10ZiG 5818v Review – First Impressions

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series 10ZiG 5818v Review

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



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



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!

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD

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





VDI Demo Day – After action report

As promised to those that came along to the recent VDI Demo Day the PowerPoint slides are below with the video playlist above. The day covered a wide range of topics from how to setup a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box proof of concept, the options for thin clients from 10zig and how to take things one step further with Application Virtulisation through… Read more



Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – Getting the image ready

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD

One of the great things about VDI is the ability to create a ‘golden image’, that’s one single image that includes the OS and Software which can be accessed from any endpoint. Whatever VDI software you go with will then take that golden image and duplicate it multiple times to provide the desktops for your users. However this masse creation… Read more



Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – Intro

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD

In this series I am going to be looking at how PCI-E SSDs can be used with VDI, I’ll be covering the hardware in use, the user experience and also why I believe PCI-E SSDs to be the best option to get your virtual desktops running as fast as possible.