Jumping VDI

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