VMware CTO Steve Herrod gives his thoughts on the year ahead…

VMware: Top 10 Predictions for Virtualization in 2009 : VMblog.com – Virtualization Technology News and Information for Everyone.

1. Virtualization of the Enterprise Desktop Breaks Out.

The “desktop dilemma” – i.e., the business choice of whether to
provide thick or thin clients for employees – will begin to be solved
in 2009. Thick clients, including fully loaded personal computers (PCs)
and laptops, provide employees with a rich set of applications in their
desktop environment, but can be a management challenge since
applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be
provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually. Thin clients
are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but
traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility,
or compatibility of thick clients. Most businesses provide thin clients
only for employees, such as call center staff, who can be productive in
this more restrictive environment. New virtualization-based approaches
will solve this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches –
delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether
thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints
with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter. Virtualization is the
essential platform for efficient, manageable desktops in an
increasingly mobile world. In addition, better remote display protocols
and use of the local machine’s compute resources will ensure an even
better user experience, and the combination of online and offline modes
will enable use when employees are traveling or when they do not have
access to a higher-speed network.

We are pleased to announce the General Availability of Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) for VMware Tools. Using OSPs, enterprise customers virtualizing Linux on VI will be able to install/update/manage their VMware Tools installations using the guest operating systems' native packaging format (rpm, deb etc) and update mechanisms (apt, yum, rug, etc).

More details including a list of supported ESX releases, guest operating systems, documentation and package repository are available from the OSP web page at http://www.vmware.com/download/packages.html (or just packages.vmware.com).

Operating System Specific Packages Home Page – VMware.

Welcome to the VMware Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) website

On
this site, you will be able to search, browse and download VMware Tools
software packaged in the native package format (e.g. rpm, deb etc) for
select supported Operating Systems.

You will also be able to use your Operating System's native update
mechanisms to automatically download, install and manage VMware Tools
for these supported Operating Systems. …

See also Matthijs Haverink. How did Matthijs get the news? He, like 176 other clued-in individuals, is following jtroyer on Twitter. I announced this and the searchable HCL there first. Please feel free to c'mon by and join us on the back porch of the Internet.

We're pleased to announce the availability of a new database-driven system for our compatibility guides. From the page: "This online Hardware Compatibility Guide replaces the former Hardware
Compatibility Guides for systems, I/O devices, and SAN arrays for ESX
3.0 and greater versions, as well as VMware View Client. For
compatibility guides of other VMware products or earlier ESX releases
and VMware View Client, please use the Other Documents tab."

Try out the system for yourself at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/  There are also HCL RSS feeds available at http://vmware.simplefeed.net/subscription

Rodos has a nice walkthrough with this modified screenshot. Musings of Rodos: VMware release searchable HCL system. Note you can click on the entries to get a more detailed popup screen.

See also Jason Boche who would still like the pdfs (but you can export these searches as pdf), Dave Lawrence, and Sven Huisman, who would like a combined guide — we still provide a separate Guest Operating System Installation Guide. 

Top 10 lists are win-win. They're often easier to write than, say, a big essay or technical investigation. And they're easy to consume, because most of us don't have the time to read, say, a big essay or technical investigation.

Now both Eric Siebert and Edward Haletky are by no means slackers, but in between working on their new books, they've both produced a new top ten list for you.

Top 10 PowerShell scripts that VMware administrators should use  by Eric Siebert at Virtual Strategy. (Eric's home for all his lists is VMware-land.) Note that some of these scripts came from the PowerShell scripting contest and can be found at the http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/utilitiesVMware Developer Community Sample Code repository.

Top VMware security links by Edward Haletky at Virtualization Pro. (Edward's home for all his good stuff, including the Virtualization Bookshelf, is the AstroArch Wiki.) Edward also recommends the Top 100 Virtualization Security Questions from VI:OPS.

*And a bonus resource. Since we're here and talking about reference material, Rod Haywood has also updated his very handy huge list of all VMware technical paper abstracts. Go check out his whole blog if you haven't yet — a lot of very smart and deep, yet very practical, thinking about VDI and Cloud topics.

Tom Howarth has a new blog, PlanetVM, but you may be familiar with Tom if you've been involved with either VMware Communities or the Citrix/SBC worlds for a while. Today on the Roundtable podcast (notes to come), in between expressing some strong opinions on VMware View, he mentioned the ridiculously large VDI deployment he's working on. (What's larger than ridiculous?) All this is a roundabout way of signaling you to pay attention to what Tom has to say, even if he can't spell virtualisation.

Tom's started a series of posts on application virtualization, such as VMware ThinApp, which we've recently updated to ThinApp 4.0.1.  The good folks at virtualfuture.info have a nice application virtualization comparison chart. (Matthijs & Sven, where's that update?)

Here's part one of Tom's series. Application Virtualisation – Part 1 | PlanetVM.

What is Application Virtualisation?

The idea behind application virtualisation is relatively simple in
that an application runs on your desktop without ever having installed
it. However, unlike using Terminal
Services, the virtualised application executes locally, using local
resources (e.g., processor, memory, disk, and network card). In other
words, the application runs, saves data, prints, and acts as if it’s
installed locally even though it is not. On top of this, you can run
multiple versions of the same application on your desktop without
conflict, and run conflicting applications like different versions of
Access or Outlook with out conflict—again, with all the applications
executing locally – and not as “screen scrapes” from a remote Terminal
Server.

The basic concepts of application virtualisation are that the
application executes on the local machine using its resources, but is
not allowed to modify anything. Instead, it runs in a small virtual
environment that contains the registry entries, files, COM objects, and
other components that it needs to execute. This virtual environment
acts as a layer between the application and the OS. The virtual layer
is very “light” (generally only a couple megabytes of memory) and loads
just prior to the application loading.