Re: VCL: warnings for reservation timeout?
There is a warning, or a couple of them - from the FAQ. You will receive warnings at 10 minutes and 5 minutes before your reservation expires. IIRC, you can choose the type of notification, e.g. e-mail or ... I think you need to set this in User Preferences (which I don't remember how to access. :-) --henry On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Michael Jinks mji...@uchicago.edu wrote: We've noticed that when a reservation times out, the system drops its public NIC off the wire without any warning. I can imagine some pretty unhappy users who lose track of time and lose work when they get cut off. Has anyone engineered some kind of warning notice for this? Thanks. -- Michael Jinks :: mji...@uchicago.edu University of Chicago IT Services
Re: [DISCUSS] Graduation - Prepare Board Resolution
... will propose it on the general incubator list. The areas we need to work on are in bold. We need to define the project description and scope. I wrote this as dynamically provisioning and brokering remote access to compute resources. Thoughts? I'm not sure I would not really understand the scope of VCL from that statement. I agree more should be added. I kept it short since the example resolutions suggested on the graduation guide page are very short and general: ofbiz: open-source software related to enterprise automation Can we just use the description then?: open-source software related to a modular cloud computing platform which dynamically provisions and brokers remote access to compute resources I think this is reasonable - but have a *minor* quibble - The bulk of what the VCL does (auth/auth, reservations, image storage, image loading, ...) seems to me to be fall under the provisions concept - but brokers seems to be getting equal emphasis even though it is an added capability. It's an important added capability, but perhaps this slight revision might help: open-source software related to a modular cloud computing platform which dynamically provisions (and brokers) remote access to compute resources --henry ...
Re: Other Uses for VCL
Andy mentioned the VCL running Elluminate Live in one context - we also are using the VCL with Elluminate in a Disaster Recovery mode in an interesting way. If the campus is closed for any reason [insert any disaster scenario here] and it is desired to continue teaching face to face courses (which are the majority of all of our courses) this can be done online. That is, this can be done online if we have a sufficient number of synchronous meeting servers available (we've been using Elluminate, but it could be any such software.) How many servers? Dozens, hundreds? It makes no financial sense to buy and install them and keep them there just in case. Here's where the VCL can take over and handle this - with one image of the server software in storage. When required, it can be loaded on any number of servers and the instructors and students can all be online from home and the courses continue. Of course, this use would displace some other uses - and that has to be arranged - but most of the student use for homework and projects is somewhat flexible - and likely can be displaced into the 10pm-10am lower use half of the day. The degree to which some uses are displaced to make place for others is a policy issue, and the VCL can be used for this. --henry On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Sanders, Arbin D asand...@nccu.edu wrote: All, ** ** I am apologize in advance for posting to both groups but I think each one has its own unique info and opinions. As NCCU goes into the new fiscal year, I am looking at acquiring more hardware and software for NCCU VCL project. Do any of you all have other uses for VCL other than HPC and Virtual Desktops? ** ** Thanks in advance! ** ** *Arbin Darren Sanders*
Re: Issues with VCL
On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Aaron Peeler fapee...@ncsu.edu wrote: Also You'll need to look at using Dojo 1.6 ... Before the move to using Dojo ( http://dojotoolkit.org/ ) the bar charts on the Statistics page weren't accessible to screen readers. Using Dojo fixes that, and that is a real plus! --henry
Re: Long term reservation
A general comment from someone who has watched the process and seen some testing and failures. This is a bottleneck type problem - the major resources are 1) RAM - used for the VM manager/host and then for the images (which can vary in size) 2) processors/cores- i.e. computer horsepower 3) disk throughput (for loading images) Whichever runs out first will give the limit - which can be a limit on number loaded (RAM), adequate performance for the ones loaded (horsepower) or time to load them (disk throughput). We and others in the VCL community have run into all of these at times, and there have been a number of neat solutions - e.g. remove unneeded software from the image - which was rather important back in the days of small RAMs. So I suggest that along with hardware configurations to be discussed on the wiki, that also some more information be given as to the above. --henry
Re: Thin client with VCL
Michael's point about testing is excellent! :-) Other considerations include comparing prices - the price of desktop computer has decreased greatly in the past few years, narrowing the price difference from thin clients. Also consider how you might want to use the desktop/local machines. The VCL is a desktop augmentation setup - so you likely want to use the local machines for web surfing, e-mail, perhaps word processing ..., what else. That decision impacts the price of the thin client. --henry schaffer On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Michael Jinks mji...@uchicago.edu wrote: Several years ago, we put thin clients (Sun Ray) in all our public computing spaces and computer-equipped classrooms. They work great for most things, and they do indeed save lots of expense and hassle. We're now in the process of going back to PC's, though. There are several reasons, but the one that might apply to other sites is remote display of graphically-intensive applications. 3D rendering is the obvious one, but there are also a few legacy (DOS-era) scientific graphing packages that don't play well with a network-connected display, and the accumulated latency during real-time graphing appears to the user as a drastic slowdown in performance. So, test all your apps thoroughly before you commit. On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 09:41:11AM -0400, Dmitri Chebotarov wrote: Hi All, Is anyone here is using a thin client with VCL? I.e. Dell FX100 or similar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client). This could work well with VCL, since most of thin boxes support RDP. Interesting to see how a thin client compares to a regular PC in classroom environment. Seems like this would be a better option - less expensive, less admin overhead, more secure, and with all the benefits of VCL... Thanks. -- Dmitri Chebotarov Virtual Computing Lab Systems Engineer, TSD - Ent Servers Messaging 223 Aquia Building, Ffx, MSN: 1B5 Phone: (703) 993-6175 Fax: (703) 993-3404 -- Michael Jinks :: mji...@uchicago.edu :: 773-469-9688 University of Chicago IT Services
Re: Permanent reservations ?
never end - well, sometime before never there will be a hardware failure, or whatever - and that will have to be dealt with. What I find that works for me for an indefinite reservation is to make it for 1 year. It's easy to Delete it when I'm done, or to extend it, if needed. (Hmm - I've never had to extend one yet.) --henry On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Evelio Quiros evq...@fiu.edu wrote: Hello, How do you setup reservations so that they never end, until the user decides to end them ? I have setup an image that does not check the the user login, and I increased the reservation time to 8640 minutes (6 days) for just a certain group. How do I setup a group that has never ending reservations ? Thanks, Al Quiros Florida International University
Re: VCL software licensing
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Andy Kurth andy_ku...@ncsu.edu wrote: Just FYI, the same issues apply to VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, etc. -Andy ... Andy is right - I'm buying VDI software from VMware/Citrix/other vendor. Do I still need Windows VDA? Yes, you do. If you are accessing a Windows client operating system (OS) as your guest OS in the datacenter from a thin client, Windows VDA is the appropriate licensing vehicle. You need this regardless of the VDI software vendor you choose. The only scenario where you would not need Windows VDA is if you were using PCs covered under Software Assurance as the access devices, since virtual desktop access rights are included as a benefit of SA. (quoted from http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/0/5/5059CBF7-F736-4D1E-BF90-C28DADA181C5/Microsoft%20VDI%20and%20Windows%20VDA%20FAQ%20v2%200.pdf ) --henry
