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.

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”.

• 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.

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.

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.

This is great, but what if you want to administer the Virtual Machines using RDP?

Clicking here will open the article at source.

The lab started with the announcement that the software was still in beta and is about 2-3 months away from release. That said it looked very stable indeed and bodes well for a 3 month release date.

There is currently only a Windows native client for the VDM which means that you need to have a fat client running Windows to be able to connect to any of one’s allocated Virtual Desktops. There are however plans, possibly at release, to have Thin Client support for the likes of WYSE thin boxes embedded into the WYSE OS (which the demonstrations were being done on) and to have a Linux VDM client as well.

The VDM connection broker server creates a connection directly to any number of Virtual Center servers. It can also provision connections to the Virtual Desktop pool directly or can act as an SSL proxy with all traffic going through it.

Lots of very cool possibilities have been leveraged by the VDM using Active Directory’s Application Mode (ADAM), of which I knew nothing before this LAB. Lots of interesting information about ADAM can be found here. Essentially ADAM allows VDM manipulation of Active Directory without altering the actual Active Directory schema.

I managed to sneak out a couple of copies of the documentation so will be having a good read about how it leverages all these cool new features.