VM-Aware » VDI

Brian Madden Breathes Fresh Air Into VMworld

Paul Shannon — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:01:49 +0000

I attened the VDI vs TS presentation this afternoon presented by, the quite possibly mental, Brian Madden. I have to say that I haven’t been to a presentation that frank in a long time, possibly even ever!

I won’t rehash everything from the presentation because you can read the crux of most of the discussions here. However, I will say that the main points were that VDI is not ready to take on TS at the moment, but if the forthcoming promised features materialise then it soon could be.

If you don’t already subscribe to Brian’s blog you really should here.

Also keep your eyes peeled on Brian’s site as he promised to dig up an old post from Ron Oglesby that discussed VDI back in 2006. He wanted people to check out the comments section for some wild comments on VDI from die-hard TS heads. I think it is this post, but I might wrong so check his site anyway.

VMware View: An Introduction

Paul Shannon — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:50:56 +0000

I have recently installed a pilot of VMware View at a customer and found some great articles and posts before the install. One of the best for introductory information was over at brianmadden.com and written by Roland van der Kruk, check out all three parts here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

If you want to find out more about VMware VIew & Terminal Services and you happen to be attending VMworld Europe 2009, ten try and check out Brian’s presentation “VDI versus Terminal Services”.

Make Windows XP A Thin Client

Paul Shannon — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:33:48 +0000

I found an excellent article written on DABCC.com discussing ways to make Windows XP essentially a thin client. Some of the tweaks include:

Desktop Folder Redirection
Start Menu Redirection
Autologin
Loading iexplore As Shell

Very useful for all those people running VMware VDI as you can use these tips to load VDM in kiosk mode.

3Par Announce VMware VDI Storage Suite

Paul Shannon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:53:09 +0000

3Par have announced some back-end storage enhancements that can greatly improve the usability, scalability and performance of VMware VDI. Thin Copy Desktop has some of the following enhancements:

Automated Disktop Image Creation & Management – Storage level snapshots that are VMware VDI aware. This will apparently make desktops available in seconds instead of minutes/tens of minutes

Fast & Granular Recovery of Desktop Images – Recovery of desktop images in seconds via the use of scheduled snapshots

Greater Performance – Using Virtual Copy snapshots, which can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients

You can read all about it here.

Customising RDP Dialogs

Paul Shannon — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:33:59 +0000

Firstly, let me start by saying that not everyone is going to want to ‘tweak’ with the bowels of RDP, but if you are so inclined then check out this article.

I stumbled upon it when wondering how I could get people to stop simply disconnecting sessions and logging off properly.

The article helps you to change the disconnect dialog from looking like this:

To looking more like this:

As I said at the top of this post, not everyone should be poking around with this kind of thing in production, but it is very very handy for persistent offenders.

This tool obviously has many uses beyond RDP dialog customisation, so use your imagination.