Gunnar Berger

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Gunnar Berger
Research Director
1 year at Gartner
14 years IT industry

Gunnar Berger is a research director for Gartner's IT Professionals service. He covers desktop, application and server virtualization ...Read Full Bio

Top 10 ways to kill a desktop virtualization initiative

by Gunnar Berger  |  June 13, 2013  |  Submit a Comment

Presentations go through many updates and sometimes in an update an entire segment is completely cut for the sake of time. So I give you a section I wrote for Citrix Synergy, Gartner’s Catalyst conferences and VMware’s VMworld but ended up cutting. The top ten ways to kill a desktop virtualization initiative. [Read more →]

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TechEd Announcements that enhance End User Computing

by Gunnar Berger  |  June 3, 2013  |  3 Comments

At events like Microsoft’s TechEd it can be hard to hear the important updates through all the announcements. I wrote this blog while cramped in the keynote and honestly it can get a bit overwhelming because there are a ton of announcements and not all of them are very interesting to an analyst that focuses on end user computing. So for those of you interested in what Microsoft is doing (and isn’t doing) in the world of EUC here you go: [Read more →]

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Microsoft Licensing and Virtual Desktops

by Gunnar Berger  |  May 30, 2013  |  4 Comments

Today I was investigating the license requirements for virtual desktops and ran into something downright silly, but completely legitimate. So, without further ado, I give you an alternative approach to Microsoft’s VDA license.

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XenDesktop 7 is XenApp 7: The missing ingredient at Citrix Synergy

by Gunnar Berger  |  May 23, 2013  |  2 Comments

A few weeks ago I sat down with Citrix to discuss their upcoming announcements at Citrix Synergy. Due to my coverage area I was very interested in many of the changes made in XenDesktop 7. As many of you are now aware Citrix has completely overhauled this solution and attacked the complexity issue straight on. However a great conversation broke out at this meeting between myself and Vishal Ganeriwala (@VishalG), Director of Technical Marketing at Citrix, that really made the changes in XenDesktop 7 clear to me. [Read more →]

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Micro servers and virtual desktops. Crazy idea or eventual reality?

by Gunnar Berger  |  April 10, 2013  |  3 Comments

For the past few years I’ve had an idea that I’d repeat over and over to anyone that would listen to me. I’ve been given a hard time about it on twitter, have been told about every technical reason why it’s not possible but in the end I stick by this idea: I want micro servers for virtual desktop (VDI) deployments. [Read more →]

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User Experience Comparison: Microsoft RDP8 + RemoteFX

by Gunnar Berger  |  February 1, 2013  |  2 Comments

I can’t believe its been over 3 months since my last blog. I’ve been busy working away on protocol papers comparing the user experience of RDP8, PCoIP, and ICA/HDX. I wrote one paper for each vendor and a fourth paper doing a side by side comparison of them. To write these papers I had to ask the vendors questions that aren’t asked very often (and therefore there wasn’t a lot of documentation around them). It surprised me how much of the information I wanted to know wasn’t easily available for all of these protocols. While these papers have yet to post on Gartner.com (should be up there shortly), I thought it’d be fun to give a sneak peak of some of the testing I did.  [Read more →]

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Wanted: Client Development for Microsoft VDI

by Gunnar Berger  |  October 15, 2012  |  2 Comments

This has never happened to me before. I was done writing a long blog on Microsoft’s RDP8 (RemoteFX) and how I wanted two things, 1) More client support and 2) Windows 7 support for RDP8. Within an hour of writing that blog I see this on twitter: [Read more →]

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Post VMworld Thoughts: Appliances vs the Rapid Desktop Program

by Gunnar Berger  |  September 5, 2012  |  1 Comment

I don’t hide the fact that I’m a huge fan of appliances and that I’m opposed to traditional desktop virtualization architectures. I know all about pod/block design and have designed many solutions using the pod/block principle, but just because I have to use something doesn’t mean I want to. Block designs can be used to scale to the tens of thousands but they are very expensive. The top reason I don’t like this architecture is that you are basically buying a bucket of IOPS, the larger the purchase the bigger the bucket, but no matter what that bucket will fill up, then you need to buy another big bucket. For larger systems these are seven figure purchases and I just find the entire premise complete nonsense. [Read more →]

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Are SHVD (VDI) desktops more secure than physical? – In a word: “yes”

by Gunnar Berger  |  August 8, 2012  |  6 Comments

Recently I was reached out by a journalist whom I speak to fairly often, and this person asked me to provide some insight into Shawn Bass’s blog series on how VDI isn’t secure. It took me a long time to write the reply to this person because there was a lot to discuss, after spending all that time I actually felt my reply should go up as a blog post, so here is my reply with very little information edited. [Read more →]

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Gartner Catalyst 2012: Is the mobile hypervisor the right BYOD approach?

by Gunnar Berger  |  August 7, 2012  |  31 Comments

It’s just two weeks until the Gartner’s Catalyst Conference and I’ve been busying myself with my presentation decks for my different sessions. One session that I find very interesting is a vendor debate I’m moderating between Citrix and VMware. First off I think its amazing that we could get these two vendors to be in the same room together, let alone be on stage together directly debating. My job in this debate is to generate conversation between these company’s very different approaches to this market.  How different are they? Well VMware is is taking a mobile device management (MDM) approach while Citrix is taking a mobile application management (MAM) approach.  [Read more →]

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