superatticman

Have just sat through a webinar regarding Citrix 'VDI in a box' in an educational environment. Would be nice to hear any opinions on this product and how it works for you as opposed to the full blown Citrix Xendesktop solution. From my initial take, this solution appears to be easier to administer and more suitable for several hundred users as opposed to several thousand.

Hi We use RES Composer to control our desktop experience in our VDI environment. Have found a forum called RES Software User Group although theres not much traffic on there. Are there any other information resources or forums for RES Composer? Thanks

HP D510's Celeron 1.7ghz, 512ram, 40gb hdd, XP running as thick clients. Pretty sturdy old pieces of kit, although PSU's are starting to fail.

Are they 'backwards' compatible so to speak? Can an LTO 6 drive read and write to an LTO 4 tape? Or is it a case of 'read only' for older tapes? Thanks

Amazing how you can miss the obvious things when you are under pressure and over familiar with a job. GOOD OLD SAFE MODE

The full path is HK LM - Software - Microsoft - Windows -Current Version - WUID then there's a value in there to be modified. Its simply not letting me get past the 'current version'. Will take a look at the Win PE method. Thanks.

Hi Up against the clock here and creating a VM to be used as our new gold image for citrix VDI. Looking to modify a registry key in: HK LM - Software - Microsoft - Windows -Current Version However, when attempting to access 'Current Version' the machine is totally freezing and only does a 'power off' or 'reset' allow it reboot. Are there any reliable registry fix tools that I could run? I know there's a few about but difficult to know what to trust not to trash the whole lot! Have 100 other things to do (like many on here!) by the end of next week and hoping someone could provide me with a 'quick fix' here Thanks

Out of interest, what has been the level of support that IT helpdesks have performed on VDI installations? Have you been expected to install, configure and support the whole lot? Did you get specialists in to install and configure this and then handed over the day to day support to you with them available to troubleshoot any problems? Or any other variation of the above? My reason for asking this is that whatever your opinions on VDI are, have you not noticed that you have had to increase your skill set dramatically to support a VDI installation? Has this resulted in an increased salary or were you just expected to add it to your daily duties? Was any training provided to you?

Then I hope you are more honest about its capabilities than the company who sold our solution were!

VDI salesman will no doubt disagree with this! I would say the difference between audio performance being 'reasonable' on a VDI machine and how it should be on a physical machine is massive.

Has anyone managed to get a VDI based solution working as well as a physical PC in music lab?

Maybe its fashionable for those who need to justify their employment with major projects?

Also bear in mind you will be doubling your IP addresses too when effectively using 2 NIC's to log 1 user on! @pcstru I agree regarding the cost savings. Do these costings include: The extra labour/cost required to 'nurse' and replace older 'thick' clients that have long fallen out of warranty? Sooner or later, those PC's are going to start failing. The extra hours put in by ICT support staff to support VDI, which back end wise does seem pretty labour intensive. Some applications which work perfectly fine in a physical environment need lots of tweaking to get working in VDI.

Thanks for all the posting so far. Its given me much food for thought! Our netbooks have SSD's and we should be getting better performance out of them.

Sorry to sound dumb, but what exactly is a 'cut down version' of windows 7? By not connected to the network I presume you mean non domain? This idea has potential though. I guess you could then automatically open up a locked down browser window (once the wireless has formed a connection) of which defaults to the citrix gateway address and then the user can log into a VDI session from there.

Hi We are currently running netbooks with windows 7 to access Xendesktop via appliance lock. To be honest, you are effectively logging into domain computers twice, so power on to VDI desktops times aren't particularly fast. Ideally, it would be an idea to have a lightweight OS such as linux or android which is configured to boot straight to the citrix homepage and wireless network. The user could then log into VDI via the webpage. Has anyone ever got a setup like this working? cheers

Spot on!

First you need a problem, then look into the solution. Then decide what product best fits your needs. All I'm suggesting is don't go with VDI simply because you are interested in the technology or feel the need 'freshen up' your network with something different. Its certainly no 'miracle cure', even those who sell VDI solutions usually advise against putting into suites which are going to see heavy cpu and gpu usage. Ie IT or art suites. Our original plan was to put VDI in a junior school IT room and repurpose the PC's there but our experience with VDI running multimedia related programs has not been positive. So we've ordered in 24x good old fashioned base units with a decent GPU. Log in times, if using 'thick clients' running desktop lock mode (redirecting you to a VDI session on login) can be frustratingly long too. You can't get away from the fact that older PC's still have to do some of the processing to initiate a VDI session. It has its place and is good for suites such as libraries and 'study areas'. It also very good for remote access too. However, there are other ways of achieving what VDI can achieve, probably for less cost too.

We currently run 2 Tape library systems on our network: HP Storageworks 2024 Library with LTO4 800/1.6gb Drive HP Storageworks 1016 Library with 160/320gb SDLT Drive The latter is now well overdue for renewal. Will probably be looking at LTO6 with a corresponding Library as our backup needs will be increasing over the next few years. Has anyone on here had any experience with LTO6 devices and any recommendations for a decent Library? Would ideally stick with HP. Cheers

Hi We've encountered an issue with Cubase 4 (which according to Steinburg is compatible with but doesn't fully support w7) which only occurs when a user is logged in. Logging in as an administrator does not replicate the problem which leads us to believe its a file permission. Traditionally, we've 'fudged' the issue in XP by giving 'C' drive 'everyone - full control' and setting it to propagate downwards. This has also fixed several other issues with edu-software. The C drive is hidden from the user by GP so they can't mess about with anything. Obviously windows 7 by default doesn't allow certain folders such as program files and windows to be given this type of unrestricted permission. Is there any way we can set 'everyone-FC' on an entire W7 C drive so we can provide a solution for this? GP maybe? Regards

Using the windows wireless management. The notebooks are for pupils and need to be available for any user to log into.

Hi We use a wireless access point to connect 50 netbooks to our network. To set this up we logged in as domain admin, manually connecting the wireless connection but ensuring that 'connect automatically' was checked. All machines were rebooted and managed to log in as a number of other users fine. It would appear that the wireless credentials were being remembered at alt-ctrl-del However, a few weeks later, some machines have been unable to log users on. Logging in as administrator (credentials must be cached) reveals that the wireless connection has lost its credentials. Putting the credentials in again 'fixes' the issue, but its probably only a matter of time before we come across the same problem. Is there any way we can 'hard code' the wireless credentials into the machine so that the chances of it being connected at ctrl-alt-del at login is as high as possible. Policy or registry edit maybe? thanks

Never wanted kids. Prefer cars, traveling, football, shagging around, eating well etc etc!

Just to confirm we are going to be starting from scratch O/S wise and migrating the CCTV software across using the inbuilt migration utility. There will be no complicated boot file editing etc required thank goodness! Have tested the onboard RAID controller on the HP dc7800 tower unit as a RAID 1 configuration, and its literally about 4 times as fast as when using the PCI add on RAID card!!! Either that SiL RAID card is total crap, is faulty, or simply doesn't like the hardware its plugged in to. We can use the HP Matrix Storage Console interface to manage and monitor the RAID 1 array. Looks like we're finally going to get there in the end

Having listened to what has been said on here, I may well go ahead with RAID 1 instead, keeping the 3rd drive in the unit as an offline spare. That RAID controller card I'm using has not had particularly good reviews, some even stating that you are better off using the onboard controller! So thats gonna be going back to the suppliers.