In my last blog post, I described how I went from “eating our own dog food” to “enjoying our own dog food” — in a metaphorical software development kind of way.  In this post, I want to describe how our own dog food became gourmet.

During the first week of January, I was getting material prepared for our sales kickoff meeting.  I updated five presentations and created two new ones (ironically, one of those presentations was on image repair).

The next morning I had a call with a partner at 6 AM so I was working from home.  After the call concluded I was trying to find some Clip Art to really bring home a point in one of my presentations.  Yes, I know that getting Clip Art from the web can be a little dicey, but I have Kaspersky anti-virus running on my PC, so I’m totally covered, right?

Wrong!  Suddenly, one of those fake Windows Security Center messages popped up and I immediately knew what was happening! Kaspersky sat idly by while the virus inundated my laptop with pop-up messages all over my screen telling me to purchase software to solve the problem that it had created!  I immediately closed all of my open browsers and shut down my PC hoping that the damage had not yet been done. It was too late. I tried booting into safe mode but the virus was alive and well. I tried cleaning it with Kaspersky, but the software would examine a few files and then report all was well. The virus had won this round.

Unfortunately this was not the first go around with this particular virus.  About a year ago, I tried helping a neighbor remove the same virus from his machine and tried four different antivirus programs. None of the four worked, and in the end we had to re-image the entire PC.  I was getting rather nervous that the 10 hours of work that I spent creating and updating my seven glorious presentations the day before would all be in vain.  The thought of having to redo the animations in PowerPoint alone was dreadful enough to make me thirst for a stiff drink.

The virus was still winning, so I called up Ady, who was also at home and told him what happened.  Ady pulled up the Mirage management console, right-clicked on my image, and did a snapshot restore on to my PC from a day prior.  It took about five minutes to determine the differences between the files on the two images (primary one in data center and my local copy).  Downloading the apps and files I needed to get going, followed by a quick reboot only took about 10 minutes. In all, I was up and running in a measly 18 minutes!

Round two goes to Wanova! The virus was gone.  My presentations were all intact — animations and all.  My PC was at home with me.  Ady was at home using the management console.  Mirage took my Windows/core application layer back a day while leaving my user file and user application layers intact. All of this happened without anyone troubleshooting or even looking at my PC.

As we all know, antivirus programs will never catch all viruses — even older viruses that should be in the virus definition file.  For everyone that has ever tried to recover a system from a virus, you know the indescribable relief that I felt at that moment when the system rebooted with no virus and my precious files intact.  Everyone who has experienced this understands how game changing it is to have a tool like Wanova’s Mirage that enables IT to recover a virus-ridden system in minutes without jeopardizing user files!  For everyone who hasn’t yet experienced something like this, that day will unfortunately come, and when it does, we’ll be happy to speak to you!

I was previously at a company that, because of an inferior user experience, had to bribe employees by giving them t-shirts and coasters if they switched over to the “new product.” While eating your own dog food is common at most software companies, bribing employees with branded items is not. This is especially the case when the software being touted does not add any value to the user, or worse, creates an inferior user experience.

After being a somewhat reluctant dog food eater for many years, I want to tell you how I now enjoy my dog food.

As I wrote a whitepaper inside a blog on my last post, I figured I would make amends by breaking up this “enjoying your dog food” blog into two different posts… although I cannot guarantee that they will be shorter!

One of the products I had at Citrix was Citrix Receiver. The Windows version would install all the Citrix clients (we called them plug-ins) that a user would need and provide one user experience across all clients. Many of us would blow away a PC once a week and start from scratch so that we could make sure that we were providing the best experience possible across all Citrix plug-ins. Of course, we still had to install our own applications, load our files, and re-personalize that machine every week. We even talked about creating a Citrix plug-in that would do all of this for you.

Let’s fast forward to my first week here at Wanova. My Dell laptop was late in arriving, so IT provided me with a HP loaner to serve in its place. It was one of those laptops where the palm of your hand hit the touch pad whenever you typed, which made me type all over the place. As I was used to personalizing PCs frequently, I soon had that HP loaner with the frustrating touch pad completely tricked out even down to the drivers for my Microsoft HD webcam.

My Dell laptop arrived exactly one week later. I flashed back to my Receiver days and prepared to re-load all of my applications, drivers, and files as well as re-personalize the PC. Pleasantly surprised would be a complete understatement of how I felt when I logged in to my new Dell and found it to be a complete clone of the image on my HP loaner, down to the last document that I created. While this is an example of what would happen in a PC refresh cycle, I also knew this would be the same experience if my Dell laptop was ever damaged. The best part of this experience was not worrying about interacting with the Wanova client on my HP loaner, as it was running in the background making it feel like I was working with a regular laptop.

Even though I knew our product could do this in theory, it was a complete eye-opening experience seeing it happen in person. All at once, our dog food became really tasty. And if you tune in next week you can see how the dog food went from being really tasty to downright gourmet!

Desktop Virtualization is one of the most non-specific terms in the IT industry in that it means different things to different people. The large majority of people incorrectly assume that Desktop Virtualization equals VDI, the bi-product of countless years of interchangeable talk by VDI vendors.

In fact, VDI represents a minor use case of Desktop Virtualization where desktop images run on servers and fast storage in the data center. VDI works great for use cases that involve non-personalized images, a high speed LAN connection, and thin client terminals. VDI does not take advantage of the native performance and capabilities of a PC, therefore it does not truly represent a solution for the 600M business PCs in the world today.

Client virtualization is the term that most people describe as the form of Desktop Virtualization that takes advantage of the native capabilities of a PC (CPU, GPU, memory).  In nearly all cases, client virtualization involves some sort of client hypervisor, whether a type-1 hypervisor that runs directly on PC hardware or a type-2 hypervisor that runs on another operating system.  A local “work” PC image resides on the hypervisor and is updated by a central “work” PC image.

Hypervisors on desktops require significantly more software development effort than hypervisors on servers because of all of the different peripherals, GPUs, etc., that are associated with the many different PC models from many different manufacturers.  As such, the amount of development effort spent trying to maintain hardware compatibility for desktop hypervisors will often overshadow and consume more development resources than the development effort of the management between the local and central PC images. Even with this sort of extensive development effort on hardware compatibility, most vendors will have a list of PCs that they support. In translation this means that you are out of luck if you do not have a PC from that list, resulting in a solution that will not work.

As part of its forthcoming Windows 8 OS, Microsoft is now including a Hyper-V client hypervisor within. When Windows 8 ships, there should not be any hardware compatibility issues with the Hyper-V hypervisor, even for PCs that are a couple of years old. The Hype-V hypervisor will also be just as secure, if not more secure, than other client hypervisors in the market.

The next natural question is why any customer would purchase a client virtualization solution that has its own client hypervisor, when Microsoft will soon be providing one for free? This is especially the case since client virtualization solutions have over-rotated on the hypervisor development instead of creating a superior image management and recovery solution that will work with the Windows 8 client hypervisor.

This is exactly what we have done at Wanova, except that we can also provide the same image management and recovery to PCs that don’t have a client hypervisor at all. In fact, Wanova Mirage can provide image management and recovery for a combination of PCs that have no hypervisor, a type-1 hypervisor, and a type-2 hypervisor. You can even move the images between any of these PC types.

Mirage centralizes PC images with incredible efficiency by integrating de-duplication technology into the data synchronization so that Mirage stores only one copy of a file, application, or operating system in the data center and does not transfer a file, application, or operating system over the network if another user’s system has already done so.

Once images are centralized, Mirage provides the same benefits for PCs that VDI provides, or eventually will provide, for thin clients including desktop recovery of the entire image, single image desktop management, PC refresh, in-place Windows migration, and centralized image repair.

Some additional benefits include:

• Desktop recovery automatically backs up an exact image of a user’s PC including personal applications, files and personalization. Restoring is as easy as installing a new Wanova client – no need for CDs, DVDs, or other complicated restore alternatives and can be done over any network.
• Single image management enables the patching and updating of a single copy of Windows and a single copy of each application for the entire organization, instead of trying to manage thousands of individual PCs.
• PC refresh transfers an entire user image to a new PC with full personalization, files. and all their previously installed applications.
• In-place Windows migration is fully automated and centrally controlled so a single technician can conduct 100 migrations per day.  IT does not have to touch the PC and the user downtime is typically only 30 minutes.
• Centralized image repair enables IT to fix malware-infected machines, broken applications or registry errors on the centralized images without troubleshooting.

These benefits are the result of a solution focusing on image management and recovery as opposed to focusing on creating and maintaining hardware compatibility with an ever-increasing number of PCs.

While these benefits may not seem related, they in fact should be expected. Desktop Virtualization is just another way of doing desktop management. Desktop Virtualization centralizes images and provides single image management in the data center instead of trying to manage thousands of PCs independently. Once PC images are centralized and managed through image layering, all the above benefits should just come as part of the solution.

This is the real value in deploying Desktop Virtualization and the value that you should expect regardless if you have PCs, thin clients, or both.

The year 2012 is upon us and the predictions that have been created over the past few weeks will begin to be realized or determined invalid. As our focus at Wanova remains geared on creating a leading end point management and recovery solution that emphasizes centralization, we will continue to provide additional features that strengthen our value proposition based on feedback from our customers, including OS and hardware migration, break-fix, end point continuity, fast recovery, and single image management.

This year has already kicked off with those speculating that we have moved to a “post-PC” era, the idea that the future of PCs is in jeopardy. While this viewpoint is shared by those vendors looking to move forward their positioning and lines of business, we feel that the call of a post-PC era is inaccurate at best, as it does not address the hundreds of millions of PCs and thousands of corporate Windows applications that are in use today, along with continuous improvement of the Windows line of operating system. Hence, the post-PC era discussion is short-sighted and leaves too many business professionals in the dark.

We believe the best solution to address the needs of both current and future businesses would be to define this era as “PC-plus.” Coined this way by IDC’s Bob O’Donnell, the PC-plus era highlights the operational scenario where Windows and non-Windows devices are co-existing. This delicate balance will remain as an ongoing opportunity for those enterprises looking to embrace all current and forthcoming devices.

One direction that VDI vendors are pushing for is to eliminate the need for Windows physical devices by serving Windows applications on hosted virtual desktops in the data center and letting the various devices remote into the hosted desktops using remote desktop protocols.

This scenario may work under some circumstances, but does not address the countless scenarios where the end user wants their device to act like their device, and not some 50% version that doesn’t leverage the device’s full resources and rich user-interface, cannot operate offline, and whose performance is affected by network latency for every operation they make.  Furthermore, the user experience of accessing Windows apps using tablets with touch interfaces is very limited and should be used scarcely.

We believe in an alternative model for the PC-plus era, which blends remote and local execution.  In this model, users will have the ability to use their non-Windows devices for native apps, as well as remote to Windows apps over a hosted virtual environment for occasional read-mostly purposes (e.g., when their Windows device is not with them), but will continue to use their laptops for generational day-to-day “read-write” activities – with a constant synchronization between the work spaces of the various devices.

We don’t see this type of scenario happening in the next few hours or days. The PC-plus era is a time for IT to find the best fit for their business that can address end user experience without compromise.

In his article ‘Seven Lessons from Amazon’s Outage,’ Phil Wainewright offers some good advice for organizations looking to move to the cloud. While leveraging a service provider can save significant CAPEX dollars, you do need to think about what happens when that service is unavailable. As a user of a number of cloud services (Salesforce.com, Marketo, etc.), I have yet to experience a complete outage, but my productivity does rely on network availability.

As you’re evaluating how effectively your applications will run in the cloud, keep the ‘what happens during an outage’ lesson in mind. If these applications are mission critical, you’ll want to find providers who can ensure your business doesn’t suffer in the event of an outage.

Frank Olhorst recently penned an article comparing Citrix and VMware’s approaches to client-hosted desktop virtualization. Frank does a nice job explaining the pros and cons of these approaches. But if your objective is to improve management of your PCs and laptops, while giving users the flexibility to work offline, you don’t really need a hypervisor of any type.

There are applications where client hypervisors make sense: If you’re a helpdesk or QA employee, and you need to troubleshoot many user environments, it’s handy to run four different OS instances from your desk. But I suspect your average end user would prefer not to have to toggle between multiple desktop instances.

Wanova Mirage has some significant advantages over a hypervisor-based approach:

• No wipe and load: the Mirage client is a 2 MB MSI file that installs in minutes on any PC running Windows

• No change to user experience: Mirage runs as a service in the background. The user can install applications, personalize their PC and work exactly as they always have.

• Broad hardware compatibility: Mirage leverages Windows’ full hardware compatibility list, and Wanova does not need to consistently play ‘catch up’ as new drivers and models become available.

• No underlying, unmanaged OS: Mirage installs into (and allows management of) one single OS on the endpoint: Windows. There are no performance implications, as the client works within the OS, and the organization only pays for a single license for OS and apps.

When considering the breadth of available desktop virtualization approaches, make sure you clearly outline your objectives and requirements to find the best solution fit. For a good article outlining the capabilities and limitations of different DV approaches, check out Andy Wood’s article for The Virtualization Practice.

At 11:00 am today, our entire city block of San Jose, CA has lost power, and apparently it will be out for the next 3-4 hours. It’s yet further proof that having a desktop virtualization system (we all run Wanova Mirage) that works online as well as offline is critical.

Wanova Mirage provides the centralization and manageability of VDI, but with the flexibility to work online as well as offline. Because I’m running a local copy of my centrally-stored desktop, I have full access to my documents, applications (those that are centrally provisions, as well as those I’ve installed myself) and the rest of my desktop. When our data center comes online again, any changes I’ve made will synchronize automatically with my centrally stored and maintained centralized virtual desktop (CVD).

Now, if I can only find my backup battery, I’ll be set until the end of the day.

It’s already been a busy 2011 for Wanova. New customers. Recently announced partner program. Next generation product. Today, we’re  proud to announce the next release of Wanova hybrid desktop virtualization software, Mirage 2.0.

Mirage 2.0 is the result of two years of active customer feedback, crafted into a desktop virtualization solution that is geared for the distributed enterprise. Mirage works on laptops – whether they are online or offline. It works over the WAN. But most importantly it works for IT, and it works for end users.

Mirage combines the manageability of VDI with the flexibility of a laptop. It’s easy to deploy, sensitive to network and storage resources, and now, scalable to meet the needs of the enterprise. We’ve added server clustering, with dynamic storage provisioning. We’ve added the Mirage Branch Reflector — a snazzy way to designate any branch-based PC as a proxy so that LAN-based peers can receive significant software updates (such as a Windows 7 image) without branch servers, and without bringing a network to its knees.  We’ve also extended our Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD) layering so that administrators have even more control over restoring and repairing PCs.

We think Mirage 2.0 is pretty impressive. But don’t take our word for it – try it yourself, for free. We look forward to hearing what you have to say about it.

Brian Madden’s recent blog post “Let’s make it official and call it ‘user virtualization’” brings up important points about the need to deal intelligently with user-desktop elements that go beyond just user profile data.

However, I think the discussion must move beyond addressing a problem created by non-persistent VMs. User virtualization might be a good solution for that specific problem, but is this really all that ‘user virtualization’ is about? I see user virtualization as a much broader concept: On the IT side, it is one which extends universally to desktop management, data protection, and user support. From a user perspective, the term should encompass desktop availability, ubiquitous data access, mobility, and consistent desktop experience. The reality is that most organizations will retain a mix of both physical and virtual desktops, so user virtualization must go beyond the VM user and extend to end-users in general, regardless of where their desktop resides.

Furthermore, in the case of persistent VMs and physical machines such as laptops, it is very common to have a 1:1 relationship between a user and the machine. In this case, user virtualization must be able to handle user personalization, while still allowing IT to manage the machine image without losing customizations and to port or migrate the entire user environment across different machines as needed. A common example would be a PC refresh cycle where the user may move across different laptops or get moved all the way to a hosted VM. A good user virtualization solution should support this portability without affecting personalization elements: the OS, apps the user has installed and configured on the original machine, as well as preferences and data. Many of these elements fall outside the standard user profile boundaries, and this is where intelligence becomes a requirement.

One of my favorite things about my job is when I am able to spend time with our customers. As a marketing person, it is invaluable to hear directly what customers like, use, and value. And of course, also to understand what they don’t. I recently spent some time with the Senior Director of IT and IS at Mellanox Technologies, who graciously agreed to let us do a press release about their usage of Wanova Mirage.

For anyone uninitiated to the joys of high tech marketing, a paying customer who is willing to talk to the media is more valuable than, well, just about anything else.

Anyway, all employees at Mellanox have laptops, and many are distributed around the world in various offices, creating an ongoing management challenge for IT. What they liked about Mirage was its ability to work optimally in their distributed environment, giving them centralized image management, and full desktop backup and restore - even across a WAN. Their helpdesk can now address end user problems far more quickly, allowing Mellanox to support their rapidly growing employee base without adding more IT staff. And end users are happier and more productive.

Happy customer. Happy me. Happy Friday!