HP/Neoware

Disclaimer……..

Dave Caddick — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:16:38 GMT

I have an old blog site at www.geekswithblogs.net/wallabyfan as well as the new one at www.techagility.info and things have been very quiet for the last three weeks or so as I have been under something of a cloud. It would appear that at some stage I may have inadvertently upset someone with one of my posts – and rather than approach me to discuss this the complaint has been forwarded in to local HP management here in Sydney.

I still have no details what so ever as to what the issue is (or was?) as no details have been forthcoming – however for the record I have updated my Disclaimer as detailed below:

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The opinions expressed within are my own and should not be attributed to any other Individual, Company or the one I work for.

I just happen to be a classic techie who is passionate about getting things to work as they should do (and are sometimes advertised and marketed as being able to?) and when I can I drop notes here to help others falling in to the same traps that I have fallen in to.

If this has helped then please pass it on - if you feel that I have commented in error or disagree then please feel free to discuss with me either publically or privately?

Cheers,
Dave

Please respect this Disclaimer for what it is?

I do not, nor never have, or intended to claim that my opinions expressed here are anything to do with anyone else, or any other company.

As much as I may express an opinion here in public, it is public much in the way that you might have a discussion over a glass of wine with friends and family at the end of dinner, and as such please feel free to launch in with your own “take” on the matter at hand, just as you would at dinner?

Thanks,
Dave

Future vision of VDI? What if the Hypervisor was cheaper and flexible enough to run on BladePC's/BladeWS's - could vMotion/XenMotion then switch on demand?

Dave Caddick — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:58:13 GMT

I am sure this is not really what VMware had in mind when they were touting VMware OnDemand? I'm guessing they had more of an idea that it would combine some of the benefits of ACE with ESX? ;-)

I have just got back from some training in Houston and while listening to a question from a colleague from the UK where he asked if "VDI was going to be able to use the full suite of Hypervisor functionality like vMotion..." and that got me thinking...

Some of the Conventional Wisdom around the place holds that VDI by itself will likely not be able to cover all of any one customers needs and most will more than likely need to look at quite possibly a number of different approaches to cover ALL employees and ALL Applications.

So with this in mind I'd be interested in your thoughts on the following idea?

Just a few thoughts around VDI??

Let's say that we stock a couple of decent servers with loads of resources and allows us to run quite a few VDI instances? OK? So one of the possible issues with the classic VDI so far is that if a user places a bit too much pressure on the resources then it has the potential to impact on all other users, being as it is a shared resource? (This is still one of the classic gotcha's in Terminal Server and Citrix PS - the session is sticky and it stays with the same server unless a logout/login occurs)

So one idea I'm kicking around is the possibility that if a user started something like a 120Mb Excel spreadsheet that might consume quite a bit of CPU then would it be possible to use the vMotion to transfer him to a BladePC, if they started 3 or 4 of them (or they needed more resources?) then transfer them to a BladeWS.....?

Seamlessly!! with the user completely unaware that this has happened!!

Now the fundamentals of vMotion (or XenMotion for that matter?) requires shared boot storage - BUT I don't think it needs to be NFS or iSCSI, etc. - the Citrix Provisioning Server or OS Streaming method like Neoware IM would probably work just as well in this scenario? As this then leaves the Virtual HardDisk/Storage in a common area accessible by the Vitrual Desktops regardless of whether they are running on VDI's, the BladePC's or the BladeWS's.

The other point is the similarity of CPU would possibly cause an issue, and this probably extends beyond just Intel/AMD? This appears to be a fundamental of vMotion/XenMotion? So this might not fly today, but it is possible that with improvements in the Hypervisors this issue might be overcome at some stage soon?

Anyway, what do you think of the *idea/concept*? As a user requires more CPU and resources they might be able to be transferred from shared resources (VDI on ESX) to individual resources (BladePC) and then high powered resources (BladeWS) - once the high intensity workload has finished then the user would be transferred seamlessly back through the stack to a VDI instance on the ESX server.

Please bear in mind that this is only a concept at the moment and there are clearly problems and issues to be overcome - but the main reason for this post is to ask if you think it has legs? What do you think?

Clearly the ESX/Hypervisor would need to be able to run on hardware outside of it’s current Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) but with Xen this might not be such an issue?

Is wonder if this is where XenDesktop is headed? ;-)

Change of location

Dave Caddick — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:08:46 GMT

Hi All,

I have been posting both at this site as well as at my new blogging home of www.techagility.info for a few weeks now, and although I still have some tweaking to do on the graphics side of things, it's time to open the doors for all. I will probably still drop the odd post this way, but essentially all is now going to the new site.

So the home page is at www.techagility.info and if you are after the feed then you can find it at www.techagility.info/feed

See you there? ;-)

Neoware e900 Thin Client Not Appropriate for Elementary School Students

Dave Caddick — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:48:20 GMT

As you may or may not know Neoware has a Thin Client called the e900 that is very rugged in an alloy housing that is capable of withstanding shock, water, dust etc. - BUT one thing it's not, is portable, unless of course you are someone like WalMart with a large distribution chain and mount these on your forklift trucks?

Still, as you are about to see, they are definitely not suitable for kids? ;-)

Range of Thin Client Laptops from HP

Dave Caddick — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:42:45 GMT

So news in from Engadget regarding HP to offer Solid State Drives in their Laptops - is this a lead in to having Thin Client like Laptops? - I'm hoping to be able to post more about this shortly.

HP to add SSD options to business-minded laptops

By Joshua Topolsky on ssd

Filed under: Laptops, Storage

We know that when it comes to a company like HP, you cats hang on its every word, waiting for a juicy tidbit of information, quietly hoping to be privy to another life-altering, ingenious decision. Well listen up folks, because we've got news. According to a report today, HP will be begin offering solid-state drives as an option for all of its professional series laptops, including the HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p, 6910p, and 8000 lines. The company's first NAND flash offering will be a whopping 64GB SSD, adding about $1000 in additional cost to the systems, though the company expects the prices to drop as solid-state proliferation increases. In all seriousness, HP isn't always on the cutting edge, but this is a smart decision, which -- luckily for us -- seems to be cropping up all over the map.