge to buy a Mac (an iMac to […]

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1 by Cameron Sturdevant Hardware Virtualization on Mac VirtualBox 2.1 now fully supports hardware virtualization on Mac OS X hosts (shown in parameters in center of screen). Windows 2000 VirtualBox ably handled running Windows 2000 Server, allowing us to run legacy applications. Guest Additions The equivalent of VMware Tools, […]

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Top 5 Rated VMware Virtual Appliances by Cameron Sturdevant StoneGate Virtual IPS Appliance Stonesofts StoneGate Virtual IPS is a ready-to-deploy VM designed to protect internal virtual networks and servers from attacks. The product works in conjunction with the StoneGate virtual or physical firewall/VPN offerings and uses packet inspection and event correlation to […]

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Corrals VMware ESX eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Corrals VMware ESXby Cameron Sturdevant Adding VMware Host Through Microsoft Console Here you see a new VMware ESX host being added to the eWEEK Labs VMware Infrastructure environment, as monitored through Microsoft’s cross-platform System […]

IT managers who are used to being praised for the huge equipment and operational savings accrued from implementing server virtualization solutions from VMware, Citrix XenServer and now Microsoft Hyper-V are facing the task of preserving these savings with effective and efficient virtual machine management. Between server, desktop, application and storage virtualization, IT managers will face […]

Microsoft breaks new ground by adding support for VMware ESX Infrastructure to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. This is a nearly unprecedented step for Microsoft and Hyper-V, and warrants immediate IT manager evaluation for both tactical and strategic implementation in enterprise data centers. For an eWEEK Labs walk-through of SC VMM 2008, click here. […]

VKernel’s Capacity Analyzer 2.0 can now use VMware VirtualCenter statistics to monitor disk I/O throughput performance and provides a comprehensive dashboard to clarify murky virtualization environments. It’s not a cross-platform tool; Capacity Analyzer didn’t have anything to say about eWEEK Labs’ Hyper-V capacity. With that said, the new version of the product, just out of […]

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: VMware Workstation 6.5 eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: VMware Workstation 6.5by Cameron Sturdevant New Virtual Machine Wizard Much of the VM creation wizard remains the same as previous versions of Workstation 6.5, easy to use and no gratuitous changes to trip up experienced users. Pocket ACE ACE (Assured Computing Environment) authoring tools in Workstation […]