Archive for June, 2010
Cisco Tablet: Rumour becomes Truth
Two month ago I’ve written an article about some rumour saying that Cisco is working on their own tablet. This rumour became truth today: Cisco announced a new business tablet called Cius. The 7-inch screen device is powered by an Intel Atom processor running at 1.6 GHz and weighs 0,5 kg. According to Cisco the battery should run for 8 hours, which is 2h less then the iPad. As the iPhone 4, the Cius comes with two cameras. The front-facing cam records in high definition and the camera at the back does 5 megapixel. Video conferencing shouldn’t be a problem with that. It supports Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and 3G. 4G should be available at a later time. I really like the micro USB port which definitely and the SD card slot. The OS is Android and with that it has access to the Android Marketplace which offers thousands of applications. The price is targeted for less then $1000. Will this be the next Boom in the tablet market? Possibly companies see this device more in the business space then the iPad which comes in my eyes as a consumer tablet. I’m looking forward to see it live once! This could be a great way to access your virtual desktop.
Upgrading VMware Tools in a virtual desktop causes PCoIP connections to fail
You may have already read about an issue where upgrading your ESX 4.0 host breaks connections to hosted virtual desktops with the PCoIP protocol. This issue only occurs when you’re using ESX 4.0 with VMWare View 4.0 and you’ve upgraded the host to Update 2. VMware released a permanent fix for that.
Delete a Replica Server from a server group
For high availability of the View Manager environment it’s possible to add a maximum of 4 additional connection servers, called Replica servers to one View connection server group. In total you’ll have 5 servers dealing with the connecting users. During the installation of a replica server it is manually added to the server group by the administrator and it’s configuration data is written to the View LDAP database afterwards. The new server itself does create a copy of the existing View LDAP instance and replicate all data. During operations all changes on the View servers including the Global Settings, the users and the desktops are propagated between all servers in the View connection server group. If one of the replica servers is removed from the group by disconnection or installation which is permanent it is recommend to delete this servers from the View LDAP.
Virtual Printing to the native printer driver in VMware View
Printing in a VMware View environment does almost look like printing on a physical desktop for the user. For example the user works with some office application and wants to print the document on his local connected Canon iP5300 printer. This is an ink jet printer and it does have some special features integrated with the original Canon printer driver. The user does press the print button and wants to set some properties for printing the document.
The mysterious of Chromoting
When Google came up with Chrome OS I guess some of the product manager hearts in the big operating system companies stopped bumping for a bit. Google with their own operating system, build on Linux, driven by the open source community and including every applications you need for a business desktop like office apps, collaboration all based on the web. But is web apps really just what you need? What about legacy native applications running on Windows, Mac or Linux? The Register has an exclusive story based on a public email from a Google engineer and some follow up correspondence which talks about a remote feature called Chromoting. What’s behind that? How will Google technically implement that feature? Maybe RDP, VNC, X11, ICA, HDX, NX……..PCoIP? How would a connection to the legacy system look like? Are they going to use a broker to manage the connection? Loads of questions and a huge room for rumour.
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 7
Web applications should be platform independent because their are standards like HTML which can be interpreted by any browser out there. They should, but many web applications are not true web applications. They use components like ActiveX or special plug-ins for the browser. Siebel is one good example for that. Loads of companies invested in web applications in the last few years and many of them are tight connected to a dedicated browser. But what if a browser goes EOL, like we see with Internet Explorer 6 today? Internet Explorer 6 can’t be installed natively on Windows 7, but many web applications still depends on it. For a company that means that they can’t move to new client operating systems, have to redesign the applications or find another way to run the legacy web application. On the VMware ThinApp blog there was an article published two days ago, which brings some videos showing how IE6 can run on Windows 7 with a Tech Preview of Thinapp.
