Former Microsoft executives Paul Maritz and Tod Nielsen know a thing or two about how the software giant snuffs out budding threats. They helped Microsoft battle upstart Netscape in the late 1990s. Now they're on the receiving end.
Maritz and Nielsen run VMware, a software company with $1.9 billion in revenue that has become the standard-setter in the exploding market for computer "virtualization." This half-century-old technology started out as a scheme for allowing software to behave as if it were running on more memory than is in fact available by quickly swapping chunks of programs or data in and out of disk storage. The concept has been expanded to include all manner of carving up computer resources on the fly to extract the most from them.
Problem is, virtualization software crowds into Microsoft's space in the market for server software. It threatens to thwart Microsoft's desire for a central role in the next wave of data-center build-outs.
Microsoft remains a behemoth, with $60 billion in revenues and enormous influence over corporate data-processing departments. But VMware, in Palo Alto, Calif., has got the giant's attention-just as once tiny Netscape and Google became threats Microsoft couldn't ignore. "There's a part of Microsoft that's locked onto us," acknowledges Maritz, who became VMware's chief executive last year. "If you really want to look into the soul of Microsoft, what makes them tick is the ability to lock onto a competitor and chase that competitor down."
While VMware pursues its sales strategy in down times, it seems most other vendors in the virtualization galaxy are pursuing VMware. The common pitch is to talk about cost savings versus comparable VMware installations.
Take Virtual Iron's Chris Barclay, for example: He touts that his company's Enterprise Edition software costs about $800, compared to VMware's minimum $3,000 price tag.
"Our price comes in at VMware's maintenance cost," he says.
The multimedia redirection (MMR) feature redirects certain multimedia codecs running on the remote desktop to the local client for rendering of full?motion video and audio. Windows XP and XPe are the only client operating systems that support MMR on View Client and View Client with Offline Desktop. MMR supports the following media formats:
AC3
MP3
MPEG?1
MPEG?2
MPEG?4?part2
WMA
WMV 7/8/9
The recommended application to use with these files is Windows Media Player 10-this application supports MMR and should be installed on both the client and View Manager desktop.
Today I updated my VDI environment which was on version 2.1 to View 3.1. There are some graphic changes which looks better. But in this article I will spent a little time about MMR. This ofcourse, I wanted to test. So I deployed a new View Desktop and installed for convenience quicktime, Because the easiest way to download HD movies is via Yahoo movies.
My first experience wasn't that great because it was not run smoothly. I was quite disappointed. After some reading it seems to be only working with Windows Media player. So I downloaded a HD WMV movie ( why not Transformers 2: revenge of the fallen) and people this one rocks! This HD movie 720p flew over my screen.
This weekend virtualization blogger Roy Mikes (of http://Mikes.eu) was one of the first people online to release a product comparison document comparing PHD Virtual's groundbreaking backup solution esXpress 3.5 to other solutions, including Visioncore's vRanger, Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1, and VMware vDR 1.0.
I can only say thanks to PHD Virtual for taking the time to give me a great demo and opportunity to test it by myself. I think, no I'm for sure it is a product with potential. Great job guy's, keep on the good work!
