Join me for a look at a very different kind of shared storage. The winners of the vForum Sydney Booth award for bravery Coraid have a very innovative shared storage solution that uses a raw ethernet network to attach a lot of low cost but high performance storage.
My guest will be Chip Brodhun who was previously with the US Marine corp deploying virtualisation in a highly mobile and diverse organisation before joining Coraid.
Are you interested in learning more about vDS and vSphere Advanced Networking? If so, don’t miss out this week’s APAC virtualization podcast with Trevor Gerdes, System Engineer at VMware Australia.
I’m at Sydney airport on my way home from vForum and I’m trying to put together an impression of the event.
First off huge, over four thousand attendees, nearly double last year’s number and a quantum leap from my first VMware conference, the 2007 TSX event which had about four hundred people.
In the tradition of social media we bring you the first ever (and possibly last) vForum booth awards. Success is based on a top secret criteria of awarding points in several random and sarcastic categories, as well as a little honest opinion.
Rodney Haywood and Alastair Cooke have dedicated minutes of their time to bringing you the best and worst of the booths, saving your the arduous journey through the crowds.
This week our special guest is John Martin. John is a Principal Technologist in the Australia/New Zealand region for NetApp. John has an impressive background having worked for the major companies in the data storage industry, including Legato, Veritas, StorageTek and EMC.
My guest this week will be Sora Cho, who is the Director of Technical Services in the APAC region at Wyse. We will be talking about the what, how and why of thin clients for VMware View and other server based computing solutions.
This week I have had a Wyse P20 zero client as my primary device for a few days. This terminal uses hardware PCoIP from Teradici to connect to the software PCoIP component in the View Agent.
The back end was the same View 4.5 Beta, Windows 7 VM that I used from my laptop a couple of weeks ago. The terminal came with a slightly old firmware, I was able to update to latest firmware using a management virtual appliance however the firmware is not a View 4.5 specific firmware. Again I had two different monitors running at different resolutions and it was my main computing device. As with my full client test I was able to do what I do in my office and I forgot I was using a thin client.
I even taught a two day online course using WebEx. This was a big call for me because if anything went wrong I would have ten students unhappy. It was no problem and the students didn’t know.
I did have a couple of setup hiccups. One is that the terminal is very picky about it’s network connection, it only accepted a direct cable connection to my Allied Telesyn switch, it didn’t like my in wall cabling nor did it like my D-Link desktop switch. The other issue was that under a PCoIP connection the mouse needs to be directly connected to the terminal, not via a hub, or the mouse cursor disappears. The mouse still works but without a pointer it’s hard to know where you’re clicking.
Some things still didn’t work, the USB DVD writer still couldn’t write however I did find out how to get Windows Device Centre to install on the Windows 7 VM so it recognised my WinMo phone.
Overall the P20 is a great terminal, with dual DVI ports it’s a powerful terminal that’s easy to use. When View 4.5 is released and Teradici and Wyse have optimised the terminal firmware for the changed PCoIP protocol it should be even better.
My guest tomorrow will be the one and only Mike Laverick (@mike_laverick) of RTFM Education fame. As promised to Andre he will be giving us a sneak preview of his VMworld session on SRM misunderstanding and misconfigurations. Since Mike literally wrote the book on the subject it should be a great session, tell you friends.
This week’s once again we have another debut. Roman Tarnavski (@romant) will be hosting another episode of the APAC Virtualization Roundtable. Roman is an active member of the Australian virtualization community and works as a Senior Infrastructure Lead & Virtualization Lead for IBM’s Australia Development Labs.
Trying to be as agnostic as possible Roman will be interviewing his own company IBM. The guest is Anthony Russell, an experienced IT veteran with 10 years focused on Mobility, New Media and telecommunications. Anthony, is currently focused on delivering IBM’s Cloud Computing strategy.
I had a week out of the classroom last week, which I spent getting familiar with the vSphere Manage for Performance course. At the start of the week I decided to test working full time with a View desktop.
I have used View for remote work quite a bit, using the classroom PC and a ThinApped copy of the View client to get to my own VM desktop. It gets quite slow at times and I was pretty sure that it was due to my home ADSL service going slow. For the last week I’ve been using my laptop as a thin client and seeing what I could and couldn’t do.
I count myself as a power user so I had a dedicated VM with similar resources (Windows 7, 2vCPU, 3GB RAM) and applications to my usual laptop. I connected from my Dual core laptop using PCoIP in multimonitor mode. The multimonitor setup was important, my laptop has a 1680×1050 display and the external monitor is 1600×1200, so non-equal resolution support is important. PCoIP did a great job, even getting the wallpaper properly spread over the two screens which my local Win7 install doesn’t do right.
I was pleasantly surprised by the PCoIP session, I tended to forget that I was using a VM and not my local desktop. I was able to do all my work, including watching recorded WebEx presentations and RDP connections to remote labs, all the while playing audio through the view client to my laptop. I was able to do play things too, I even had two high def videos running at the same time. Better yet I was able to sync my iPad with iTunes, although I had issues with syncing my WinMo phone although that seems to be an install issue for Mobile Device Centre. Another failed test was burning the CDs I give to students during courses. Using USB redirection to get the drive into the VM, the burn failed with an error and the disk was corrupted.
One of the cool things was to be able to use the View client on my home theatre PC and watch the WebEx recordings on the big screen in my living room. Moving from one client to another was great. I didn’t try using Pocket Cloud to use the iPad to get to a full machine, maybe I’ll try that this week from a hotel room.
I was impressed, I’ve used server based computing many times in the past and the user experience was a compromise, particularly for multimedia. PCoIP on a LAN didn’t have a multimedia compromise, and little other compromise even for a power user.
A dual core laptop on the LAN isn’t a realistic real world View client, I hope to get a couple of thin clients in for the next weeks I’m at home and test with real devices. Hopefully a real thin client will give even better USB redirection.
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