Wandering Knowledge

vbridges vdi client running on a netbook

I finally carved out some time, re-requested an evaluation license, and installed Virtual Bridges VDI.  I’ve been impressed with what I’ve read so far and have been wanting to try this for a few months now.  Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Virtual Bridges provides a solution for running Windows and Linux guests in a virtualized environment to be offered out to thin clients, thick clients, home users, and disconnected users (utilizing virtualization on the client side).

This morning, I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a “spare” Dell PowerEdge 2950.  After the install, I did my updates and minor tweaks, then installed the 64-bit VERDE package from Virtual Bridges.  Following their documentation, I installed the VERDE KVM drivers, to take advantage of the Linux kernel’s virtualization/hypervisor technology.  After that, still following their documentation, I created a Windows XP SP3 guest and a user for that guest (”student”).  After updates and tweaking (for a “golden image”), I published and deployed the XP guest to the student account.  I then booted their LiveCD ISO (customized Ubuntu 9.04 system with the VERDE client installed) on an Acer netbook.  Works like a charm!  I gave the XP guest 512MB of RAM, but I’ll likely bump it to see if it makes a difference (seems a tiny bit sluggish).

In the next few days, I’ll create a Windows 7 guest and test it out.  I’ll also hopefully get with one of the teachers soon to test out Plato and a few other “Windows specific” applications to see how well they perform in the VDI environment.  So far, I’m impressed and excited.  The evaulation license has 26 more days on it and allows me to have 10 concurrent users.  I’m anxious to see how well it performs.

Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll get a chance to evaluate their cluster and cloud branch, as well as their SMART client (for disconnected and mobile clients).  I can see the cloud branch as a solution offering for our regional (Region 15) school districts.  It basically allows for centralized management and maintenance of guest images, but allows for distributed local authentication.  Each school district would use an image from the centralized repository, but clients would authenticate off of their own district’s local servers (whether it be Active Directory or other).

Here at Winters ISD, we’ve been fortunate to have acquired some new equipment a few months ago that will not fully be used until this summer.  That has given me some time to experiment with various open source cloud infrastructures.  The projects that I’ve been looking at include:

• Eucalyptus
• Enomaly
• openQRM
• OpenNebula

Both Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are included in the repositories for the newest version of Ubuntu (9.04).  With all things considered, I think I’m going to focus my efforts on Eucalyptus.  Some of the main reasons are that it’s now a focus for Canonical, it’s interface is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, so basically any third-party tools “should” work with Eucalyptus, and they just landed $5.5M in funding. I’m an Ubuntu guy, and with Canonical focusing efforts toward an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud using Eucalyptus, it seems a great way to go.

I’m keeping track of my thoughts, ideas, and progress at the Region 15 SchoolTech wiki.

I’m still contemplating organizing another Open Source Symosium this year.  I may put it off until next year since I’m strapped for “free-time”.  I had thought about trying to move it to Dallas, but my wife recommended that I keep it in San Angelo (afterall, the main purpose for having it in San Angelo in the first place was to bring an open source conference to this area).  There have also been thoughts of taking it to Austin, but again, the same reasons against taking to Dallas apply.

I’m also working on putting together a presentation on Edubuntu Classroom Server for schools in our region (Region 15).  I would like to do a half day workshop and let those interested “test drive” the thin client setup.  It would help if they were able to test some of the applications that they use in the classroom or lab on a daily basis.  It would be nice if something like this helped address the online testing requirements.

I’ll try to post updates on my progress of the Edubuntu Classroom Server demonstration.