Charles Pluta – IT Service Integration

Week 4 – Project 52.. (Wow, a month already?)

I’m writing this post at about 36,000 feet in the air using GoGo’s in-flight wireless service on my flight. It was $10 for the duration of the flight (I tried some promo codes but they had all expired). Being that it is a 5 hour flight (Atlanta to Seattle), I’m not complaining. Definately better than the $5/hr that the airport wanted for WiFi service.

My company provided me with a HP 4410t.. A thin client notebook that I am using the built-in VMWare View Client to connect back to my virtual destop running on VMWare ESX 4*. The desktop process is almost smooth as glass.. The only issue I have came across is that loading images is a little slow. Its like DSL, noticable but completely acceptable.

I believe on my return trip I will be attemping some things that should bypass their filters. GoGo currently does not allow VoIP to be used other their service but since VMWare View uses an SSL connection to present you with the desktop, if I had a USB softphone it should passthrough securely and bypass their filter. I believe I will purchase one so I can try this out on my return flight next Saturday. I’m sure there are other services blocked but I’m not crazy enough to try to view those things up here.

VMWare View looks like a very stable product (This is my first time using it externally), and I have enjoyed deploying it in my test lab in the past couple months. I beleive everything is functional the way I want it to be, with my current setup having 4 Server 2003 VMs as well as 5 XP Desktop VMs. I am waiting on View 4.5 in which Windows 7 support should be included. For now, I am just sticking with XP. My View 4 configuration includes the automatic customization to configure all XP options when deploying a new image.. Such as setting it to DHCP, Configuring the computer name to use the pool-name+1 increment on the new desktop.  My image template includes all software preloaded (Office and the like),  full activated and ready to use. A complete desktop can be deployed in less than an hour.

The ESX hardware configuration is an HP DL180 with 20GB of RAM, and (2) 1TB SAS drives mirrored for my data stores. This project has went well and I look forward to deploying it in a production environment soon.

* I work for both an HP and VMWare partner/reseller, so while these statements are without bias, here is my disclaimer.