Tag Archives: What is

What is VDI?

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Found this VERY interesting read on the state of VDI:

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is not a product. You can’t call up a company and ask for 5 licenses of VDI. It is concept comprised of multiple solutions or products to achieve a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (though recent announcements have Citrix XenDesktop as a single product that comes very close). The concept of VDI virtualizes desktops operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux, etc) and deliver the remote view of the desktop via a display protocol. In addition, there will be management and control systems to manage the provisioning/deprovisioning of virtual machines and applications.

All in all a comprehensive look at some of the players, the concepts and a comparison. If your looking to understand a little more about remote desktops this is a read for you.

update: Forgot the link! Here it is now:  The Current State of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Thanks Stephen)

What are MX Records?

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I was asked to explain MX records today, here it is for others as well:

MX Records, or Mail eXchange Records, is simply a line of text in a file on a DNS Server on the internet.

What it does however is VERY important. It tells other peoples mail servers where to deliver email they are sending to you.

DNS MX RecordThe first MX record (indicated by a lower number, in this example, 10 mail.domain.com.au) is known as the primary MX record. This is where email servers will try to send email first. If it fails, then it will try subsequent MX records (in this example, 20 mail.domain.com.au).

If your email server is hosted onsite on MS Small Business Server 2003 and you change ISP, you will have a new STATIC IP address assigned. Given that your MX record will be pointing to the old IP address, you won’t be getting any email arrive.

To fix this means editing the MX record to reflect the new IP address. That will involve either lodging a job with your hosting provider, or domain name registrar.