Reading Between The IT Lines – Issue #3

So, what’s new in the IT pond this week? Let’s take a quick tour and find out what’s hot and what not – coming up….

EUC

VMware is going to partner with Microsoft to extend the upcoming Azure’s WVD service with Horizon. Or in other words, Horizon users will be able to connect to WVD workloads with Blast or PCoIP. Same as Citrix announced a few weeks ago. At least I guess. Link

Citrix released XenServer (Citrix Hypervisor) 8.0 with the ability to snapshot vGPU based VMs, Windows Server 2019 support, support for large disks (> 2TB), and more. Link

Daniel Feller published the results of his recent tests to measure the impact of any recent XenApp/XenDesktop releases on network utilization. Pay special attention to 7.17. Link

Ever wonder about the right way to integrate StoreFront with Citrix Gateway? Sarah with a great article that explains everything about it. Link

IT

vSphere 6.7 U2 introduced new scheduler options to help secure the hypervisor from L1TF vulnerability, and now VMware published a white paper that discusses the issue, the new scheduler options and their impact on performance. Link

Microsoft dropped their password expiration policy recommendation ( which has been 60 days for years now) in favor of more modern and better password-security practices such as multi-factor authentication, anomaly detection, and more. Link

Cloud ☁️

vSphere is coming to Azure. Azure VMware solutions (or in other words, vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vCenter hosted on Azure) will allow VMware customers to extend their workloads to Azure. Same as the infamous VMware Cloud on AWS service which has been announced two years ago. Link

We keep hearing about the upcoming Apple cloud infrastructure for years, but in the meanwhile, they are still one of the biggest AWS customers, spending around $30M per month. Link

During the first quarter of 2019, Amazon’s revenue from AWS was $7.7B, up by 41% compared to the same period last year. And this got AWS to generate a $30B annual run-rate business. Link

Microsoft reported their Q3 2019 (fiscal quarter) earning and only mentioned that Azure grew by 73% and the whole commercial cloud made $9.6B, which is up by 63% compared to the same period last year. They still insist to keep a lid on Azure’s real size by combining its numbers with the ones of Office 365, which is believed to be a bigger business than Azure. Link

BTW, Gartner believes that public cloud spending will continue to grow. Link

And in Google’s endless effort to get into enterprises, they have now made it easier for Windows shops to move their workloads to GCP with sole-tenant nodes, BYO licenses, managed active directory service, managed MS SQL service. Link

Cyber & Privacy

Docker had a data breach in its Docker Hub service (their cloud-based repository of containers) which exposed sensitive (not financial though) data about nearly 190,000 of its users. Link

Expanding Horizons

61% of all food deliveries in the US are Pizza. At least per Uber Eats customers. Link

We hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup of the latest in the biz, and hope you’ll join us again next week for some more IT dish. Keep it real!