With its latest announcements of XenServer-related products, Citrix has strengthened its ability to provide more capable disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity services using its server virtualization line of products. These have lots of appeal for enterprises that previously would have either considered a full DR solution too expensive or who are using regular tape backups and finding them cumbersome.

You can read this advertorial that was independently written for my old stomping ground Tom’s Hardware (I was their editor-in-chief during 2005) here.

As enterprises become more involved in virtualizing their servers, they are finding that virtualization can deliver more than just better utilization of their computing resources. But the potential risk for downtime can increase substantially. The value of one particular physical server goes up as it carries more and more virtual machines (VMs) running on it. This makes having a failover solution more important.

You can read the entire article that was posted today here in Datamation.com

With the release of Windows 7, companies looking to replace aging Windows XP PCs have an opportunity to use a variety of new tools to run a virtual machineversion of XP co-exist inside the newer operating system.

The trouble, however, is that each virtual machine option has its advantages and disadvantages.

In my latest article for Datamation, I look at using Laplink’s PCover, Zinstall.com, and Microsoft’s own XP Mode solution as ways to bring up a virtual XP machine.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offers both big promises and big challenges for IT managers. On the plus side, the idea of running some of your desktops inside a secure data center has a lot of appeal, particularly to the generation that grew up during the mainframe computing era and wishes to return to those simpler days. Data and applications can be better protected; endpoints can be more easily patched, cloned and supported; and users can access their desktops from anywhere there is an Internet connection and a Web browser.

You can read more about this in my article in this month’s issue of Baseline magazine here.

As virtualization becomes more mainstream, there are many anticipated developments and advancements on the horizon. Here’s a brief lay of the land, in addition to players you should watch for in the coming year. This was published in Virtualization Review.

Back in the 1980s when PCs were first entering corporations, IT workers had to fight off the mainframers who wanted to keep their 3270 IBM terminals on their desktops. A similar battle is being waged these days with so-called thin clients, which lie at the heart of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) rollout.

You can read more about the economics of using thin clients for your main desktops in a story that ran today in ITworld here.

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a growing trend. The idea is to stream a standard boot image from a central storage repository so you can save on desktop support and maintenance costs. You avoid having to run endpoint protection products, or patching individual desktops, and you can distribute your desktops around the world as long as you have a reasonably fast Internet connection and a Web browser to kick things off.

But VDI is fraught with complexities. You can read why in my post in ITWorld today here.