TechAgility

So last week I managed to get RemoteFX up and running from a Windows 7 VDI from a Hyper-V Host – initially I was a little perturbed as it didn’t look that good, and appeared to have a certain amount of stutter to it, I then realised that I had at some point unplugged the ethernet cable from my Docking Station and as a result I was actually connecting via WiFi – once I replaced the ethernet cable all was fine and the experience was very good indeed.

It’s possibly worth noting here two immutable facts regarding Desktop Virtualization (in my opinion):

• You need to be able to provide a User Experience that is as good as, or better, than a PC today otherwise your project will definitely struggle and may even be doomed to failure before getting to the Pilot stage
• The User Experience cannot be simply defined or quantified – it is extremely subjective, and as such it is very much a “movable target” and subject to the whims of those being asked at any given time of day, etc…    (my advice is to aim high )

So while it was running on the WiFi I tried checking for any latency? None – all 1ms or less – and yet there was some noticeable stutter in the replay of a Flash vide from YouTube.

This brings up another point regarding testing the User Experience – find yourself something that you would consider to be a good representation of what the users would normally use and then continue to use that as a reference model against which all solutions can effectively be measured? – I am currently using a High Definition video clip from YouTube from BBC2 that is an underwater shot of Surfing. This can be found here:

The reasons for using this clip as my reference piece is:

Regardless of who I am showing this to – they will instinctively know what it should look like, even if they have never seen the clip before.

Because of the Slow Motion video it will show up any stutter or frame drop quite dramatically

It is available in a number of resolutions – 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p.

It is also quite a good clip and will naturally draw peoples attention

Now after replacing the WiFi with the ethernet cable all seemed to go well at the standard 360p so I thought I’d simply push it higher and all should be OK? Well 480p wasn’t too bad, but anything above that started to suffer, so after doing some checking I noticed that the VDI instance was flat lining the CPU at 100%. So I stopped the VM, added another vCPU and restarted, and then tried again – now it could be run at 720p and only when it was run at 1080p was there some very slight (almost negligible) stutter.

Now this should not be considered as anything like a definitive guide to the performance you might get from RemoteFX – I have had very little time to do any further testing, and next on my list is to get vWorkspace running on this rig so that I can see what difference EOP Xtream makes to these same observations – but in the meantime I’m just sharing my 2 cents worth in the vain hope that it might be useful to someone else?

written by dcaddick

After doing some serious digging it appears that there was well over 400 sessions at MS TechEd 2010 – to be honest I ended up giving up as I figured I’d found way more material than I will be able to get through in quite a long time.

MS are to be commended for being quite open about sharing the content? It would also seem that most of the sessions have been captured on Video as well and are available in HD and MP4.

Here’s my pick of what might be topical and somewhat related to Client and/or Desktop Virtualization?

• ARC307 – Top 10 Hidden IT Costs and How to Avoid Them
• COS306 – The Economics of Cloud Computing
• VIR204 – Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware
• VIR206 – Virtualization 360: Microsoft Virtualization Strategy, Products, and Solutions for the New Economy
• VIR209 – Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 and Microsoft Office 2010
• VIR304 – Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory in Depth
• VIR305 – Microsoft RemoteFX: Rich Windows Desktop Experience for VDI and Session Virtualization
• VIR310 – Networking and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Deployment Considerations
• VIR311 – Planning and Deploying Microsoft VDI with Management Technologies
• VIR313 – VDI from Microsoft and Citrix: What is it? How do I manage it? What benefits does it provide?
• VIR315 – Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Performance Analysis: How You Can Get the Most out of Hyper-V
• VIR316 – Remote Desktop Session Host vs. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Smackdown
• VIR317 – Desktop Virtualization: You Have a Choice
• VIR320 – Sequencing Deep Dive: Efficiently Making Your Applications Virtual
• VIR321 – Effectively Debugging Complex Application Sequencings
• VIR304 – Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory in Depth
• VIR403 – Virtualization FAQ, Tips, and Tricks
• WCL314 – Windows Sysinternals Primer: Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and More
• WCL318 – Using Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) 3.0 to Troubleshoot and Fix Problems, and to Capture and Deploy WIM Images
• WCL402 – Pushing the Limits of Windows with Mark Russinovich
• WEM301 – Deploying Windows Embedded Standard 7 with Style
• WEM302 – Explore the Multimedia Potential of Windows Embedded Standard 7
• WSV205 – Remote Desktop Services: Virtual and Session-Based Desktops and Applications Architecture with Partners
• WSV301 – Administrators’ Idol: Windows and Active Directory Best Practices
• WSV303 – Death of a Network: Identify the Hidden Causes of Lousy Network Performance
• WEM305 – How to Choose a Windows Embedded Operating System
• WEM308 – Windows Embedded Overview: Demos of the Latest and Upcoming Releases
• WSV309 – Microsoft RemoteFX: USB and Device Support
• WSV316 – Hyper-V and Storage: Maximizing Performance and Deployment Best Practices in Windows Server 2008 R2
• SIA333 – Useful Hacker Techniques: Which Part of Hackers’ Knowledge Will Help You in Efficient IT Administration?
• SIA334 – The Secrets of Effective Technical Talks: How to Explain Tech without Tucking Them In!
• SIA335 – Death of Security: Breached Hosts/Stolen Data/IP Espionage

written by dcaddick

I was recently looking for info regarding how to manage or integrate Windows Thin Clients (XPe/WES) with SCCM.

To the best of my knowledge the formal stance has always been “we supply the Macro components to support SCCM Agents in the build – the rest is up to the Customer” and my understanding is that this was mainly around the concern that this solution was never able to support “bare metal imaging” to be able to reimage the devices?

Please be aware that I have not attempted to get this working myself, this is merely the research that I have done just in case I was asked to implement it, and although some may see it as hugely beneficial to have both Thin Clients and PC’s being managed from a single console – the flip side to this is that the SCCM console and management structure does NOT know how to handle or treat devices that have a Write Filter

• Or if it was possible to image but this was still in a grey area of being un-supported?
• It seems that it might actually be possible to image with WES 2009 onwards as indicated in this article?
• Embedded OS Deployment with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
  One of the new features in Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is the support of SCCM operating system deployment. This means, any Standard image can be deployed the same way images for desktop or server machines are deployed within an SCCM infrastructure. Previously, it was not possible to deploy XP embedded images, because XPe did not support the Sysprep utility.
  • More at source ….

Looking a bit further ahead towards the end of the year with WES 7 however it looks like this imaging issue will be overcome as MS will then support imaging? BUT only to WES 7 devices as it will then be able to be imaged using the ImageX based process?

Other than that I have collated some details below that seems to pretty much map it out that it shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish – but it would appear that it would be a better idea to go with FBWF to have more flexibility with coping with the SCCM Agent side of things

Creating SCCM software update packages

There is no fundamental difference between creating software deployment packages for a normal Windows XP Professional or a Windows Embedded Standard system. If you are new to this, Microsoft Technet, with its documentation and whitepapers, is a very valuable resource to get things started. However, especially when Embedded Enabling Features (EEF’s) or the limitations of embedded devices come into play, deployment packages for embedded devices need to be created with a slightly different mind set than those for enterprise scenarios.

More at source….

Advanced System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Software Deployment Scenarios
Change management scenarios of embedded devices are sometimes much harder to handle than those of corporate desktops. This is especially true when you consider the way users interact with devices. System Center offers a control panel applet users and administrators can use for local interaction with the Configuration Manager infrastructure. This works fine for Windows Embedded Standard Devices as long as they run explorer shell the same way corporate desktops do. If embedded devices run their own shell these options are gone, because no access to the applets can be provided.

More at source….

Write Filters Support for Mass Deployment in Windows Embedded Standard 7

Mass deployment is the process of creating a master Windows Embedded Standard 7 runtime image on a reference system and then deploying this image to multiple target systems. The deployment process typically uses specific tools such as System Preparation tool (sysprep.exe) and Imagex.exe as well as Windows PE Environment to perform the following tasks:

• Generalize the master system by removing machine specific information
• Capture the system into a Windows image (wim) file
• Apply the image (wim) to the target system
• Specialize the image to the target machine.

Write Filters (EWF and FBWF) in WES7 are delivering sysprep providers to enable seamless settings transfer during mass deployment scenarios. These providers are part of the regular write filter (EWF or FBWF) packages. They are also invoked automatically when users run sysprep command, i.e. they do not require any user interaction. So, if a user is deploying a master image with FBWF protecting the system volume (C:) and having a folder (Documents) in the exclusion list, all target systems will end up protecting the system volume (C:) and having (Documents) folder in the exclusion list. Similarly, if EWF is protecting the system volume (Disk 0, Partition 1) of the master image, all target systems will end up protecting the system volume (Disk 0, Partition 1).
More at source…

Beta SCCM R2 – How to get a Quick Test Lab for SCCM R2
This is not going to be a depth post… but just a post to say how to get yourself rapidly into a good place with SCCM R2. I have been asked a number of times how to gain access to or even build an SCCM R2 environment. As much fun as it is….. and it is fun! It does take a considerable amount of time!
I was chatting to Marco Cibis (PFE Germany) when we were on a training course together in Prague…. Marco is one of our SCCM guru/jedi knights …..

Anyway he sent me a great link for downloading a pre-configured VHD for SCCM
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=469af3b8-849d-4400-bded-9024c3db759f&DisplayLang=en
So that was stage one!!! download SCCM RTM for an eval….. saved me 10 hours

Some additional references:

=========

How to Manage Windows XP Embedded Write Filters Using Configuration Manager 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932175.aspx

Known Limitations in Configuration Manager Support for Windows XP Embedded

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932123.aspx

I have also discovered this regarding getting T5720’s working with SCCM – but again the main issue will be no ability to image:

SCCM General – Generate a new GUID for the SCCM Client

It was not until I started working on getting our HP Thin Clients to work with SCCM imaging that I had to worry about generating a new GUID for the SCCM client without doing a repair or reinstallation.  You see the HP t5720 is really the thorn in my side.  The HP t5720 devices we have are 80% of our thin client population and only have 512MB of flash disk and 512MB of RAM.  In order to get the SCCM client to really work well with Windows XP Embedded 2002 it is ideal to have Service Pack 3 (SP3) for the OS.  What really hurts with that is there is not much free space left – even after removing the HP preload utilities that we do not use.  In fact there is not enough space to install the SCCM client.

Keep in mind that we are not joining these devices to the domain, patching them, or doing much more than a few configuration changes and enabling reporting and remote tools.  We use the HP Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) to lock the devices down and purge unwanted changes.

More at source…

written by dcaddick

So this should certainly fire up peoples plans about adopting Thin Clients and I guess MS will be more than happy that folks will be queuing up to try new devices on their RDS via Windows Server 2008?

And more here:  Microsoft launches Windows 7-based embedded OS

So why will this be a big deal? If you want more details I’d strongly suggest reviewing this post regarding the Capabilities, Connectivity and Experience Features that vary with RDS depending on the OS and Patch level of the Client device : Remote Desktop Connection 7 for Windows 7, Windows XP & Windows Vista

And don’t underestimate the selling power of eye candy? Thin Clients with a nice new clean Windows 7 look and feel will definitely help sell more Thin Clients

Windows Embedded Standard 7 RTM has Shipped!

After several years of development by 70 of the best software engineers at Microsoft, and buckets upon buckets of sweat and tears, I’m so happy to announce that Windows Embedded Standard 7 has finally shipped!

The launch of the product officially occurred at the Embedded Systems Conference today when our General Manager, Kevin Dallas, announced the product in the conference keynote address. This product demonstrates Microsoft’s further commitment to the embedded business and Windows 7 technologies in specialized consumer and enterprise devices.

Focusing on consumer related devices is something new to the team that delivers Windows Embedded Standard because we’ve historically focused mostly on enterprise scenarios. But with Standard 7 we’re finally making available to you the Media Center component. With the Media Center feature we’re anticipating a new focus on consumer related devices in the household based on this embedded operating system such as Set Top Boxes and Televisions.

If you’ve never installed the Standard 7 product before during the many months it was available as a public download, you may be interested in checking out the Standard 7 FAQ.

For a deeper dive into what this release means for the embedded community, I encourage you to read the press release.

Before I head off to uncork the champagne, here’s a video showcasing some close partners and their devices running Windows Embedded Standard 7.

-Andy

Windows Embedded Standard (WES7, WES2009, XPe, NT4e) : Windows Embedded Standard 7 RTM has Shipped!

written by dcaddick

I came across this very interesting post today as something that both validates the “Client Virtualization” approach (I think VDI is a bit too narrow as a definition?) and yet at the same time tells a cautionary tale about how it’s not as easy as it’s sometimes made out to be? and it is way harder than simply Virtualizing Servers

However I think the point can be made that if it is approached in a structured manner, and you do take the time to run through the various steps of PoC, Pilot and then phased deployment while validating each step to check for issues then you should be on-track.

My experience so far is that it’s not really fair to blame “Client Virtualization” or VDI if the IT Dept. has brought in all the old baggage with “this is always the way we have done it”?

Justifying VDI – Part One

April 26, 2010 — David Freund

As Chris Murphy explained in his video blog post, EMC IT began last year to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure based on VMware View. The VDI concept is pretty straightforward, and sounds compelling: reduce desktop management complexity, more cost-effectively update aging desktops (and their operating systems), and give users greater platform choice—and “anywhere, anytime” universal access.

Can VDI really deliver its user experience promise? How much it would really benefit our company in cost savings and in increased flexibility? EMC IT came up with answers to those questions—and got a “green light” for deploying a production VDI environment during the second half of this year.

……

The latency “pain threshold” ended up being around 100 milliseconds. For local users, where network latencies are typically much shorter, virtual desktop performance was similar to a physical PC. For remote users with latencies exceeding 100ms, remote desktop performance was consistently slower than a local PC.

……

In my next post, we’ll finally look at TCO/ROI numbers that helped gain approval for next phase of EMC IT’s VDI project: a production rollout for 5,000 of EMC’s 40,000 desktop users.

Justifying VDI – Part One « EMC IT’s Journey to the Private Cloud

written by dcaddick

This is just some ramblings from me over the xmas/new year break and some general thoughts about the global economy and some technical thoughts

Economy

Option ARM’s – could this be the harbinger of the Second Wave of Foreclosures in the US? 

• Subprime Loans Caused the Initial Illness, Option ARMs will Cause the Relapse
• OptionARM Homebuyers See Monthly Payments Go From $95 To $3,500
• 2010:Foreseeable and unforeseeable risks, the room for policy error is enormous
  Domestic Risks and Uncertainties:
  The Bulk of the Option Arm resets trigger in 2010-2011 – “The reality is that these loans were never meant to survive the reset. Unless an alternative is created, the human pain and loss will be massive.” Institutional Risk Analyst Chris Whalen
• I would certainly like to think that all the Bankers ( <– substitute rhyming slang here ) have actually done their job correctly and with due diligence and actually “priced” in the risk that some of the “Assets” they may be holding could be exposed to any potential risk associated with the Option ARM’s? But that’s probably hoping for a bit too much?

The US economy appears to have somewhat recovered it’s confidence – However most of the “Stimulus Package” has not actually filtered down to the point where it’s spent?

• Presumably it still sits somewhere between the Senate and the States where the money is to be spent?
• One Year After Near Financial Collapse, Americans Wonder: Where’s MY Bailout?

I would imagine that the UK economy will continue to lack confidence until the upcoming Election (mid-year?) is resolved?

• Until then you will still have the “Dead man walking” ex-Chancellor Gordon Brown in charge?
• Who knows, it may still end up being something of a contest, or it may be the Tories are back in charge?
• CBI Raises U.K. Growth Forecast for 2010, Predicts BOE ‘Pause’
• Engineering a Strong UK Economic Recovery into a May 2010 General Election?

Is the European Union starting to flex its economic muscles?

• I have heard that the EU is considering a Flat Tax rate for business?
• I have also been told that there the EU is now considering/implementing a Pan-European Legislature?
• What will the repercussions of this be?
• Will this allow the EU to implement laws quicker than the member states?
• Would we have a situation where the UK prefers to implement legislative motions through the EU process because of convenience or speed?
• Will traditional US based HQ’s start considering moving HQ’s to EU in order to potentially take advantage of these proposed changes?

Technical

MS should be releasing the latest edition of Windows Embedded (WES) 2011 in mid-year – this could be very interesting for a number of reasons

• This is essentially Windows 7 “super lite” and appears to be pretty much compatible with everything
• So easy to build a new runtime it no longer needs a developer to create bespoke instances
• Comes with the choice of enabling either Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) or File Based Write Filter (FBWF) to protect the base image
• A “Thin Client” install is only 1.5G in size – well down for the standard Windows 7 with Office reaching more like 20Gb
• Sure – the terms of the EULA specifically prohibit the *install* of Full MS Office Products
• But that doesn’t preclude any Application Streaming or Virtualization efforts?
• At only USD$90 a runtime version – will this be *THE* VDI base OS of choice? 
• It’s small, light, cheap AND it is non-persistent straight out of the box – it’s certainly worthy of some consideration?

The “Cloud” will continue to gain traction – Amazons Web Services (AWS) has had its 5^th anniversary and MS’s Azure (pricing here) makes its debut.

written by dcaddick

Just a brief update as to some of the changes that I have discovered in WES 2011 CTP2 (as opposed to the original CTP) – this was simply built on a default VM Template based on Windows 7.

Also some useful reference links:

• Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2 New Features and Changes
• Discovering Windows Embedded Standard 2011 – What is different to WES 2009? – Part 1
• Choose the Right Windows Embedded Operating System
• HORM in Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP

Please review the screenshots below (sorry about the quality, I’ll redo them this week)

• There are additional Templates (including Thin Client) that seem to have most of what people would need to get themselves started
• The Summary page then indicates anything that’s not there – in this case the VMware Drivers were missing – I just ignored this and moved on, once completed it appears to have managed to find it and installed it
• Disk Footprint
  • This is a huge improvement on the first CTP – Minimal install used to be 650Mb, and just adding Explorer ONLY saw it jump to 2.6Gb
  • Estimated OS footprint was listed as 1946Mb for the Thin Client template
  • After installation it appeared (at least in the VM as only 1.57Gb)
  • To be fair – there does not appear to be too much installed by default though?
• It looks just like Windows 7 – seriously
• So without even telling it what HW I have just check out the listing from Device Manager – only two items were not sorted!!
• No drivers were installed or referenced by me – I just let the wizard do its thing and here it is with the Internet working
• One curious thing I noted was that there is no RUN command, or Search function in the Start Menu, not that this is a bad thing on an intended Thin Client?
• I was able to check that both FBWF and EWF is installed by default
• As things stand I’d say this is a huge leap forward by Microsoft from the disk space point of view as it now looks quite likely that with some judicious pruning then a relatively useful Image can be created to simply act as the dedicated Client Device for Citrix, VMware VDI instances
• If you’d like to get your own copy of the Image Builder Wizard (IBW) then log on to connect.microsoft.com to download

So after thinking on this some more I had the following thoughts?

• This is essentially Windows 7 “super lite” and appears to be pretty much compatible with everything
• It’s so easy to build a new runtime it no longer needs a developer to create bespoke instances?
• Comes with the choice of enabling either Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) or File Based Write Filter (FBWF) to protect the base image
• A “Thin Client” install is only 1.5G in size – well down from the standard Windows 7 with Office reaching more like 20Gb
• Sure – the terms of the EULA specifically prohibit the *install* of Full MS Office Products
• But that doesn’t preclude any Application Streaming or Virtualization efforts?
• At only USD$90 a runtime version, and only 1.5Gb – will this be *THE* VDI base OS of choice?  
• It’s small, light, cheap AND it is non-persistent straight out of the box – it’s certainly worthy of some consideration?

written by dcaddick

So as things slowdown in the lead up to the break I have had some time to get back and review some twitter posts and other blog articles that I have been meaning to catch up on. I must admit that I tend not to use Twitter that much but do find it quite useful as pointers to additional material for research and recently posted material on the topics that I’m interested in.

So one article that really caught my eye was this from Ruben Spruijt’s post at Brian Madden, because for a number of years now it is the Hard Drive that has not kept pace with advancements in technology for the rest of the PC/Laptop components, and in particular I have noted a number of people getting very enthusiastic about the performance improvements they have actually noticed when using Laptops with SSD’s

Runcore SSD’s – promises to boost computer performance vs. the traditional 1.8" HDD by more than 400% with read/write speeds up to 75/40MB/sec.
Experience with 128GB 1.8" ZIF in HP 2710p – Read/write performance for 4K random files has improved over 500% (even under Bitlocker). it just became the fastest computer I ever used… Word and Excel launch in one or two seconds (compared to 30-60 before)…

Just how fast does the storage component of VDI have to be?
So it stands to reason that if you are going to Virtualize your Desktops (and by definition centralize?) then you are going to need to give some serious throughput for the Disk I/O or IOPS? So for anyone who is embarking on this then I would seriously recommend giving this article a through read? Understanding how storage design has a big impact on your VDI!

Possibly the most interesting point that Ruben did bring to my attention with this is that in VDI implementation the Disk I/O is predominately Writes and not Reads – I know this sounds contradictory in some respects, but do review this for yourself – in particular is a good comment from Claudio Rodrigues regarding the nature of how the O/S’s deal with this, as well as confirmation from Dan Feller at Citrix who confirms that most of the numbers and math are in sync with his findings. Ruben has also supplied a Sizing Tool to get a good idea of what might be needed?

So it also starts to make sense that you make sure that you focus very sharply on the XP or Windows 7 Template VM’s in the first place to reduce the I/O required as much as possible?
Citrix has some great tips in this document - Best Practices – Citrix XenDesktop with Citrix Provisioning Server

So as this brought up some interesting thoughts I also found this article relating to sizing and best practices, VMware View sizing & best practices
which followed on from this original article Virtual Infrastructure best practices and in essence this confirms that the storage requirements will need to focused somewhere around an 20/80 split on the Read/Write (20% read and 80% write)

While this table gives a quick representation of what sort of sizing requirements are out there please make sure you research this subject thoroughly, and read the post in full? J

In all fairness I must also confess at this point that my weakest area in IT is storage, and as yet I have not had a functioning Lab running either Citrix’s XenDesktop or Vmware’s View to be able to play around with this and get my hands dirty with either Provisioning Server or Composer. From what I can see (based on Marketing so far J) both of these products have the ability to drastically minimize the storage needed for VDI and as a consequence I am assuming that this may indeed have a flow on effect to mitigating the IOPS issue? (Can anyone comment or set me straight on this?)

I then went on to find some more details around the costing and financial side of VDI implementations and found this article of Doug Brown’s regarding Cost Savings of VDI: Is It Possible? as the diagram below points out, it is complex, and as such it could be that the regular ROT/TCO calculations are not highlighting all the potential benefits and savings?

Changing the ROI/TCO Calculation?
So this then brings me to another update in my Twitter was from Tyler at LiquidwareLabs.com with a new addition to the ROI/TCO debate,
COP – Coefficient of Productivity in VDI the New Math , in which he points out that you should also factor in any additional productivity gains and use this to dilute the true cost of the CAPEX.

Now I wonder how many VDI proposals are brave enough to start assigning values to what has traditionally been seen as "additional" benefits related to an architectural change? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it, but I can see the debate might start to get a bit heated in the boardroom? and in some respects maybe that’s exactly what’s needed – by assigning values and assumptions and then extrapolating them across an enterprise the resultant *potential* savings become too hard for the board to ignore?

Sure there will be debate, and rightly so, but in following this sort of process it should quickly become apparent that there is a technological shift under way where the concept of "My Desktop" still being something that can be pointed to in the Office sitting on a desk somewhere is rapidly becoming redundant?

Now having said all that – it’s interesting to note that Gartner’s Hype Cycle Report for 2009 seems not to have VDI listed? Maybe it’s hiding under something else here?

So will VDI make it to "mainstream"? AMD seems to think so, Taking Desktop Virtualization Mainstream, but also a lot of it will depend on a number of factors.

My main thoughts on this are:

To truly succeed VDI needs to be able to deliver a *High Fidelity* User experience equal to or better than what users have today – if what you are designing is unable to provide this then you should stop and re-evaluate now

If you can build a system that is able to provide this then users will want (no, Demand!) that they have it ASAP – you will know that you have succeeded when demand outstrips supply

To provide this *High Fidelity* User experience I’d suggest focusing on two key areas that may/or may not apply depending on your particular focus and what is considered in or out of scope for your project?

• Graphics
  
  • Bottom line – Graphics performance in this design CANNOT be measured, it has no metrics, or Best Practices. One persons "that’s fine" is another persons "there is absolutely no way I’ll put up with that", etc. This will always be a completely subjective assessment based on whoever is rendering the judgement.
  • You may think that you don’t need to focus too much on Graphics because "there isn’t much need or requirement for Video from the business" but I can almost bet that you would be wrong – if you are operating on this assumption be sure that you double-check with Stakeholders and get their agreement in writing?
  • So much content on the Internet is done in Flash today, it’s not just watching a CEO or Analyst briefing via YouTube, a lot of Web Based Training modules use the same or similar technologies, so even if you currently block YouTube and Facebook today it’s still quite likely that you need to factor this in to your design
  • Is RDP good enough? Check this assumption by giving targeted business users a Thin Client and removing their desktop to the lab and forcing them to access via the Thin Client – this is a simple but effective test that validates whether they truly need/demand High Fidelity, or will OK Fidelity do?
  • Do you need Citrix HDX? PCoIP? RGS? While I’m making the point about Remote Protocols – don’t forget to gather details of connecting accessories? Do you need to support serial or parallel?
• HDD or IOPS
  
  • Make sure the VM performs as well as possible while measuring the I/O on the VM itself? Check the disk queue, and ensure that it’s not the disk performance that’s holding this back – and make sure you have enough throughput to allow for Login’s etc.

So where does that leave us?
In the Graphics space there is already a number of solutions for VDI that have been out for some time (Citrix’s HDX) or have recently been released (Teradici’s software version of PCoIP). In addition to that there are other approaches if you need to support High Fidelity Users at the top end with HDX-3D taking advantage of Nvidias GPU’s that almost bring TeraFLOP performance to the Desktop.

A good introduction to CUDA – Just how powerful can GPU’s be? Back in mid-2008 the GT200 was able to deliver 1 TeraFLOP performance, the G80 supports 768 Threads per Core – on 128 Cores… Want a Personal Supercomputer? What would you use it for?

So I suspect that we are not far away from seeing vGPU’s being available to VM’s that will be able to deliver the performance on demand – the main thing is that you make sure you are either using a Remote Protocol stack that can provide this functionality – OR make sure you are using a Broker that supports a shift to one?

At the HDD level I’d suspect that as SSD prices come down and SSD longevity increases, along with improved methods of utilising this in some kind of shared caching mechanism in a VDI deployment we may well see some serious advances that enable VDI to overcome this IOPS roadblock?

With the monotonous regularity of Moore’s Law driving CPU performance up it should be possible to provide way more CPU power to users than they really need to enable this – but again – it’s quite possible that the Disk I/O that has the potential to spoil this party?

Please feel free to correct any of my ramblings?

written by dcaddick

The T5545 Thin Client from HP is quite a neat mid-range device that has some nice features that can make your life quite easy, but so far it seems that it’s not all that easy to find out how to go about tweaking it to your environment and users?

I’ll update this later with some additional links to docs – but feel free to email me if you need additional info?

So some handy hints:
(This all applies to the latest Build 31 )

Logging on as Administrator – default password is root

Add HP or Debian Packages to T5545

• Fsunlock – unlocks file system (equivalent to XPe/WES’s EWF or FBWF)
• cd /media – or cd /mnt
• hpkg -i xxxx.hpk   or
• dpkg -i xxxx.deb
• fslock – locks the file system back up
• reboot

Use ezUpdate to automatically update image/packages/custom scripts/Stateless Settings/Persistent Settings
(This is also valid for the new ThinPro K2 build on the T5145)  
Do be aware that you do not need to endlessly reboot to test it – just call ezUpdate from the X Term Console?
·         If you need to validate what it’s doing then check the logs in ./writable/ezUpdate/log/ezUpdate.log using the MousePad from the Advanced area of the Control Panel
·         If you still do not have enough info then run “ezUpdate –d 5” to enable debug mode on the log
·         The order of what it will look for is:

• New Image
• Any new packages
• Custom
• Then check for valid Stateless profile
• Finally check for valid Persistent profile
  

  ezUpdate Admin Guide

·         If you’d like to test/demo the ezUpdate process then you could always *add* the rar package as shown here:

• Download this sample package: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/rar/download
• Put the package in the packages directory on the ezupdate server
• reboot or simply run ezupdate
• Check the log and you should find that it has installed the package correctly
• Run “dpkg –list” in the Terminal to show that rar is now an installed package

·         If you’d then like to remove the application, then this is how we can go about it:

• fsunlock
• dpkg -r rar    (this might need to be hpkg depending on where the package came from?)
• fslock
• reboot/run ezUpdate
• if it still looks like it might be there, then use the dpkg –purge command?

How to deploy ThinPro Settings via Altiris or HPDM
Link to doc here:

Configuring TeamTalk
Have you ever been frustrated or in the dark on how to configure TT when it comes to GUI Menus?  There are a ton of specific GUI configs commands in the Team Talk 7.0 manual chapter 21 command line.   The commands can be added to teemtalk_wrapper.sh.  These settings will apply to all connections from HP Connection Manager.
The file to modify is – /usr/bin/teemtalk_wrapper.sh

Modifying the Menu
If your user has a need to modify the Menu under ThinPro (say they don’t want the Control Center up and available for users) – use the following technique.  You can use it to display commands as well as long as you select the right command.
1)      Login as administrator
2)      Right click on the Menu
3)      Open the menu editor
4)      Click the (+) to add an entry
5)      Then the command to start a connection is
a.      Connection-mgr start $ID
b.      connection-mgr start type:label  (under the usr/bin directory)
ex. connection-mgr start ica:”My ICA”

Get back in after locking down?
Pressing CNTL+ALT+SHIFT+S will bring up  hptc-shutdown – the Shutdown dialog that will give the Switch to Admin Mode Option.

written by dcaddick

The best piece I have read from the IT Industry in the last two weeks or so is:

Why desktop virtualization projects fail

Desktop virtualization is one of the hottest topics of interest and a major initiative of many companies. Touted benefits include lower operating costs, simpler management and desktop mobility. Below we’ll explore what the barriers to wide-scale adoption of desktop virtualization solutions are and some approaches to deal with them. It’s not a fit for everyone in a company but it can be for many.

Challenge #1: Assuming desktop virtualization makes sense because thin clients are cheap - Many people assume that virtualizing desktops is going to be magnitudes cheaper because thin clients can be found for approximately $300-400 whereas a PC can cost $500-$1200.

Tip: Client costs are only part of the picture. Desktop virtualization can reduce capital expenditures but do not expect that to be the case in the first year. Building the infrastructure is expensive (storage, servers, licenses, etc.) and may be the same in the first year. Think about using existing PCs as clients instead of replacing them with thin clients. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs but the reduction in hardware costs may not be seen for a couple of years due to the infrastructure needing to be built. More importantly, operational expenses will be seen immediately and that is where the true cost savings can be found.

………   more at source

I have also collated below some of the details I have discovered around the latest news on PCoIP and HDX-3D

From Brian Madden:

Look out PC-over-IP! Citrix announces new host-side GPU-based encoding for HDX 3D

For me the most crucial part of this post is explaining this:

How HDX 3D works

On the remote host side, Citrix is releasing a custom VDA for the environments where you want to use HDX 3D. (The VDA, or “Virtual Desktop Agent,” is the software agent you install on your remote workstation OS that lets it participate in a XenDesktop farm and gives the ICA hosting capability to a desktop OS.) Having a separate VDA shouldn’t be a problem for anyone since this is a physical workstation host solution anyway, so it’s not like you’re sharing the same disk image with remote desktop VMs.

On the client side, HDX 3D is just another plug-in for the Citrix Receiver. (That’s newspeak for “it’s just another virtual channel for the regular ICA client.”)
HDX 3D lets you configure the image quality, so you can balance the bandwidth-to-user experience. (PC-over-IP lets you do this too.)

From a technical standpoint, the HDX 3D engine replaces the existing ICA progressive display capability. It lets the OpenGL or DirectX stuff render on the host, and then it scrapes them and makes what’s essentially like an M-JPEG movie which is streamed down and played on the client. In many ways this is similar to the way HP RGS and Teradici PC-over-IP.

……….    more at source

What this tells me is that this is right in the zone for HP’s Blade Workstation’s as they have Nvidia based GPU, and that the BladePC’s would not be in at all as they are AMD/ATI based hardware. It’s also interesting to note some more details coming out via this Citrix Community Blog HDX 3D – What Happened to Projects Pictor, Apollo and Prism? and the subsequent comments from Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Product Manager:

Though the first release is available for only XD customers, future releases will enable XA customers to get HDX 3D using VM Hosted Apps technology. And with GPU virtualization and related technologies in the future, we will enable support of HDX 3D on virtual machines as well.

And for VMware Brian Madden had this commentary…

After VMworld, VMware still has to prove they "get" desktops. 13 questions about their desktop strategy they need to answer.

The irony of this is that I really, really want VMware to be successful with desktops. Competition from VMware has caused Citrix to put more innovation into their desktop delivery products in 18 months than they have in the past ten years combined. If VMware rolls over on the desktop, I hope that the Symantec or Quest can step up to apply pressure to Citrix or else we’re going to have another decade of innovation ice age.

But back to the main topic: VMware’s lack of desktop vision.

At last year’s VMworld, we got all these great indications of what VMware was capable of in the desktop space. (Here’s my article from then where I could hardly contain my excitement about six desktop announcements.) And how did VMware follow up at this year’s VMworld?

• We got demos of the PC-over-IP and the client hypervisor. (This has a lot of promise and looks to be really great.)
• We learned that VMware will OEM RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles technologyfor some future release of View. (Not View 4 though, from what we can tell.)

So those were two great things. (Tactical, but still great.) Unfortunately that’s kind of where the good news from VMworld stopped:

• VMware demoed their client hypervisor known as CVP. (yay!) But we learned that it won’t be available until 2H 2010! Last year they said their client hypervisor was going to ship by the end of 2009, and now it’s another 8+ months away!?!
• The View futures session was just about View 4. VMware still hasn’t announced a release date, although the rumor is it’s still coming at some point this year. View 4 will have PC-over-IP, but little else new. (Oh, it will have vSphere 4 support.)

  …………    more at source

from Citrix Community blog:

• Desktop Virtualization is not Server Virtualization  (This title pretty much tells it like it is)
• Setting the Record Straight on XenDesktop (there’s not that much difference between XenDesktop and View apparently? )
• Interesting comment towards the bottom – Lastly, while I differ with most of what one VMware Community member, Rkelly, posted re View vs. XenDesktop, I have to say I agree with his final point for the IT team in any VMware shop:  "Download the trial versions of both products and see for yourself" . You just can’t beat a “Try before you buy”

From Alessandro and Virtualization.info

Virtual Computer partners with XenoCode

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization. Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio. It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

And lastly….  I haven’t see this before? The AppFactory, based in UK from the looks of it and promising to Virtualize your Apps from 149 pounds an App?
I wonder how well these guys will do? Very slick and professional web site, so it will be interesting to hear how well they do?

written by dcaddick