The best photo I've ever seen of a StorageTek unit:

"An automated magnetic tape vault at CERN computer center, seen on September 15th, 2008. The tapes are used to store the complete LHC data set, from which a fraction of the data is copied to overlying disk caches for fast and widespread access. The handling of the magnetic tape cartridges is now fully automated, as they are racked in vaults where they are moved between the storage shelves and the tape drives by robotic arms. (Claudia Marcelloni, Maximilien Brice, © CERN)" via The Boston Globe

This and other awesome photos have been posted to twitter over the weekend, because the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on – and will produce tons of data about zillions of hardly existing particles. Yet another special form of virtualization!

Yestday's world cup qualifier soccer match between Ireland and France sure ended with quite a stir, particularly due to the 1986 Maradona-like handling of the ball by one of France's strikers that gave France a 2-1 lead over Ireland.  The striker actually admits to having instinctively handled the ball in the penalty area and it is FIFA's inflexibility to leverage the available technology that's most interesting and disappointing to soccer fans like myself.  Read the full story on Yahoo... How difficult would it be to have a thin client like a Sun Ray placed behind every goalie's net, allowing a referee to watch an instant replay with the use of their smart card right then and there?  Maybe it will take a few years, but it is surely something that could easily be accomplished today. Sad that it will take process and people to let a ready product be useful in securely and cost-efficiently replaying what actually transpires. A loss for many sports fans until it does happen.

Here are the slides and some references for my closing talk at Swiss Intranet Summit in Zürich.

via Today's Inspirataion: Louis Glanzman: "The real painting artist"

In the spirit of, "Hey we fixed a bunch of bugs, why hold on to them?" VirtualBox 3.0.12 was released today.

You could read about the fixes or just go get the new version. 

-FB 

We all learn at an early age that sharing is the right thing to do.  I get to constantly remind my 3- and 5-year old girls about this very important aspect about being a good person.

How do I get from small kids sharing to the new Sun Ray Software 5 release?  Wait for it...wait for it....

It's another ThinkThin update about the Sun Ray Software wiki!

In my earlier posts, I talked about how you can use the Comment feature on any page to leave feedback. And, I still encourage everyone to keep doing that.

But, since the SRS 5 Early Access releases, we've provided the following User Tested page for all wiki users to share the USB devices they've tested with the new USB redirection feature.

Currently, Sun supports USB redirection for all USB devices that fall within the following device types:  flash drives, printers, scanners, USB-to-serial adapters, and USB-to-parallel adapters.

The USB Redirection User Tested List lets you (the Sun Ray user community) share what devices are working for you, including USB devices not in the supported device type categories.

This page already has over 200 edits and over 100 entries from a number of users. And, I just added a Recent Contributors section that dynamically shows who has made the latest edits to the page.

So, what are you waiting for?  If you are using the USB redirection feature and you want to share the devices you are using with this cool new feature, share away! 

- Paul, SRS documentation lead

"And now to something completely different". This famous line from Monty Python comes to mind whenever you click on a hyperlink that links to a PDF or ODF document. In order to indicate the type of the link I'm using icons by adding some lines to the stylesheet. Here is the code for GullFOSS, that you can copy and paste into your blog's stylesheet or CSS file without any modifications:

/* add odf icons for those links */
a[href$=".odp"] {
    padding-left: 17px;
    background: transparent url(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/resource/design/odp.gif) no-repeat center left; }

a[href$=".odt"] {
    padding-left: 17px;
    background: transparent url(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/resource/design/odt.gif) no-repeat center left; }

a[href$=".ods"] {
    padding-left: 17px;
    background: transparent url(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/resource/design/ods.gif) no-repeat center left; }

a[href$=".odg"] {
    padding-left: 17px;
    background: transparent url(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/resource/design/odg.gif) no-repeat center left; }

a[href$=".pdf"] {
    padding-left: 16px;
    background: transparent url(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/resource/design/pdf.gif) no-repeat center left; }

Finally an example. The PDF at the bottom of Bill Verplank sketches metaphors gets the PDF icon from the style statement above.

I recently gave an interview on Sun VDI and MySQL Cluster to Lenz Grimmer, MySQL Community Relations Manager. It has been published on dev.mysql.com. Check it out: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/tino-rachui-sun-vdi-cluster.html

-Tino

Sun Ray Software 5 was released today and I've been asked by lots of folks when they can expect to see the new features appear in Sun VDI Software. I'm proud to tell you that the next version of Sun VDI Software is just around the corner, so watch this space closely over the next few weeks or follow the Sun VDI Software Twitter feed to be the first to know when it's released.

Just some quick notes on what you can expect from Sun VDI Software 3.1:

• Most Sun Ray Software 5 features, including the Sun Desktop Access Client, Adobe Flash enhancements and USB redirection to Windows virtual desktops. (Read Angela's excellent post for more detail on the SRS 5 enhancements).
  
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V as a virtualization platform. Now you can mix and match Sun built-in virtualization, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V all in the same deployment.
  
• Support for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services as a desktop provider (that means you can do VDI and classic server-based computing all from Sun VDI Software!).
• Additional virtual desktop OS support (including Windows 7 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11).
• And lots of other smaller improvements.

We're hope you share our excitement about the incredible things we have going in desktop virtualization at Sun!

 -Chris

The Sun Desktop Virtualization Marketing team is pleased to announce the release of Sun Ray Software 5!

This release focuses on improving the end user experience with a broader choice of end client devices, improved Adobe Flash performance and expanded support for USB peripheral devices. Additionally, Sun Ray Software 5 improves application server support, by adding support for Windows Server 2008.

The Sun Desktop Access Client (SDAC) is revolutionizing Sun Ray Software as we know it, making our vision and strategy of providing simple, user-friendly access to a centralized virtual desktop environment from nearly any device a reality. Easily installed on Windows PCs, the Sun Desktop Access Client removes the dependency on Sun Ray hardware clients, providing full access to Sun Ray infrastructure. It provides a simplified solution for end-users who do not fit the desktop thin client model, and require continued use of their current Windows PC. As well, it helps to mitigate the initial costs of migration to Sun's desktop technology by repurposing existing PCs. Providing client device choice to the customer helps our customers embrace our technology and enables them to become more environmentally friendly by extending the lifecyle of existing PCs rather than disposing of them into a landfill.

Unlike some of our competitors, the Sun Desktop Access Client frees users from being restricted to a particular device and enables them to choose whatever device best suits their needs. In addition to client choice, another key challenge CIOs often face, is how to provide a true PC experience to their end users from a virtualized desktop environment. This release beats many of our competitors to market by introducing multimedia enhancements for Adobe Flash audio and video on both the Sun Ray hardware clients, as well as any Sun Desktop Access Client enabled PC.

In addition to expanding client device choice and adding Adobe Flash multimedia acceleration, Sun virtual desktop users can now expect similar peripheral connectivity with their Sun Ray thin client environment that they would normally have with their standard PCs. Sun Ray Software 5 now enables users to connect many of their favorite USB devices to a Sun Ray hardware client, connecting them to their Windows XP virtual desktop environment. Peripheral support includes a broad range of devices such as USB flash storage devices, printers and scanners.

Finally, Sun Ray Software 5 includes support for Windows Server 2008, enabling access to applications running on Windows Server 2008 in 32 bit color. Support for Windows Server 2008 TS Session Broker is also included.

Read more about it at www.sun.com/software/sunray!

Angela Carducci
Product Line Manager Desktop Virtualization Marketing
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
angela.carducci@sun.com
twitter.com/angelacarducci
http://www.sun.com/vdi

Sun Ray Software 5 Released
See: http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2009-1110/feature/index.jsp

SRS 5 includes:

• SRSS 4.2
• SRWC 2.2
• SDAC 1.0

See new feature details at & download from URL above.

> Swiss Intranet Summit, Zürich. 17-19 Nov 2009

I should better get my closing talk ready...

I was asked to help out at the LISA conference that was held last week in Baltimore, MD.  I won't waste your time with the subjects that I was asked to present - though I may follow up with an interesting demonstration that we put together.  No, the highlight for Sun Ray was saving a fat client from near collapse on the exhibition floor. One of the demonstrators in the Sun booth was planning to showcase the amazing analytics of our open storage platform using a VPN connected laptop. Basically, the plan was to VPN in to Sun where he could then connect via RDP to a demonstration system up and running in a lab.  The problem with the plan was that the network inside and from the hotel was absolutely horrible.

So, what do you do when you are relying on the network for the lion's share of your demonstration and it is an absolutely dog?  Remove the fat client from the picture and insert a 100% network based computer?  Well, that is just what we did.  We replaced the high end laptop with a Sun Ray 270.  From there we leveraged the VPN capabilities of the device to connect back in to Sun. Once connected, we launched the Windows Connector to his demonstration machine and .... presto, the demo was a success.  The performance of the Sun Ray device was head and shoulders above the week performance turned in by the VPN connected laptop due to the use of the ALP protocol. The adaptive nature of the protocol proved its worth adjusting to congestion on the network and delivering a snappy desktop experience.

World Usability Day 2009 is Thursday this week. The topic in 2009 is Designing for a Sustainable World. Hence check worldusabilityday.org for an event nearby – easy and CO₂-friendly to reach.

Editor's picks (that's me):

• WUD Prague with the Sun NetBeans UX team and the special guest Mr. Sun A11y Peter Korn.
• WUD Hamburg with a special session on sustainability.
  

This is a recipe how to export a VirtualBox desktop out of VDI 3 to a destination Solaris VirtualBox host. It is based on Dirk’s procedure and contains some modifications to make it work for me.

1. Tell the iSCSI initiator on the destination VitualBox host to accept static iSCSI connections:

iscsiadm modify discovery --static enable



2. Find out the IQN of the iSCSI target of the desktop to export. The easiest way is to look at the desktop as it is registered on the VirtualBox host. Here you can use the command:

VBoxManage list -l vms

It will show also the IQN and the host of the connected LUN. An IQN looks like this:

iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:c856c247-you-do-not-have-to-read-this-9318dd9d6b48



3. Mount the LUN into your destination VirtualBox host:

iscsiadm add static-config <IQN>,<IP>

The IP is the IP of the storage server – it is not its host name.

4. List the new target

iscsiadm list target -S

The last line contains the important output: OS Device Name, e.g.:

/dev/rdsk/c2t600144F04AD2FA0C0000144FEDF91800d0s2



5. Make a raw copy of the content:

dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t600144F04AD2FA0C0000144FEDF91800d0p0 of=/var/tmp/image.out

Note, replace the s2 at the end of the raw disk name with p0. Don’t ask why. And you will have a lot of time not to ask why because the copy operation takes quite some time.

6. Convert the raw image into a VDI file:

VBoxManage convertfromraw /var/tmp/image.out /var/tmp/image.vdi --format VDI --variant Standard

Dirk’s convertdd was not available on my Solaris machine, but VBoxManage convertfromraw does the same.

Last but not least it should be mentioned that all this is obsolete for VDI 3.1. We have added a function to export a VirtualBox desktop directly from the Sun VDI administration:

Manchester – Leeds – Camberley, Surrey – London – Coventry – Edinburgh
Sun's Desktop Virtualisation Roadshow is coming to the United Kingdom.

Overview – Agenda – Dates and Registration between now and Feb 2010.

[Photo: CC by Jim Linwood]

Here is yet another wonderful reason why booth #415 is hot at EDUCAUSE 2009 in Denver.

[Image taken from Project Wonderland v0.5 User Preview 2]

A special talk on Wonderland by Kevin Roebuck is on Thursday 2:20pm - 3:10pm (Korbel Ballroom 3B): Sun Microsystems, An EDUCAUSE Gold Partner - Project Wonderland and the Age of Immersive Education

Overview - Agenda - Register

BTW_ sorry, green hills were not available in the image stock library. But rain is almost guaranteed.

EDUCAUSE 2009 is ready to start this week in Denver /Colorado. Do not miss to check out Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – Sun VDI –  at booth #415 (floor plan).

See also Dirk’s posting on Sun VDI for the Education Market.

Picks from the conference schedule:

• Seminar 03T - Sun Microsystems
  Tuesday 8:00am - 2:30pm (Off-Site Tour)
  
  
• Virtual Desktops: 60 Percent Cheaper, but Are They Worth It?
  Gerard Flynn, Thomas Hoover
  Wednesday 3:50pm - 4:40pm (Korbel Ballroom 4A/B)
  
  
• Deploying and Managing Desktop Virtualization for University Students and Faculty
  Jeff Cunningham
  Wednesday 4:55pm - 6:10pm (Hall F, Table 65)
  
  
• "I'm Thin and Green": Reducing the Desktop Carbon Footprint While Offering Anywhere, Anytime Computing Services
  Richard Toeniskoetter
  Thursday 8:10am - 9:00am (Korbel Ballroom 1E/F)
  
  
• It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right
  Lawrence Lessig
  Thursday 9:30am - 11:00am (Wells Fargo Theater)
  
  
• Sun Microsystems, An EDUCAUSE Gold Partner - Project Wonderland and the Age of Immersive Education
  Kevin Roebuck
  Thursday 2:20pm - 3:10pm (Korbel Ballroom 3B)

From page four of Oracle's Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ

"Yes, Oracle plans to continue Sun’s “desktop to datacenter virtualization” strategy and integrate with Oracle’s virtualization products. By unifying management across desktop virtualization, server virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization, Oracle and Sun provide comprehensive, flexible, eco-efficient solutions to maximize utilization, consolidate to reduce costs, increase productivity, and decrease management complexity.

We expect to continue Sun’s desktop virtualization products: VDI, Secure Global Desktop, Sun Ray, and VirtualBox."

Ed note: Recommended Music to Read By

A couple of slides to show the architecture and new features of Sun VDI 3.1:

// republished by Tanweer Ahmad
// backlink from Sun System News, 3-Nov-2009

Hi,

Today I want to have a brief look at Sun VDI with the focus on the education market. And this just because the interest in that segment is quickly raising for VDI solutions. There are some specific requirements for this market:

• Costs are important for everyone, but budgets in the education market are typically the smallest.
• Non Windows desktops have a big footprint driven again through costs and also as students are more open and flexible towards alternative desktops.
• Administration needs to be straightforward. In schools or training setups you typically find the teacher doing the administration and setup.
• Especially the clients need to be zero managed. Or in other words clients need to be installed in a plug and play manner.
• Noise reduction, students and trainees simply need to concentrate on their work.
• All data and configuration should always be on the server. Only interface for the students might be a USB stick to transfer their homework.
• Students should learn how to use certain applications but also to control and administrate their own desktop. This requires a sandbox for the students where they can experiment without impacting the IT environment or other students.

Sun VDI is specifically suitable for the requirements of the education market. The solution is completely server based, meaning all desktops are hosted on servers, while the desktop display and interaction is done on ultra thin clients - called Sun Rays - that do not hold any state. Or in other words you can unplug the device from the network or power without losing your session or any data.

The way how such a deployment is operated is quite simple. After the setup of the system the administrator imports a desktop that he has previously created on his laptop using VirtualBox. This desktop is called a template. Thereafter, the administrator typically just replicates (clones) the template to as many instances as he needs. This replication is completed within minutes. Finally the administrator assigns his users to the new replicated desktops and the setup is done. Now the students can login into a system, select their desktop and are ready to work. How long the desktop belongs to the student depends on the policies that the administrator defines. This can be a one time usage, so desktops are deleted after logout, desktops can stay permanently with the student or something in between. Below I have a couple of examples how Sun VDI can be deployed from small to larger deployments:

Sun VDI for schools

This is an example of an VDI deployment in a school in Italy. The school has just a single server and about 10 Sun Rays deployed into various rooms in the school. The desktops deployed are based on the Edubuntu distribution. The server itself can a be workstation such as the Ultra 27, with 12 GB of RAM and 2 hard disks. The VDI demo guide explains pretty well, how such a setup could be done. For a final rollout just a few adaptations need to happen.

Sun VDI for Training Centers

A second use case is actually a training center, where the students learn about a certain piece of software. Here are aspects such as rolling out fresh training environments (desktops) within a short amount of time important. And it is also important that the setup can be reverted in a short amount of time. This is all covered by Sun VDI in a very flexible manner. An example deployment of a training center for 100 students would require 3 servers, such as the X4170 configured with 2CPU, 48GB RAM, 2 *146 GB disks and 4 Ethernet ports. In addition you would need one storage server, that stores all the desktop images. Here a 7110 could be suitable, but this depends on the type of training that should be executed. It is important to note, that such a setup would allow one of the servers to be down, while the other servers still manage the remaining load to large extend.

Sun VDI for Universities

I don't have specific pictures of large cross campus deployments. But the principal remains the same. This can actually best be documented by one of the Sun VDI deployments that we did at the JavaOne event last June. More than10000 conference participants could use their own personalized desktop for the duration of the event. And a deployment for a university would not look that much different.
I hope this has been some valuable information and actually has not been too techie. If you want to try it out, just have a look at our VDI 3.1 EA and the related documentation.
Cheers,Dirk

After 4 years, 9 months and 9 days of extremely loyal service, it is time for my Motorola A1000 to enter retirement. It is a shame that Motorola couldn't see that far into the future, the A1000 was back then to me what my iPhone 3GS is now - a marvelous piece of technology well ahead of its time.

But then, anything is possible. Like for example Ed Zander interviewing Larry Ellison about Sun. Something only an old Sun employee with an old *Motorola* A1000 could see through a different light.

Still, a marvelous piece of technology. 2004-2009 (and it got hammered, didn't it?!)



Yes, photo taken with the iPhone, but it's not 3 megapixel - Apple decided that we don't want to email our own photos at the original resolution ;)

The hard-drive(s) of your virtual machines are simply files which are stored typically on the host's filesystem. On my Mac they're in 

~/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/

VirtualBox understands several disk formats including:

• .vdi or "Virtual Disk Image", the native format for VirtualBox
• .vmdk - VMware's format
• .vhd - Microsoft's format

This means that if you have an existing hard drive from another virtualization platform, you can plug it into a VirtualBox vm by telling the system about it using the Virtual Media Manager...

 And then configuring it in the vm's Storage configuration dialog (or via the command line):

Given that VirtualBox not only understands, but can also create, these different formats, one obvious question is "what is the difference?" or "which one is best?" 

One of the VirtualBox team (thanks Klaus) explained:

"The major difference is that VDI uses relatively large blocks (1MB) when growing an image, and thus has less overhead for block pointers etc. but isn't ultimately space efficient in the sense that if a single byte is non-zero in such a 1MB block the entire space is used.
VMDK in contrast uses 64K blocks, and thus has more management overhead and generally a bit less disk space consumption
What offsets this is that VDI is more efficient when it comes to snapshots."

So now you know!

- FB 

Hi,

Sun VDI 3.1 Early Access has been released last Tuesday. This is not just a minor update, but we have added a number of new things that might be of interest for people:

• Microsoft Hyper-V support:
  Sun VDI introduces Hyper-V as a new desktop provider. Virtual desktops are provisioned using ZFS, which allows a fast deployment based on ZFS cloning and copy-on-write semantics. Far more scalable than any other VDI storage solution in the market.
• Microsoft RDS support:
  It is possible to run mixed environments of VDI and Terminal Services. All under the same management infrastructure.
• VirtualBox 3.0.x
  Most prominent feature is the guest multi processor support (guest SMP)
• Template Management module
  Template management has been introduced for better keeping track of template revisions and controlling the staging and rollout of new template revisions.
• Integrated webconsole for VirtualBox
  The webconsole allows to do in-place modifications of templates and desktops with the management UI. It can run in any browser that supports Adobe Flash.
• Host and Storage Maintenance
  There is a new module that takes care of controlled outages of hosts and storages. You schedule outages and suspend running virtual desktops or migrate them to other available hosts.  
• Virtual Networking
  There is now the option of isolating the virtual desktop network traffic per desktop pool. Or you can assign multiple subnets to virtual desktops.
• RDP client configuration per desktop pool
  The access for Sun Ray clients can now be configured on a per pool basis. All RDP configuration settings can be controlled.
• Sun Desktop Access Client
  There is a new client, the software version of the Sun Ray included in the release.
• Flash acceleration for MS Windows XP and 2003 desktops
• USB redirection for MS Windows XP desktops and all hosted VirtualBox guest OSs

These are just the highlights. Many more things went into the EA. Just have a look. The download is here. Documentation can be found on the VDI Wiki. If you have some questions or issues you can contact us on the VDI forum. And of course your feedback is important to us. Please take the EA survey, it takes just 5 minutes. Loads of the features are there because of your feedback.

Cheers,

Dirk

Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.1 (VDI 3.1) is in early-access. Please check out the new version and help us to get the missing bits and pixels into the right spots.

> Quick Overview
> Preliminary Documentation
> Announcement and Download

In case you have missed this. There exist a document "Virtualization for MySQL on VMware: Best Practices and Performance Guide" which provides a comparison of virtualized MySQL Server instances running on VMware ESX with non-virtualized MySQL Server instances running on bare-metal. Additionally the document contains "Best Practice" configurations for running MySQL Server on VMware ESX. Please note that the document is about MySQL Server and not MySQL Cluster which has to run on bare-metal.

Why is this all important in the context of VDI 3.x? You should have heard meanwhile that Sun VDI 3.x is making use of MySQL to host the VDI configuration. Secondly for the VDI Single Host configuration which we have introduced with VDI 3 Patch 2 you have to use a MySQL Server. With the ability to run MySQL Server in a virtualized environment you also gain the possibility to run the whole VDI Single Host configuration in a virtualized environment. You have to play with it a little bit though as we haven't tested this particular configuration extensively in our labs yet.