Windows 2008 R2 SP1 – VDI substitute ?

What is one of major limitations for not using Terminal services in previous versions of Windows Server family. Slow RDP performance? Also, but not so critical. We could say that was language choice pretty poor prior to 2008 R2 SP1. 

Check here if your language is already available!

 

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With your local language pack interface become quite similar to localized  Windows 7. So why not use this technology instead of expensive VDI ? At least for users with well known business applications.

I left out performance issues for the end , but I can assure you that Remote Desktop Connection speed over 2008 R2 SP1 rocks.  Non-believers check out this link.

Price. Much more expensive that previous versions. Check with your local dealer.

Twitter is over capacity

 

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night clouding …

2.1-Copy (1) of lab-setup.2

Poor’s man LAB (getting some muscles)

 
 

 

 

1) LAB hardware details

a. Node1

CPU  : 6 core AMD

RAM  : 8 GB DDR3

DISK : 1 TB RAID 1

OS : Windows 7

HYPERVISOR : Vmware Workstation 7.1

b. Node2 and Node3

CPU 4 Core Intel

RAM : 6 GB DDR3

DISK : 512 GB

OS : Ubuntu 64 bit

Future of Poor’s man LAB (moving to EC2)

As you have probably noticed, I’ve moved my blog to Amazon EC2 cloud. I had plans for my home lab but recently I’m focusing only on EC2 cloud and solutions for it. You can check out my current home lab setup here.  Following posts will cover basics of EC2 and it’s use case scenarios.  So please stay tuned for more.

How big aliens really are ?

Let’s talk about something different now. Technology has enabled us to see things that would otherwise remain unseen.

I’ve recently watched some very cool videos on youtube, that show us how small Earth and Sun are compared to some other big stars. The biggest known star VY Canis Majoris is so giggantic, that you  need 1100 years to travel around by  plane that goes 900 km per hour.

link to the video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

from wikipedia

There are billions and billions of galaxies out there and I firmly believe the Earth is not the only planet with living organisms.

Therefore, the question that suddenly crossed my mind is, if there are such big stars out there with such enormous planets, there must also be some very big creatures / living beings on those planets. So huge that, we simply cannot imagine them. Creatures could easily be 1000 times bigger than those we know  on Earth.

If we develop such thinking further on, let’s say that there are some very intelligent creatures out there, which are 1000 times bigger than us. They probably live much longer than we do and travel much faster than we are capable. Their space ship is probably much bigger than our Earth.

I don’t want to be pessimistic but just maybe we are simply too small to discover much more than we already have.

Night Cloudin’ – clouds are here to stay, but what will they bring ?

Nothing like a good night clubbing!

Clouds are here to stay. Even weather here in Europe says so. And that, my fellows and ladies, will bring much fun into the whole business of IT. Well, fun is already here. Everybody wants clouds. From virtualization vendors, hardware vendors, security vendors, networks vendors, database vendors … Because, hey people: almost everything on the road is going to be virtualized soon. We need to take another step to evolve further. We must not wait now. Everything that we do related to IT will be published in some big brain that will exist in  clouds all over the world. No more local – think global!.

And that is what cloud computing brings. We’re soon gonna get a whole new perspective of idea what IT is. IT as we see it today will be washed down the toilet. Hardware infrastructure in companies will disappear overnight. We will soon have some night cloudin’ in action here.

Big players will take things in their hands. Well, actually they’ve  already had.  And the fight is furious.

Speaking more in IT terms: private and public companies will borrow resources in private/public clouds or mixed hybrid clouds and won’t have any local IT staff and infrastructure at all. You will have your gadget and access to your workload somewhere in the cloud and that’s it.

Poor’s man LAB

A few words about the title. Running ESXi from Workstation can be a nice feature to do some tests that would otherwise require a few dedicated servers at least.  Instead of that we can do it on a PC or laptop. What’s described in this post is not the only “how to” do it. You will find many examples on the internet. For start you can check great blog links provided in the links section of the page.

In this chapter our goal is quite simple. We need to provide test environment on our Windows 7 machine with two ESXi hosts and VCenter on the latest 4.1 version of Vmware products. In later chapters we will use this as a ground for other more advanced setups that VMWare offers and can be done in a home lab.

Of course we will need some nice piece of hardware to run the whole thing:

Must have components are :

  • Intel VT-x or  AMD-V capable CPU
  • at least 4 GB of RAM, preferably 8 GB
  • 200 GB or more of free disk space

Currently my system consists of :

  • AMD six core
  • 16 GB RAM

Software , use latest versions

  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
  • Vmware workstation 7.1 EVAL
  • Vsphere VMvisor 4.1 (esxi) – FREE
  • Vsphere Vcenter 4.1 EVAL
  • Windows 2008 R2 Core
  • Windows XP Pro 64 bit
  • Openfiler or Stormagic SvSAN

Not all software mentioned above is free, however you can get trial / evaluation versions of it.