Mike D’s Blog

iCloud has just started offering free desktops from their cloud based service. You heard that right – a free desktop that you can login to from anywhere. It also comes with free storage (3 GB worth). Here are some of the specs:

• Access to your friends, files and digital life on any computer
• 3 GB free storage space to safely store documents, photos and music online
• 30 free applications such as Office, Mail, Music, Video, IM, Sharing, Games, Collaboration and Development tools
• 20 free widgets
• Free backup to provide secure storage, including WedDav
• Zero installation, icloud runs in your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser

I logged in this morning with my free account and it’s pretty nice. At least it looks that way on the surface. If you can get around the little bit of sluggish performance, the reliance on IE (Firefox is only experimental), and the fact that you can’t logout then things run pretty well. Some interesting apps are included that might make this thing actually usable. That’s the big question though – would you use this as your primary machine all the time?

Here’s a challenge. Someone go and give up their machine at home and only use iCloud for a full 15 days. Do whatever you would normally do. Report back here with your findings. Were you able to really get everything done? How did you get all your data up there? How did you get the photos off your camera and into the desktop? It’s things like this that I think everyone would really be interested in hearing. So there it is. If anyone is up to the challenge then I have a $25 iTunes card for the first to respond to the challenge. I guess that’s sort of humorous since iTunes won’t run in iCloud. Anyhow, the offer still stands.

I’d also be interested in anyone else’s experience on what they liked or didn’t like about the offering. Like I said, it has some good things going for it. I just wonder if consumers will stick with it.

Just this morning, VMware announced that it will be opening the source code for the VMware View Client to anyone that wants it. The move is targeted to allow partners to more easily share advances in hosted desktop clients based on the most pervasive hosted desktop system out there – VMware View. The client is licensed under LGPL v 2.1. Some details from the press release:

VMware View Open Client is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (LGPL v 2.1) and is accessible from  http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/. Some of the features included in this release support secure tunneling using SSL, two factor authentication with RSA SecurID, Novell SLETC Add-On RPM package and a full command line interface. Support for the source code distribution is available through the VMware View Open Client community at: http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/.

This is an incredible leadership move by VMware to give a kickstart to the true universal client. Just judging by the numerous joint quotes from partners in the press release everyone is really excited about this. Now partners can freely develop on and embed the client into all sorts of devices from cell phones to set top boxes to PCs and laptops. It will be interesting to see how much development takes off in this exciting space. But enough about my excitement. What do you think?

UPDATE (February 3, 2009): I updated the links to the code. It appears it got moved and the press release was wrong. Should work now.

Aaron Sweemer over at Virtual Insanity had an interesting post from a couple of weeks ago about the disk storage savings from using the new VMware View Composer. Prior to Composer if you wanted to create 100 VMs and the individual VM was Windows XP with a 10 GB disk then you’d use up (100 * 10 = 1,000 GB) of disk space. Now with VMware View Composer you’d only use up 10 GB for the original VM and a small differential of space for each additional VM. How big is the differential? Well, it will vary depending on how much is changing. For a good look at a real use case finish reading the article at the source.

And just when you thought there was no ROI for VDI sessions. Make sure to read this article on users suing companies because they’re waiting for Vista to start and shutdown and they’re not getting paid while they wait (up to 15 minutes). I guess it’s time to go and sell to the end users. Imagine going home and leaving your VDI session logged in while you’re away. Talk about a cash cow!! Anyhow, really interesting problem that VDI can easily solve.

Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime • The Register

Are you deploying VDI? If so then there’s an article from Glenn over on Virtualization Information on lessons he learned when deploying VDI at a large pharmaceutical. Definitely worth a read to avoid some of the gotchas.

An interesting article popped up today about BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) over at Citrix. It’s a very interesting program and one I think more and more companies will start over the next few years. I’ve already seen similar things largely in the insurance industry. I work with one such customer where the independent agent buys their own computers and simply connects that to the corporate network. As a matter of fact, my father and brother are agents for NationWide insurance and do just that – they BYOC and have been since the agency started back in 1989. I’m sure the program goes back farther than that but that’s when my father joined Nationwide.

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