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Citrix's XenServer 4.1 has provisioning server, VMware doesn't?

I personally haven't had the time to test the beta yet. I hope to find loads of time in order to start building out solution-sets which will embrace all sorts of vendors including VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun to name a few.



Actually, said Brian Madden, an independent analyst focused on server-based computing, Provisioning Server does not actually perform a P2V migration of an image; rather, it enables any image to be booted off a network share. "Ardence doesn't care if it's physical or virtual," he said. But converting an OS image to run within a virtual machine does have its advantages, Madden said, since it normalizes device drivers, and removes hardware incompatibilities.
Provisioning Server use cases
The most obvious use case for Provisioning Server is within a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) scenario, where its multicasting abilities allow it to simultaneously broadcast an image to multiple devices -- "up to 1,000 off a single VHD file," Crosby said. If such an estimation is true, the capability could be very useful for organizations that want to deploy VDI for large groups of end users. Further, once an OS is running, changes to its image are locally cached rather than written back to the root image, Crosby explained, helping to keep end users' desktops in a clean, consistent state, and minimizing the number of desktop images administrators need to maintain and store.


Its time to start testing and also deploy such solutions and see how we can save on the storage there. Link
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