Sun VDI 3 = Choice
Here's a quick video I made showing the different supported OS choices available only with Sun VDI 3. I mention "supported" because you can make any OS VirtualBox supports into a VDI solution, but we officially support XP, Vista, Win2KPro, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris. "Supported" means you can place a service call if something is not operating as advertised. Note the "Full PC" experience of the boot and shut down for each OS. I'll be cleaning this up a bit by making it shorter and adding some tunes (server was right next to me while filming so I removed the original audio track).
Fantastic - all we need now are some +- buttons on VDI 3.0 login screen to allow the user to change the current resolution (by using xrandr before we start the RDP uttsc client).
Posted by Paul Shore on April 24, 2009 at 09:21 AM PDT #
I've got a lot of ideas that I need to do RFE's for, including choosing resolutions. Though I didn't think of +&-, that's brilliant1 I'd like to see the chooser stay in the back ground, hot key to swap environments, just a tad more text of what's happening besides "Connecting...", and finally password protected access to a "terminal"
Posted by Thin Guy on April 24, 2009 at 09:42 AM PDT #
How about a voice over track rather than music? Describe what's happening in the back ground... narrate the use case or two.
Posted by Dave Pickens on April 24, 2009 at 07:49 PM PDT #
* but we officially support XP, Vista, Win2KPro, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris...How about Windows 2003 TS ? Isn't that officially supported?
Posted by Hardik on May 03, 2009 at 05:18 PM PDT #
Hardik,
Why would you want to run a full server OS for a desktop VM? And @ $999 per instance from a licensing standpoint, that's pretty pricey.
Posted by Thin Guy on May 03, 2009 at 05:23 PM PDT #
You don't have to have an instance of Win 2k3 for every person connecting to Windows TS (Terminal Services). We have around 20 users connecting to the same Terminal Server, and the only additional cost is the TS licensing, which isn't that pricey.
We have to have Win 2k3 anyway for some of the business applications we use, so the actual price of the software (the 999 you mentioned) is something I would have to pay anyway. I would really love to be able to host Win 2k3 on Sun VDI (maybe you can, I dunno, but just judging from the fact it's unsupported I wonder if it would be a good practice). With a smaller business like ours it's hard to justify costs for large-scale Virtualization Infrastructure software, yet It would still be very beneficial to have OS Image replication for fail over and performance, server consolidation, etc.
Not to mention that because of the reliability of Solaris and ZFS, having entire OS images on a rock solid server for a very attractive price is very appealing.
Posted by John on May 11, 2009 at 09:32 AM PDT #
@John
VDI really isn't the solution geared for deploying servers. It may make more since to look at xVM Server then have a SunRay server for connecting to the Terminal Server. But all in all tuning Term Server can be complex and tuning is less of an imperative when one has lot of hardware resources. Virtualizing does cause some loss of performance.
I would argue FMA is the most compelling feature for using xVM based products. I would presume it would be an imperative to handle faults elegantly if one was cramming so many eggs in fewer baskets.
Posted by damntech on May 21, 2009 at 06:08 PM PDT #
Is there a simple way to let a SGD user choose which pool they want to connect to with VDI 3.0?
Something like what SSRS does:
http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/65274045/dialog2.png
Is there a RFE for something like that?
Using the syntax <username>::pool=<poolname>[,desktop=<desktopId>], when prompted for credentials is not very user friendly.
Thanks
Posted by Patrick Bateman on June 26, 2009 at 05:56 AM PDT #
Most excellent work, Craig. Thanks for taking the time to put this together.
Posted by Matt (madhatter) on August 13, 2009 at 12:03 PM PDT #