At the beginning of this New Year, IT In Canada spoke with Microsoft Virtualization Lead, Bruce Cowper, about the System Center
family of products and how they may be used to support virtualized desktop and other customer environments. In this far ranging conversation, Cowper stressed that System Center is more than an IT management tool – he sees it, rather, as the “heart” of an organization’s virtualization as it enables management of all scenarios that IT administrators must deal with on a daily basis - patch management, deployment, allocation of resources, disaster recovery, etc. that sit on the virtualization foundation - while effectively binding together all the different virtualization deployments (ex. server, desktop and other tools) and the company’s physical infrastructure. According to Cowper, the best way to think about System Center is as a “management platform” that allows visibility into multi-vendor hardware layers, through the virtualized foundation and administrative services, all the way to the user experience and which allows centralized management through a common set of product interfaces of each piece of the IT system.
Cowper also discussed the advantages and interest he is seeing in the Canadian market in various forms of desktop virtualization, and described how the System Center suite’s broad functionality and multi-vendor interoperability is uniquely suited to support these types of deployments. In the case of a
Citrix VDI, for example, four components are involved: the physical device (laptop, smartphone, PC), the desktop which is running on a server in the data centre, the physical infrastructure that runs the virtual desktop at the backend, and the application a user engages with. For each of these components, there is a corresponding System Center tool that integrates with the rest of the suite to provide administrators with “a single pane of glass” for maintenance and management, the potential for proactive automated management for additional times saving, as well as centralized reporting that may be shared with operations managers in other areas of the business. For its part, Citrix has supported this interoperability through the release of management layer interfaces – management packs or connectors - between the System Center platform of tools and Citrix specific applications, such as HDX (High Definition Experience). A recent example of this interplay - the
Citrix Essential 5.5 for Microsoft HyperV, a tool which links Citrix and Microsoft systems to enhance disaster recovery services in virtualized desktop – was released earlier this month.
