PlanetEd Technologies Technology Views

2010-05-12T10:04:00.003-05:00

PlanetEd Technologies, Inc. will be holding an Open House on May 20, 2010 from 3:00pm-7:00pm, to celebrate our New Location at 2401 E. Washington Street, Suite 200, Bloomington, IL, 61821. A map can be found here.
Ribbon cutting with the Chamber of Commerce will be at 4:00 PM.
A brief tour of our new facility will be provided to each of our guests. Guests will also have the opportunity to meet with some of our vendors. Representatives from Cisco, Cymphonix, Eaton and VMware be attending!
Appetizers and refreshments will be served all day, as well as hourly drawings for prizes. Be sure to ask how to register for the PlanetEd/Cymphonix Gateway Prize - an Apple iPad!
We hope to see you on Thursday, May 20th. If you are unable to make it on that evening, we would be pleased to arrange another time to meet you during our normal business days/hours of Monday-Friday from 8:00am-5:00pm. For more information, please call 1-309-664-0395 and speak with our receptionist, Berna Kasarci.
We look forward to seeing you!
Sincerely,
Brian E. Adams
PlanetEd Technologies, Inc.

2010-02-03T21:35:00.002-06:00

Thinking about your data storage needs? Need shared storage for virtualization? Backup to disk? Check out EMC's CLARiiON storage systems. Get a great start on your storage infrastructure with the CLARiiON AX4-5 storage. Nicely price, high performing SAS or SATA storage configured just for your environment.
Need to go large? EMC CLARiiON systems like the CX4-240 can scale to very large environments, delivering thousands of IOPS, and providing high-end datacenter reliability.
Take a look at the EMC CLARiiON storage solutions today at http://www.emc.com/products/family/clariion-family.htm.

PlanetEd Technologies is an EMC Velocity2 Partner. Visit us online at www.planeted.net.

Notes from the field - VMware View 4

2010-01-13T22:20:00.002-06:00

PlanetEd Technologies is in the closing stages of our second VMware View 4 implementation. Since our vertical market at the moment is in the K-12 academic space, the majority of our users standing up VMware View environments are attempting to extend the lives of their existing workstations. In a few cases, this desire has negated the possibility of utilizing the PCoIP protocol for delivering a rich media experience.

VMware advises that SSE2 extensions are required on the View Client workstation in order for PCoIP to display. If SSE2 extensions are not available, the View Client will notify you upon connecting to the pool that an error occurred. Not real descriptive, but enough to let you know something went wrong. Enabling the old RDP protocol for connectivity to the pool from these specific clients typically resolves the problem.

Another weird technology issue we have experienced is the disappearance of the network adapter from View Desktops after a user logs off. This happens with PCoIP enabled desktops. It appears that by changing the protocol to RDP, this problem also resolves itself. We're working with VMware to try and resolve this issue.

For some positive notes....our clients have experienced some super performance out of the new View 4 desktops. Connections over T-1 lines back to the main datacenter do not seem to be as much of a virtualization hinderance as they were in View 3. We had some good tests today of some basic desktops and are pretty excited about how they worked!

We did discover a few downfalls though...If you build a basic XP workstation using the default settings when creating the virtual machine, the VM will have an IDE disk. VMware adds additional disk drives depending upon the pool type (all machines regardless get additional disks) and these are mounted as SCSI drives, which invokes a hardware wizard at first logon from a View Client. For admin users this is typically not an issue. For general users, this is an annoyance. To get around this issue, we went back to the drawing board and built VMs with the SCSI controlled disks.

We also had the opportunity to use the VMware ThinApp packager that comes default with the Premium Bundle. What an amazing product this has turned into. Read one of the three manuals to get a real appreciation for application streaming, and disk space maximization.

Minus the minor bugs, so far, so good!

Exchange Server 2010

2009-12-01T15:58:00.003-06:00

Microsoft has recently released Exchange Server 2010, enabling you to simplify your administration, help protect your communications, and delight your users by meeting their demands for greater mobility. New features include:
- Database Availability Groups
- Online mailbox moves
- Web-based Exchange Control Panel
- Outlook Web App

Find more information about Exchange Server 2010 here:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/overview.aspx

vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released

2009-11-20T07:22:00.002-06:00

With the upcoming release of VMware View 4, the backend infrastructure needed a little updating. VMware vSphere 4 Update 1.0 was released this week. It includes support for VMware View 4, in addition to some other features, most notably:
-Support for Windows 7 x86 and x64
-Enhanced support for Microsoft Server Clustering
-Support for the Intel XEON 3400
-Increase in the number of vCPUs per Core to 25 (8 core boxes can support 200 CPUs)
-vDistributed Switch performance improvements
-Issues resolved: Minor annoyances with some non-Windows Operating Systems, and security fixes in the Web Application, NTP service and the list goes on. More information is available here:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html

Brian Ethington
Infrastructure Services Practice Manager
PlanetEd Technologies

PlanetEd Technologies, Inc Live at IETC

2009-11-17T22:23:00.003-06:00

PlanetEd Technologies enginners will be manning booth 98/99 during the Wednesday (11/18) evening festivities and all day Thursday (11/19). Stop by to discuss:
-Cisco Route/Switch/Wireless/DataCenter
-Cisco Voice
-Your Virtualization Strategy
-Microsoft Advanced Infrastructure Services
-PlanetEd support Services

We'll have Cisco Phones on site, and demonstrations of the VMware View Desktop Architecture. Stop by and see us....We have a lot to share!

11:00 AM Thursday, Your Virtualization Strategy presented in Capital 5.

VMware View 4 Desktop Virtualization

2009-11-09T10:52:00.002-06:00

VMware announced today (11/9/2009) the new version of VMware View, formerly Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Besides full support for running virtual desktops on the new vSphere platform, VMware view brings with it rich media that other VDI makers cannot deliver using the Remote Desktop Protocol.

VMware has partnered with Terradici systems to integrate the PC over IP protocol (PCoIP) which overcomes obstacles faced in many desktop deployments where streaming media and audio are not delivered in step from the Virtual Machine to the desktop.With PC over IP, your end users will have a solid, rich media experience.

Common reasons for using Virtual Desktops include:
1. Extending the life of existing desktops by moving the processing and memory resources of the desktop to server class hardware
2. Additional security features by having the Operating System and all of its files residing in a central location, rather than on individual desktops
3. Reduce costs by deploying workstations from a single location

More information on the new VMware View 4 is located at http://www.vmware.com/products/view/overview.html

Brian Ethington, VCP
Infrastructure Services Practice Manager
PlanetEd Technologies, Inc