Excellent read on the iPad as a desktop virtualization thin client. If you’ve seen any science fiction (StarTrek, Babylon 5, etc) they all use iPad/tablet like computers. The traditional laptop/desktop form factor requires you working at a desk. If you’re doing anything standing up, normal computers fail.
The problem I think Desktop Virtualization will have is:
1) The problem with keeping all your data in the cloud is you have to be able to get to the cloud. So, it only works where you have wifi or 3/4G, and its useless on planes or in rural areas.
2) All the desktop export protocols sucks. I’ve not used VDI, but VNC is teh suck, and RDP is only usable if you’ve got a good WAN connection. The iPad will work fine for carrying it to the conference room, but not for being able to get into your work PC at home to finish that memo your boss wants. (Speaking of protocol suckage, I’m seriously considering moving my primary PC to Win7 w/ VMWare Workstation so I can RDP into it when I need to. But thats another post about Command Center 3.0)
3) The iPads 1024×768 screen resolution is straight out of the late 1980s. Grabbing your desktop off your desk terminal (1680×1050) and moving it there will make all your windows difficult to use. At least windows lets you resize from all corners and not just the lower right like on the Mac.
So about 20 days after I get my stuff (new HD, Snow Leopard, Fusion2) to upgrade my MacBook Pro (one of the first intel models) VMware goes and releases Fusion 3. I was just outside the free upgrade window. Bah!
I’d installed Fusion, created me an Ubuntu and XP Guest, and verified I had installed all the windows apps I might need in an emergency (ie VSphere 4 client). Fusion2 had some nice features. Unity mode, where I could have my windows apps running with my Mac apps using the same window manager was pretty nice. And being able to put windows apps in the OSX Dock was cool. It also had support for linking my iSight camera and bluetooth into my guest.
My problems were two fold. My old Mac was just slow and Fusion had a weird thing were I’d lose focus to my guest windows frequently. Fusion became something I ran when I needed Windows, not something I kept running all the time.
Well, after installing Fusion 3, the slowness and focus issues are gone. I’ve been working all day in my XP Firefox with no performance or other issues.
Fusion 3 has some nice enhancements too. My XP Task bar is now at the bottom of my second display. And if I turn off my XP taskbar, the system tray widgets appear in my OSX menu bar. The Fusion MenuBar menu tools is pretty nice too. From one easy to get to location I can launch new apps, connect/disconnect hardware devices, and do all the other guest setting changes.
The upgrade is definitely worth the $40. I only wish I’d waited. But I suppose if I had I’d not have seen what an improvement Fusion 3 is.
VMware Self-Service- Setting up mirrored folders for your Mac and virtual machine.
This looks kick-ass. I wonder how the performance is.
I’ve not tested this as I don’t have a Win7 VM anywhere (yet). Cavet Emptor.
VMware vSphere Client on Microsoft Windows 7! | Virtual Lifestyle.
In case anyone was wondering, you can run the VI client inside Parallels Desktop on a Mac. As I plan to switch to VMware Fusion if I get Snow Leopard for my birthday I hope it works in that too. I’d really like to virtualize my Windows box.
Ew, assuming I can get the USB pass through to work in ESXi. I need to be able to use the scanner in my VM.
So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it.
My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.
Welp, the folks monitoring the chip in my head took that idea and created JeOS (pronounced Juice). Just Enough OS is the term for my micro-distribution. And trolling though Ubuntu’s site today I discovered they’ve got a JeOS version.
With the accelerated nature of the Virtualization Project I’ve got going at work I’m not gonna propose JeOS at this time. Heck, I’m not sure I’ll even have time to bring the P2V’ed servers up to the latest LTS release, much less split up services and migrate to a different edition. But I do plan to play with it some, and may propose it to IT for the radius server we’ll need to build.
VMWare ESXi 4.0 is out. It has most of what I’ve been wanting in ESXi, in particular IDE support. 4.0 supports SATA drives in the host, and IDE drives and some form of USB in the guest OS.
Ever since windows 98, I’ve has a policy of never running anything ending on .0 in a production capacity. I’ve got it running in the lab at work and look forward to putting it through the rounds when I get back from my business trip.
Tags: vmware
I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.
You could do something unfortunate, like:
cp server-flat.vmdk /backup_location/server-flat.vmdk
gzip server-flat.vmdk
You won’t notice your mistake for weeks or months. So long as that VM is running it will keep an open file handle to the uncompressed file. You might notice some weirdness with “df” but that is about it.
Of course once you do restart the VM or reboot the VMware host OS, you’ll discover your harddrive is gone, and that backup is several months old.
Tags: Stupid Unix Tricks, vmware
