Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

opensource

VMware View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1

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Just noticed that a new version of the VMware View Open Client has been released:

Latest Release: 4.0.0 Beta 1 (October 2, 2009)

VMware View Open Client version 4.0.0 Beta 1 is now available on the Downloads page.

Please see the release announcement for a summary of what’s included in this release.

Features

Some of the features included are:

The following features are NOT included in this release:

For a full list of features please refer to the README.txt file available with the distribution.

Compatibility

This release is compatible with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0, 2.1, and VMware View Manager 3.0 and 3.1.

If I have some time on my hands I will try to make a bootable stripped Linux CD that holds this client, or maybe a USB key is a better idea…. let me think about it.

The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10

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I used to be a Windows Administrator and have been using Windows since version 2.0. During my career for some weird reason when teams where formed I was always matched with Unix, Linux or Novell Admins. You can imagine I had a lot of discussions around Microsoft Windows. Some fair, some and probably most were heated. One of my big arguments for the Desktop and Windows in general has always been “user experience” and “simplicity”. Everyone can install a Windows machine.

With Windows you just pop in the CD, install, next-next-finish and everything works out of the box. Yeah I know during the early years Windows wasn’t plug and play but most vendors provided you with driver disks anyway. As of Windows 2000 most plug and play issues were solved and my arguments were rock solid because there wasn’t a Linux desktop or server that could do the same.

Well I had to reinstall my home system because it was saturated again, one of the bad habits of Windows I guess, and I thought what the heck let’s give Ubuntu a try again. So I downloaded the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 and tried the live CD to see if everything would work straight out of the box or not. For 8.04 this wasn’t the case, my wireless wasn’t recognized and my videocard had some weird problems.

Hurray for Ubuntu 8.10 it worked straight out of the box. I installed Ubuntu on my disk and the first thing I noticed that compared to Windows Vista or even Windows XP it boots up fast! So let’s see what do I need to install to have the same capabilities as I had with Windows Vista…

  • video media player -> VLC
  • ftd -> openftd
  • newsleecher -> hellanzb+lottanzb(gui for hellanzb)
  • audio media player -> rythmbox, which includes last.fm and internet radio
  • browsing -> firefox
  • picture editting -> gimp
  • office suite -> open office
  • desktop notes -> tomboy
  • ftp -> filezilla

These are the main applications I used on my home system, well besides VMware Workstation, but I own a license for that one so I just downloaded the Linux bundle. After a couple of weeks I must say that I’m impressed. Updating via “apt-get” or the update manager gui works perfect, same for installing new software. I love Compiz, which gives you an amazing 3D cube for your workspace, and makes switching between applications and desktops really easy.

So Ubuntu just rocks and no negative point so far?
Well, after an upgrade my wireless was toasted, the binary firmware file was gone so I had to recover it from the Ubuntu CD. And Auto-Login just doesn’t work. I tried everything, but still receive some weird error and I can’t fix it so far.

Besides these two little nags I do think Ubuntu 8.10 is definitely worth trying out. So if you’re like me and want to learn a bit more about Linux than this might be the perfect moment. Just 4 days and Ubuntu 8.10 will be released officially.

Bluebear’s Kodiak!

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I just received my beta invite for Bluebear’s Kodiak and will be testing it today. I am downloading a brand new Ubuntu 8.0.4 virtual appliance and will keep you guys up to date on this multi platform VirtualCenter management client.

If anyone wants an invite to the beta program than just drop your email here, or send me your email on duncan[@]yellow-bricks.com and I will hook you up. It’s still limited so be quick!

I’m all out. So you guys should help each other… over 60 invites within 24 hours. Bluebear is hot!

Xen HA clustering

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The company I work for, Ictivity, recently started testing with Xen(not Xensource!) and HA clustering. There were two case studies, one based on Suse and one based on Red Hat. Both definitely have it’s own advantages and disadvantages but it seemed promising to me. Today I noticed a blog on ONLamp.com about how to set this up. It’s a good read and gives you insight information. You can do this with open source only software so it will not get any cheaper than this. If this solution is suitable for an enterprise environment is definitely a point of discussion, but it is good to see there are more alternatives coming our way.

The idea of using virtual machines to build high available clusters is not new. Some software companies claim that virtualization is the answer to your HA problems, off course that’s not true. Yes, you can reduce downtime by migrating virtual machines to another physical machine for maintenance purposes or when you think hardware is about to fail, but if an application crashes you still need to make sure another application instance takes over the service. And by the time your hardware fails, it’s usually already too late to initiate the migration. So, for each and every application you still need to look at whether you want to have it constantly available, if you can afford the application to be down for some time, or if your users won’t mind having to relogin when one server fails.