In this series of posts I’m going to be looking at the all new 10ZiG 5818v Thin Client. Recently released and coming with Intel Atom D2550 CPU this thin client sets its self apart from others with the introduction of Windows Embedded 8 (WE8). WE8 is essentially a cut down version of Windows 8 that is focused on devices that have… Read more
Category: Virtualization
The articles below delve into the wonderful energy saving world that is Virtualization. For the uninitiated Virtualization is the art of running multiple operating systems on a single item of physical hardware (commonly a server).
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Case Study – Education
As anyone who reads my blog knows I am a strong advocate for VDI techonlogies particulary Citrix VDI-in-a-Box which has the key advantage of being able to use local storage (which is great for SSDs!). As part of this I’m now happy to report that Citrix has used my old workplace (a medium secondary school in Oxfordshire) as a case… Read more
Flash on a thin client with no Server CPU used? I think so! 10ZiG 8848c
Even in this modern world of HTML5 there is still a very strong case for Flash Video playback (after all its still the option of choice on YouTube), the only problem is when you play flash video inside a Virtual Desktop session (VDI) the servers CPU can quickly be chewed up and so ruin the experience for everyone. The simple… Read more
AMD FX and Hyper-V – Hypervisor is not running
Its a long shot that many people will have this issue but hey why not! If you have one of the uber new AMD FX Processors (e.g. the 6 core 6100BE) and have tried to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine on it you may have seen this error message. An error occurred while attempting to start the… Read more
PXE Boot to WDS with VirtualBox
If you have ever tried to boot a VirtualBox VM into PXE (Microsoft WDS/MDT based) using the default Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop adapter you may have seen the error message FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted. The simple solution to this problem (and to get you booting into WDS) is to install the VirtualBox extension pack which can… Read more
Installing the product key into an evaluation version of System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager
So you’ve got your shiny new System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager install up and running, Virtual Hosts are running, you’ve done P2V migrations of a few old machines all during the while you are watching the ‘Evaluation Version – xyz days remaining’ ticker counting down. So where do I put this product key? You may think its in settings,… Read more
Axel M80 thin client – nice for the office not so sure about the classroom
A little while ago the guys at Axel let me borrow one of their M80 thin clients to try out with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and also Microsoft RDS (Server 2008 R2) and I’m happy to say I can easily see this as a good thin client to use in the office although I have my reservations about use in classroom. This review… Read more
What does it take to run a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Proof of Concept?
One of the wonderful things about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is that any driver that was written for Windows 7 will also run in Server 2008 R2! As such its very easy to take any Window 7 compatible PC (with a processor that can do hardware assisted virtualization like the AMD A and FX series) and turn it into… Read more
Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – 19 users @ 2ms response time!
Currently our VDI setup is only used in the Library and so we very rarely max out the usage on our server, however ealier today I spotted that we had 19 of our 20 VDI clients in use, by in use thats students logged in actively engaging with their computers. I couldn’t resist checking up on the performance stats and… Read more
Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – Hardware close up
Proving that PCI-E SSD works fine in standard servers (like the HP DL line) is a key goal of this series of posts, above you can see the PCI-E SSD churning away quite happily serving up virtual desktops.