Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Sun Ray Virtual Display Client

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sunray

I thought I would take a break from my usual material and post something a little different. Please forgive me as this article bares little technical value but I just felt like posting anyway. Like every company out there we’ve been involved in evaluating the dizzying array of Thin Client and Virtual Desktop solutions on the market today.

I recently had the opportunity to evaluate the Sun Ray 270 Virtual Display Client solution from Sun Microsystems. It’s a really clean all in one solution that features a 17″ display with an integrated Smart Card reader. The solution required the use of a Sun Solaris x86 server to act as the middleware between either a Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix Metaframe Server. Users sessions were initiated by the insertion of a Smart Card and the solution excelled at hotdesking, allowing a user to remove their Smart Card and go to another Sun Ray and pickup exactly where they left off from the previous session by simply inserting their Smart Card and entering their password (if it was configured to prompt for a password).

The Sun Ray client located the Sun Solaris servers within the same local network by use of a broadcast packet. When the Sun Ray client was outside the local network we had to configure special DHCP options which enabled the Sun Ray to “locate” to the back-end Sun Solaris servers.

We did have some interoperability issues with Windows 2008 Terminal Services Session Broker that Sun hopes to have resolved sometime in the coming year.

The only real feature the device was missing was an integrated 802.11 wireless solution. The reseller did point out that the Sun Ray can be paired with a few 802.11 bridges to provide wireless connectivity.

While we didn’t actually select the Sun Ray for the project we were evaluating I was really impressed with the solution and would advise anyone looking at thin client solutions to give their nearest Sun reseller a call. If your interested in hotdesking and/or Smart Card support in a thin client then you should definitely check out this solution.

Cheers!

RSS Feeds

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I thought I would take a quick second to let everyone know that there are two RRS feeds for this blog. The first feed is for the articles that get posted while the second is for the comments made by readers like yourself and me. There are a lot of really helpful tips and information that can be found in the comments from some very insightful readers.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/michaelfmcnamara

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While there are approximately 50 readers subscribed to the main article RSS feed there is no one subscribed to the comments RSS feed.

Please feel free to comment on any article, especially if you think the article is incorrect and/or misleading. I’m also interested in soliciting information for future articles. What would you be interested in hear more about?

Thanks for reading!

Cheers!

VirtualBox 2.0.0 Released

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While this isn’t generally within the realm of the topics that I discuss here I was impressed enough to give it a blurb. A few months ago I started playing around with a few of the different virtual desktop solutions available. I wasn’t really looking to spend any $$$ so I looked around at all the free and open source solutions. I stumbled across VirtualBox which had recently been acquired by Sun Microsystems and was very impressed. I had VirtualBox installed on a Windows XP desktop within minutes and had an Ubuntu 8.04 installation up and running in a virtual window within an hour.

On September 4, 2008 VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released. There’s suppose to be some significant performance increases in this release including support for SATA NCQ (Native Command Queuing) when using raw disks and Nested Paging on AMD machines. This release also promises support for 64 bit guest hosts. You can find the full change log here.

If you’re looking to toy with Linux, VirtualBox makes it really easy to install Linux on top of your existing Windows XP desktop/laptop without the worry of destroying your personal computer. While I still dual boot a number of my desktops/laptops I’ve been finding VirtualBox almost indispensable in my daily work activities. There are even a number of organizations running VirtualBox as a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution from a number of different thin clients.

You might even be persuaded to load up a virtual machine to check out an upcoming clone of Microsoft Windows called ReactOS. It’s not based on Linux in any fashion but promises to be compatible with all software that can run on Microsoft Windows. While it’s still in it’s infancy (alpha) it will be interesting to see how Microsoft will respond if it ever starts to gather steam.

VirtualBox is definitely worth the time and effort to download and install if your interested in a virtual desktop solution.

Cheers!

Verizon FiOS TV Channel Re-alignment

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It appears that Verizon is going to be performing a channel re-alignment on September 11, 2008 here in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. I know there have been all sorts of discussions on the Internet about the date, some receiving notification that the date of the conversion was September 2 and some September 11. I just noticed on the FiOS TV Guide this morning that almost all the channels now list their “new” channel number along with the date that the channel will change (move).

In a recent post I mentioned how Verizon was doing away with all the analog channels. They were doing this for a number of reasons, one obvious reason was to meet the government’s mandate of going all digital by February 2009, and another was to help free up “space” for additional HD stations. I believe there are suppose to be quite a few new HD stations added in the channel re-alignment.

I’ve also heard quite a bit of discussion about the terrible compression that Comcast is currently inflicting on a great many of their HD channels. If you have FiOS TV/Internet service available in your area I would suggest you strongly consider making the switch. I’ve been very pleased with the service and reliability to date.

Cheers!

Update: Wednesday September 10, 2008
I’ve managed to locate the new TV channel lineup for Southeastern Pennsylvania on Verizon’s website.

Update: Thursday September 18, 2008
The channel re-alignment occurred just as promised. I’m fairly pleased with the new channel lineup and I hear that there are going to be quite a few new HD channels added in the coming months so I’m really excited.

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