Jumping VDI

Hi,

Yesterday evening I came back from a crazy 48 hours trip Hamburg-San Francisco-Hamburg. I had to cover a left over from my last trip. Anyway, arriving at home I've looked at something yellow, a ball, I guess, but too tired to pay more attention:

But something stuck in my head. So in the morning I've had a closer look:

So I thought this is a prototype of a new Sun Ray device? Well, I've tried to find a smart card slot to get my desktop session and to see what will will happen. But there is no slot as such ;-)

It is more a Sun Ray for kids, as my son explained later to me when we played a bit football.

-Dirk

PS. And of course the name is 'Sun Ray' and not 'SUNRAY'

I've decided to change the title of this blog, because it seems obvious that some people find it offensive. For those who don't know, I have a strong affinity to basketball. Played it for a long time.

And there was this movie, "White men can't jump" , which I've seen and relates quite good to my affinity. So still liking basketball, but can not jump that high any more. People who know me, know about my knee stories ...

However VDI will jump, for sure ...

Stay tuned,

Dirk

Hi,

We now have a demo guide that runs you through the setup of a single box VDI demo based on VirtualBox.

Feedback is welcome,

Dirk

VDI 3 just released its first patch a week ago. So far, so good. But there came up a number of questions about how the whole patch strategy for the product including the various technologies. This works in the following way:

• Patches for VDI core will be released as patches for the VDI 3 product, in the way we just did it for the first patch.
• Patches for included Sun Ray technology will be released as the part of the Sun Ray product. In general it is recommended to run on the latest patch level, even though it might not be important to VDI 3. The most recent patch as been announced here.
• Changes to VirtualBox will NOT be delivered as patches. If bug fixes are required, we will release a new minor version of VirtualBox qualified for VDI 3. In consequence requires a new version a re-install of VirtualBox on the virtualization host.
• Changes to the storage platform. These are not driven or controlled by the VDI team. Therefore the VDI team needs to qualify a new firmware for the Unified Storage systems as well as updates to OpenSolaris. The VDI team will announce which future versions are supported or by when. So, be a bit careful in this area.

Cheers,

Dirk

Here is a short summary of our VDI implementation for the JavaOne conference. How we did it, has been described on our wiki. During the show we've been gathering data, here are some highlights:

• Setting up the VDI environment took about 2 days. This is the software install on all tiers, the network setup, storage setup and the cloning of roughly 10000 desktop images. Additional images would have been created on demand. The work has been done by 2 engineers of the VDI team.
• Roughly 6000 desktops have actually been used by the participants during the whole week.
• The majority of the users sticked to just one desktop.
• Half of the users went for Windows 7, the other half for the Unixes OpenSolaris and Ubuntu.
  
• The whole storage consumption for 6000 desktops in use was 2 TB. Remember each single desktop image had a size of 10 GB. (Windows 7 even more). Without the merits of ZFS this would have been 60TB.

FatBloke took some nice pictures showing people using VDI 3.

And by the way, it is a very new experience seeing people working on the same thin device all using different desktop OSs.

And this is the user experience that has been offered to the users:

1. Choose your desktop
   
2. Connecting to the desktop
   
3. Working with your personal Windows 7 desktop
   

That's it around the show. Interesting experience for the VDI team and very good proof of our solution.

-Dirk

Today I'm at the Community/JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Moscone Center.  A couple of thousand participants will be at the show. And as usual they get terminals to access their session schedule or browse the internet. The cool thing from a VDI perspective is, that this is all powered by Sun VDI.

There is an article on how we set it up: http://wikis.sun.com/display/DesktopVirtualization/Sun+VDI+for+JavaOne. I think this is very impressive, running about 20000 virtual desktops with such a small equipment.

Special thanks to the tradeshow team, Vernon and Kevin, and to Thomas and Chris, to get this setup going in such a short time.

- Dirk