Citrix updates Xen Desktop 4

Citrix is set to release its latest version of Xen, Desktop 4, promising the software will give users access to business desktops from any location and from any device, reports Computerworld.

This anytime, anyhow, anywhere approach is being driven by a new technology, Flexcast, that Citrix claims will shake up the way that an organisation's office workers would receive technology.

According to Sumit Dhawan, vice-president of Citrix's Xen Desktop product group, Flexcast is a new technology that offers enterprises the simple ability to have a central IT solution for delivering to a high variety of different desktops, be they for office workers, developers or power users.

The market transition to virtualisation has developed an opportunity to create a more agile and efficient infrastructure for resources within the data centre, says The Hindu.

Companies have turned to virtualisation technologies for servers and data centres to simplify administration and reduce management chores and operating costs while maintaining reliability and safeguarding against disasters.

BS Nagarajan, senior technology consultant, VMware India, says a key benefit of virtualisation technology is the ability to contain and consolidate the number of servers in a data centre. This allows businesses to run multiple applications and workload manager on the same server.

Red Hat has said its version of the Linux operating system can now be used safely with Microsoft's Windows Server on the same computer, according to Forbes.

Servers often run several instances of the same operating system, acting as several computers, through virtualisation. Red Hat and Microsoft have now tested and certified that their systems can coexist on a virtualised host, and will support customers with that setup.

In the alliance, Red Hat will validate the users of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 platform. Microsoft will certify users of Red Hat Enterprise 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.