System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Work Still Needed to Interest Enterprises, But Potential is There

Oracle plans to make VirtualBox part of its enterprise virtualization portfolio, right alongside its server virtualization hypervisor Oracle VM, according to a SearchServerVirtualization.com article. Oracle aims to integrate Sun’s VirtualBox hypervisor (rebranded as Oracle VM VirtualBox) with Oracle VM, allowing administrators to use VirtualBox as a sandbox to create virtual desktops and deploy them to Oracle VM pools.

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Sun VDI 3.1 Beta Intrigues With More Additions

Impressive features is how the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3.0 software is described by Pedro Gomez, who describes a few them in his blog along with screenshots to demonstrate his points. For those looking ahead, Dirk Grobler explains why Sun VDI 3.1 early access may be worth trying, noting that the upcoming release will be adding some major updates.

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Information on GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, NetBeans, VirtualBox Revealed

Sun GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, NetBeans and VirtualBox are a few of the Sun-related technologies whose futures’ Oracle recently addressed in an update on its frequently asked questions page regarding the proposed merger of the two companies. Oracle’s new statements on the above mentioned projects and others are summarized.

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Short Items of Interest

• VirtualBox 3.0.6 Released
• Managing Desktops Smarter
• Using Roles in Sun xVM Ops Center
• VirtualBox Rollback
• Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions
• Smart Groups in Sun xVM Ops Center 2.5
• Sharing Data Between Host and Guest with VirtualBox

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But What Does Oracle Have in Mind for the Solaris OS?

In his InformationWeek review of Sun’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3.0, Randy George finds a lot to praise along with a rather significant caveat, which has to do with Oracle’s yet unannounced plans for the Solaris OS.

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Based on One-Time-Passwords

YubiKey is a device that acts as a USB keyboard and provides secure authentication by a one-time password (OTP) algorithm. Working on a client’s suggestion, Sun’s Rene Klomp has extended the standard VdaClient used in the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3 with YubiKey authentication and details his efforts in his blog entry “YubiVDI”.

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VM Images for VirtualBox and VMware Platforms

A Virtual Machine Template for the GlassFish WebSpace Server is available. The template provides a new method of evaluating and deploying the GlassFish Web Space Server 10 product. “The template is a VM image containing an operating system, application server, database and GlassFish Web Space Server deployed in a headless server profile and lightly pre-configured for immediate evaluation and customization to suit your deployment needs,” explains Sun’s Gabor Puhalla.

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Developer Suggests Some Alternatives

Integration of the MySQL database with Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3 is the subject of a recent blog by Tino Rachui, the engineer who was responsible for the database integration aspect of the release. He presents some alternatives to the three-host requirement that has raised considerable comment since the release.

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Recommendations Using Preliminary Data

Readers of Dirk Grobler’s blog are directed to the deployment guide for VDI 3 for its discussion of sizing. The goal of this sizing guide was to get statements around the question: “How much gear do I need in order to serve a 1000 desktops?” The data are preliminary.

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Three-part Screencast

In a three-part screencast, blogger Markus Weber has put together a presentation on the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that deals with Installation (Part 1); Configuration (Part 2); and Usage (Part 3).

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