Some interesting results from the Project VRC State of VDI/SBC Survey

I can't publish all the results, but they will be available here on March 24th, 2015.

Here are two that I found rather interesting that I can publish early:

XenDesktop seems to be the incumbent VDI solution for the survey respondents.  I knew that Citrix had been around a long time, but still rather surprised that it's still trumping VMware's Horizon View.  I probably shouldn't be though as Citrix has always advertised their solution very well and feature functionality always seems to be ahead of View.  Although, seeing XenDesktop in practice on vSphere infrastructure doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy's especially leading into the next question.
How updates are installed/updated/managed responses doesn't really surprise me, but it does bother me.  Manually updating images seems so archaic and I'm quite frankly surprised that VMware hasn't made updating Parent VM's a more automated process.  Being that the respondents were also Citrix heavy, I feel this bodes poorly for their product on the automated operations front as well.

The only way I've hypothesized to update parent VM's in a somewhat automated process is to:

  1. power-up the parent VM 
  2. query SCCM for the related VM 
  3. wait for a 'success' of applicable 'some time window' updates.  
  4. Power off VM
  5. Snapshot it
  6. Delete old snapshots (based on some time window and count)
  7. WinRM call powerCLI cmdlets on View Brokers to then associate pool to new snapshot.


I think if I remember correctly, doing that last step was not possible or somewhat very difficult because the cmdlets didn't have this capability.  Something to look into again I suppose.  I also have thoughts on using WinRM in a 'cloud' fashion against View Brokers.  I'm working on an article that I'll publish later w/ my thoughts and practical application of this thought.

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