My Digital Life

HP’s Windows 7 Slate Tablet lives on

Tom Basham — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:10:39 +0000

This is interesting, according to Engadget HP’s much publicised Windows 7 based state tablet isn’t in fact dead as has been reported.

Personally I think this is great news. I’m a long term fan of the slate having had one of HP’s old slates the TC1100 for years. It’s a great bit of kit but Win7 really challenges its 2004 specs.

According to Engadget HP are planning to launch the new tablet later this year targeted at the enterprise market. This makes a lot of sense to me. The iPad has the consumer world all wrapped up but in business (currently) it’s more of a novelty to anyone that needs to do more than email. A Win7 based tablet that has a pen as well as touch and can run apps like OneNote would be very welcome.

What’s more it gives HP a good product on which to take some market share from Motion Computing, who have been doing quite well selling Windows based slate tablets into industries like healthcare and engineering.

Of course there have also been rumours of a HP tablet based on Palms WebOS, which of course HP now owns. While that would definitely be an option in the consumer world I’m not sure businesses would find it all that attractive. The reason I say this is that currently WebOS has next to no security built into the OS, at least none that is compatible with the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) security policies used by Microsoft and Google (see this article for more info). So in that sense a twin platform might make good sense for HP.

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Google Search Appliances support OpenSearch and Windows 7

Tom Basham — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:34:33 +0000

A while back I posted up some info on using the OpenSearch features of Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 to provide search integration into SharePoint.

OpenSearch is a protocol for easily sending search queries and sharing the search results. Windows 7 and IE8 use OpenSearch to allow external sources of data to be searched directly from Windows as shown in the screenshot below.

Personally I think it’s a really nice bit of functionality, it’s something I use all time now I have it. So it’s good news then that a couple of days ago Google announced support for OpenSearch on it’s Google Search Appliances (GSA).

If you’ve not seen these before they’re essentially a server running Google indexing and search that you can plug into your network and use to provide search internally to your business. You basically pay for the number of documents you index.

This new support will allow you to send search queries to a GSA and have the results displayed in Explorer or IE just as shown above.

You can find detailed technical info on the Google site and download the feature on the Enterprise Labs site.

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Device Encryption on Apple iPhones

Tom Basham — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:20:28 +0000

Following up from my last post on enforcing security policies devices such as iPhones, I thought it might be worth clarifying how iPhones deal with encryption.

Essentially iPhones from the 3GS onwards are encrypted by default, this isn’t something the end user or administrator can control. Earlier devices such as the iPhone and iPhone 3G do not support encryption at all, they’re simply not powerful enough apparently (Apple told me this!).

So if you use Exchange and wish to set the encryption security policies onto iPhones the ‘Require Encryption on the Device’ doesn’t actually do much in of itself – the device is either already encrypted or just can’t be.

Where it is useful is if you wish to block access to devices that cannot be encrypted. In this case you simply set the ‘Require Encryption on the Device’ policy and uncheck the ‘Allow Non-Provisional Devices’ policy. The iPhones will report back their support for encryption and Exchange uses this to evaluate whether they should be allowed on not. So iPhone’s and 3GS’s will be blocked.

Further info on iPhone support for Exchange ActiveSync Policies can be found here.

Android and iPhone Exchange Activesync Policies

Tom Basham — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:55:10 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some work on how best to secure data on the myriad of mobile devices that are used these days to access email and calendar information.

It’s a hot topic at the moment, and so it should be. Recently here in the UK the information commissioner brought in a £500,000 fine for each instance of information data loss. Of course it would depend on the information lost, but hands up anyone who understands everything that’s on their companies smartphones and PDA’s… with info creeping out in email attachments or iPhone apps that cache your work username and passwords, it’s a real risk.

If you use MS Exchange, one of simplest ways to apply a level of security to mobile devices is to use the Exchange Activesync Policies that are included out the box. These allow you to apply – and more importantly enforce – a range of configuration options on devices and block access to devices that don’t meet a minimum standard you decide on.

At the bottom of this post I’ve attached a spreadsheet which I’ve put together which details the policies available and the devices they are compatible with. To get the information I spoke to MS, Google and Apple (thanks Jason) directly, so it should be accurate. But I don’t have any contacts at Nokia or Palm so that info was taken from their deployment guides.

Part of the reason I thought I’d post this up is that I noticed a very similar doc was added to Wikipedia, but it doesn’t include some important information about the level of Exchange Client Access Licence (CAL) need to use some of the policies, nor does it talk about the differences between hardware versions of iPhone. If I can bring myself to dive into the wiki mark-up language I’ll amend the article to include the info but for now I hope this spreadsheet helps some of you.

If you’re not currently implementing any policies in Exchange there are a few things to consider before you do.

First think about the types of device currently connecting. If you’ve been using Exchange EAS for a while the chances are you’ll have a range of kit from Windows Mobile 5 onwards. This older equipment may not support many of the available policies, so if they’re company owned devices you may want to look at upgrading them rather than cut the users off entirely. Unfortunately it’s not just older devices that don’t support all EAS policies correctly. Modern OS’s such as Google’s Android and Palms WebOS don’t either.

There are some simple reports that an be run using PowerShell that will list out all the device that connect in, including device type, versions and usernames. Unfortunately the iPhone doesn’t report back its hardware version until iOS4 however. I’ll try to follow up this post with the query details.

Remember that neither Google’s Android, Applies iPhone or iPhone 3G support any level of device encryption, which from a business perspective is a little scary considering their popularity. What’s worse, early versions of the iOS3 firmware apparently mislead the Exchange server into thinking early iPhone were encrypted. If you have a lot of these things out there but still want to apply a level of security you can buy yourself some time using the ‘Allow non-provisional devices’ policy.

One option would be to create a basic security policy with all the PIN settings you want to apply and enforce that by un-checking the ‘allow non-provisional devices’ policy. This will ensure that if a device doesn’t support the policy it can’t connect. You could then create a seperate policy with the encryption settings and the ‘allow non-provisional devices’ enabled. In that case the policy should apply only to those phones that support it.

As always, communication out to your end users is going to be key, especially if you have personal devices connecting to Exchange in addition to your company ones. Whilst having a PIN etc is probably a fair exchange for the Exchange functionality they’ll receive, suddenly finding that your personal phone has had a PIN enforced and that your SD of music and photos has been encrypted is likely to annoy… Something to keep in mind!

Anyway, here’s spreadsheet: Exchange ActiveSync Policies (June2010)

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Bruno Senna at the Goodwood Festival of Speed

Tom Basham — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:40:57 +0000

Bruno Senna posted a great clip of him driving one his uncles (Ayton Senna) old race cars back down the Goodwood hill to the paddock, filming the entire thing on his phone. As Bruno says on twitter:

I was holding my mobile phone with my left hand and the steering wheel with the right. Don’t do this at home. Definitely not on the street!!

I thought this was a good demonstration of the reasons I love the Festival of Speed. Where else would you get the best drivers in the world hooning the best cars in the world up and down someone’s driveway?

Apples iPhone 4 Gyroscope

Tom Basham — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:12:28 +0000

After reading about the iPhone 4’s gyroscope during WWDC, I have to admit I wasn’t sure how such a thing would work. I’ve only ever really encountered the spinning gyroscopes you get as a kid, and I couldn’t really see something like that fitting in a phone!

Thanks to this Wikipedia entry, and this article on ifixit.com the mystry is solved – worth a read if you feeling geeky.

Another Jenson and Lewis Video

Tom Basham — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:36:12 +0000

I could spend days looking around that warehouse…

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Jenson and Lewis build a McLaren F1 Car

Windows 8 Details

Tom Basham — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:38:59 +0000

Over the last few days it seems if a Microsoft Windows 8 presentation aimed at PC OEM’s has leaked out onto the net. Of course no one has confirmed it’s real, but it looks much like the documents I saw during the Vista and 7 development cycles so I’ve no reason to think it’s not.

I’m not going to republish the slides here, as clearly they should be under NDA, but not this info is in the public domain I’ll discuss major points in general and my take on the implications.

So what’s new in there?

Industry Trends
Whilst this isn’t exactly news, it’s interesting see what MS sees as the trends that are shaping their development of Win8. Many of these are focused around the users interaction with computers.

They describe a market in 2012 providing a wide range of hardware form factors and offering users ubiquitous internet access. In a world where connectivity is assumed MS will continue its ‘Software + Services’ push in Windows 8. With the recent Windows Live Wave 4 releases already providing a pretty strong platform of local applications coupled with Internet services (Hotmail, Office Web Apps, Photo Gallery etc), they mention that Wave 5 release of these apps is pencilled in for release at around the same time as Win8.

MS are also keen to point out that peoples personal and business computing experiences are rapidly merging. This is something that I’ve certainly encountered over the past few years, and it will be interesting to see how MS counter this. The challenge is in keeping corporate applications and data secure, whilst also providing the flexibility people look for in personal computing from the same device.

Solutions out there in the market currently use a pretty heavy handed approach, using perhaps a separate OS instance though a VM or using ‘OS on a Stick’ solutions that effectively turn a personal computer into a thin client that then connects to a business desktop.

I suspect that MS could provide a slightly more elegant solution if they choose to build that abstraction into the OS. Windows 7 already supports booting from a VDI virtual hard disk, and can use XP Mode or MED-V to provide applications that run from a separate local OS. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both of these technologies advance further to present a single ‘desktop’ to the user that ties back to separate ‘personal’ and ‘business’ VM’s. Presumably this may lead to a Client Hypervisor version of Hyper-V along the lines of Citrix’s XenClient.

Apple Envy
One slide that perhaps shows MS’s overall approach to Windows 8 is actually all about Apple. MS have looked at Apple’s appeal and described a cycle that flows from Brand Promise > User Experience > User Confidence > Realised Value > High Satisfaction and then back to Brand Promise. In other words if it just works, people like it, you look good and they’ll will return for more of the same.

I’d have hoped that was all a bit obvious to be honest, but it’s interesting to see that it’s a clear part their thinking and even state “This is something people will pay for!”. Hopefully MS are learning lessons from Apples success, and in fairness their own successful Windows 7 release.

Windows Store
For some time now I’ve been quite critical of MS’s late arrival into the ‘app store’ space. As far as I know only Windows Phone has an MS operated app delivery mechanism (and to a lesser extent XBox Live). To my mind both Windows and XBox would benefit hugely from an app store and the ecosystem of developers that it would spawn. Frankly the PC world is still pretty much in the age of having a choice between Freeware, Shareware or full retail software. Apple style app stores completely change this by providing users will a trusted source of apps and developers with a permanent market and a method of getting paid for their work.

I’m therefore very happy to see MS outline plans for ‘Windows Store’, an iTunes equivalent. It seems like I’m not the only one as the slides show feedback suggesting that it “can’t happen soon enough”!

The concept seems fairly well advanced, the slides include a wireframe storyboard of the app browsing and purchasing experience, which looks quite Zune like – a good thing I reckon. They also show that a users apps and settings will follow them across PC’s, presumably tied to a Live ID as with XBox Live. The app store will also provide mechanisms for delivering updates or patches to installed apps.

For developers there will be a personalised portal to submit apps, track their progress through the approval process and view analytics around sales and usage. One of the most interesting items shown in the portal is a tab for Telemetry. This shows that developers will be able to monitor how the apps are used and receive crash dumps that are returned by faults. As far as I know this is far in advance of any other systems out there and should help ensure that the quality of apps delivered through the system is kept high.

Something that isn’t covered is how the applications themselves will be delivered. We’ve seen MS dabbling with streaming applications over the Internet with the Office 2010 beta, which I understand was a big success. Given the current trend towards application virtualisation I could see Windows Store making use of App-V or a similar technology to deliver apps as discrete objects rather than the traditional MSI’s. Given MS’s own desire to replicate Apple’s ‘It Just Works’ view of the world using virtualised apps would seem to be be a good route for Windows Store. It would help minimising the errors and incompatibilities that can plague large app portfolios.

Personally I think Windows Store is an incredibly exciting development for users and developers. What I’m curious about is how this might then relate to business use of Windows. Presumably it wouldn’t be to hard to extent this model out into the Enterprise space.

There are already solutions out there that provide ‘shopping cart’ style interfaces into Microsoft’s Configuration Manager (SCCM) application delivery tools, but this sort of interface would certainly be a welcome addition for businesses. I guess there would be a couple of approaches that could be adopted.

For one, Windows Store itself could provide a way for companies to allow users to buy software through it. This would probably need an approval mechanism to ensure that spend was authorised, and also an alternative method for invoicing and payment. It would also be desirable for companies to be able white-list or black-list apps.

It’s a challenge for sure, but it’s not too hard to envision it happening. With MS’s ability to federate it’s Online services with internal company Active Directories they could potentially access a primitive authorisation matrix through the ‘Manager’ information in AD. And Group Policy would be a perfect way of switching the Store into a ‘business mode’ that doesn’t bill the users directly.

The second method might be to build a similar interface that can be hosted internally and used with SCCM. Providing a similar user experience on company machines has obvious benefits to users and IT alike. Indeed given the focus on bringing together people work and home experiences the ability to switch between them at will is probably worthwhile.

Identity and Authentication
There a couple of slides around Win8’s proposed methods of authentication and how it might handle user data. The obvious flashy thing here is the proposed use of facial recognition for logon, the idea being that a webcam connected to the computer would recognise that you have say down in front of the computer, determine that it’s you and then log you on.

I’ve played with some tools for this before, and it’s a very nice user experience. If MS can get it right and fix the false-positive issues that facial recognition systems can have (i.e. holding up a photo of the computers owner to logon…) it could be a very nice addition.

The other item of note was how Win8 will handle user profiles. It seems that Windows user accounts will be ‘connected to the cloud’ so that user settings, and presumably documents, will follow them from PC to PC. With Microsoft’s Mesh synchronisation technology now mature and forming part of Windows Live Wave 4, I suspect that this will also be the basis of continuously sync’ing user profiles with a Live back-end service.

I’ve wondered whether they’d do this for some time. Indeed when Mesh was released I wondered whether having the ability to sync both document data and user personalisation info into the cloud might lead MS to presenting actual Windows desktops from it’s Azure platform.

There are plenty of other bit and pieces in the presentation. But to my mind those are the main things to consider.

Of the rest the Fast Startup looks good, it’s a hybrid system boot mechanism that uses the hibernate function to cut out some of the boot process and hugely reduce startup time. It’s worth noting that this and Sleep will be the default startup and shutdown actions in Window 8.

So all in all it’s very positive stuff, I suspect that MS will be very unhappy it’s public. It certainly gives the opposition something to aim at. I have to say if I was MS rather than clamping down on the now public info I’d make the most of it – fill in the gaps on what’s already known and start the hype early.

For more info there’s good ccoverage over on Windows Kitchen.

Jenson and Lewis build a McLaren F1 Car

Tom Basham — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:25:26 +0000

A nice video with Jenson and Lewis trying to build one of the teams old F1 cars without the rest of their team. Looks like goof fun, and it’s good to see that they seem to get on.

The clip also reminds me that I really must find a way to blag a factory tour!

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iPhone 4 in business

Tom Basham — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:47:22 +0000

With the iPhone rapidly becoming an accepted business phone for many companies, I’ve been interested to read about the changes that the forthcoming iPhone 4 and iOS 4 will bring.

To be honest there isn’t a huge amount of info out there, but the info that is available is quite positive. There’s a page on apple.com with some basic details. The main areas that Apple seem to be addressing are security and management, both of which have been question marks in the past. Specifically the talk about:

Data Protection
Security enhancements in iPhone OS 4 protect email messages and attachments stored on iPhone 3GS by using the device passcode as an encryption key. New data protection APIs can be used for custom and commercial apps so that business-critical information is protected even if a device is compromised.

This is good news, but I still think Apple need to be clearer about exactly what sort of encryption is used etc. The 3GS’s are meant to be encrypted, but there’s pretty strong indications that this isn’t quite as strong as you would hope [1, 2, 3]. If Apple can get this right it’ll open a lot of doors from them in business, as they’re still some way behind RIM’s Blackberry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platforms. Both of these offer significantly more control over encryption, and in combination with device management tools can both be configured to accredited security levels (up to ‘RESTRICTED’ I believe).

Mobile Device Management
Deploying and managing large iPhone fleets will be even easier with iPhone OS 4. New Mobile Device Management APIs can be integrated with third-party solutions to wirelessly configure and update settings, monitor compliance with corporate policies, and even wipe or lock managed iPhone devices.

To their credit Apple have supported a level of device management for a while through their implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveSync. This at least allows basic policy enforcement on devices connecting in through Exchange. By providing more complete API’s into a management interface however hopefully iPhones will begin to support a much wider range of management features. The obvious gaps currently are around password/pin polices, encryption and granular control of features and functionality. There are a number of products in the market to manage mobile devices [1, 2, 3], so hopefully we’ll see these begin to support the iPhone as well.

Wireless App Distribution
iPhone OS 4 enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute in-house apps to employees over Wi-Fi and 3G. Apps can be updated without requiring users to connect to their computers.

This has the potential to unlock the iPhone/iPad to a new group of developers. Previously it’s been quite tricky to develop in house Line of Business applications, and critically, to distribute them out to a fleet of devices. The ability to deploy in-house apps over the air will make this much more attractive to organisations.

SSL VPN Support
SSL VPN support in iPhone OS 4 gives users another way to securely access enterprise resources. These new protocols can even be leveraged to connect seamlessly to a corporate network via VPN on Demand. Forthcoming apps from Juniper and Cisco will support SSL VPN on iPhone.

VPN support is obviously a nice thing to have, but I’d be interested to hear how often this is used. In a world where you’re developing and using internal applications it’ll be a very useful tool if those aren’t published to the internet, but for basic email etc generally the existing ActiveSync connection probably offers enough transport security. I guess web access policies could also influence the use of VPN’s if you wanted to force your users through a company proxy server of some sort.

Improved Mail
iPhone OS 4 allows users to set up multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts and now works with Exchange Server 2010. With the new unified inbox feature, users can see messages from all their email accounts conveniently displayed in a single inbox, or they can quickly switch between inboxes to see messages from any single account. If users receive an attachment that they want to save or edit, Mail now lets you open attachments with compatible apps from the App Store.

Again, I think the mail changes are more ‘nice to haves’ rather than significant improvements to the business features. Though the unified inbox is very well implemented when you see it in use. With the support for multiple ActiveSync accounts, it will be interesting to see how they have implemented the policy management. If you have two ActiveSync connections, each with difference policy enforcement settings, which one wins? Is it whichever is more secure? If so who decided what the more secure value is? I also wonder if this could potentially allow information to leak from one system to another. If mail is synced from one company onto the iPhone, could it then potentially be synced back down to a separate mailbox with the iPhone acting as a hub? I can see how that might be useful for personal contacts, but for potentially sensitive emails etc, it could be a problem.

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Who needs PowerPoint? Try Prezi instead

Tom Basham — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:14:07 +0000

Well to be honest I do… but thanks to Eileen Brown I’ve now discovered a pretty decent alternative in Prezi. As part of my job I often have to put together presentations for various strategies or projects. I’m always quite conscious that traditional built pointed PowerPoints are liable to bore people to tears, so anything that can help liven things up a little has to be good.

So what is Prezi then? Well it’s an online presentation tool, but the difference is in how you build up those presentations and what they look like when played back. Rather than write a long (probably inadequate!) explanation they’ve got a decent intro video:

So as you can see it’s a bit different from the normal PowerPoint type app :)

I guess the closest I’ve seen has been Microsoft’s Office Labs pptPlex which is a free add-in that provides similar functionality inside of Powerpoint. Prezi is just more like a ‘Deepzoom’ sort of experience – which is odd given Deepzoom is an MS technology.

Having played with it a little today, I reckon Prezi is a good little tool. It makes it much easier to tell a story in your presentations, and hopefully keep people engaged in what you’re saying.

The ability to embed external media like images and videos is well implemented and very useful. Indeed, I’ve not tried it but I think you can even embed normal slides from slide share – though I’m not sure why you’d want to!

Prezi has three options for getting access to it. You can sign up for free, but you only get 100MB of storage and all your presentations are public and branded with a Prezi watermark.

There are then two costed options, ‘Enjoy’ at $59 a year and ‘Pro’ at $159 a year. Both have the option to make presentations private, and have the watermark removed. ‘Enjoy’ has 500MB of storage, and ‘Pro’ 2GB and a Desktop editor so you can create and view presentations offline.

The free versions inability to save a presentation privately is – in my view – not very user friendly. I can see why they’ve done it to drive sales of the costed options, but even so you’d have to careful what you post up, especially if they’re work/business presentations.

Personally I feel that the costed options are a little too expensive. As good as it is, I’m not sure that it’s worth that much or that the offline app would be worth a $100 premium.

It’s a balance really of whether you feel that the impact Prezi can potentially give your presentations is worth the cost. I think it has real potential, but there are a few niggles that it would be worth them looking at.

- The saved presentations are pretty big – a basic demo I did with two paragraphs came down as a 20MB zip file!
- As Prezi is a Flash app, right-clicking on it just brings up the normal Flash menu, not much they can do about that, but there are some tasks where right-clicking would improve the navigation. And of course it won’t work on an iPad, where the interface would seem to really suit it!
- There are only a couple of styles provided, and whilst you can pay $450 for a custom one, the ability to change fonts and colours etc would seem to be a pretty basic feature people would expect.

Like I say, I really like Prezi, you can create some really striking presentations in it. Will I buy it? Probably not… With information security such a big factor in business these days I don’t think I could save presentations online without knowing more about their security model etc, and $159 a year is too expensive for a version that would give me the ability to work offline and keep the presentations within the companies control. Still it’s a very nice little app!

Building a race car from scratch

Tom Basham — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:06:01 +0000

Years ago when I was first looking into getting my Elise I spent quite a bit of time on the British Cars BBS, which at the time was a lively place to find out about such things. I remember have a couple of chats to a guy who went by the name of DP on the site. He had one of the few Elise’s in the states at that time, which was quite a feat as they weren’t actually street legal over there.

Anyway, last time I remember him posting there he was looking into building his own car from scratch based on a layout with the driver and engine side-by-side with chains driving both the front and rear wheels.

I kept up with the project at the time, but today I noticed a post on Jalopnik about a new ‘DP4 Super-kart’. Turns out in the 8 years since then Dennis has been busy building on those original plans and developing a number of different cars based on that layout.

The latest project looks pretty impressive… it’s smaller than an original Mini but powered by a ~200bhp motorbike engine though a 4wd system. If the video below is anything to go by it looks like a lot of fun. Especially when you consider that’s the cars first real run so it hasn’t had much development on it’s setup etc.

He’s also got a really good blog detailing the development of all his projects including the DP4. If you’re a car geek it’s well worth a read. It’ll be interesting to see how his other projects go, as they include electric track cars based on the same sort of designs.

There’s more info on the Palatov Motorsport site and DP’s own site.

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How to pick the right channel for your Wi-Fi

Tom Basham — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:37:45 +0000

Recently I’ve noticed a few more wireless networks crop up near my place, so I’ve been meaning to check I’m still on the right channel. Seeing as I was doing the checks I thought it might be useful to write a few notes on what to check for.

First a little technical background… Wi-Fi networks all operate in the same 2.4GHz band of the spectrum. To allow many networks to work within the same vicinity the range is broken down into a number of channels (11 in the US and 13 in Europe). Think of these as the frequencies of radio stations, each has a discreet band of its own.

When you set up your Wi-Fi network your router or access point will be set to use one of these channels. That sounds great eh? Unfortunately, as you can see from the diagram above, to squeeze in enough channels many of them overlap. What that means in practice is that if your network is on a channel that overlaps with your neighbours both of you will probably suffer reduced performance.

To get around this problem, you can check what channels are being used around you and set your network to one that has the most clear signal.

The easiest way of doing this is to download a Wi-Fi monitoring tool and use that to analyse the surrounding networks. I’ve used inSSIDer from Metageek before as it gives you a nice graph which helps visualise the networks. So in the screenshot below you can see that the orange network is set to channel 6 (the mid-point of the range), but that the dotted yellow network is set to channel 9 and overlaps it slightly. Setting the orange network to channel 1 would move it out of the interference of the other networks, and should therefore speed it up.

If you’re having problems with your network it’s worth trying this out and seeing how the networks around you could be affecting yours. You can usually set the channel for your network within the control panel for your wireless access point or router. Give it a go and see.

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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Tom Basham — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:14:30 +0000

It seems that these days pretty much every cold call I get from a vendor is about VDI. If you’re an enterprise it seems that it’s pretty much anyone wants to talk to you about. It’s clearly the topic of the day, but what does it actually mean?

At work I’ve been looking at options for VDI for a while, but to be honest I prefer to refer to the topic as Centralised Desktops. For me ‘VDI’ implies a particular solution, whereas in fact if centralisation is something you want, you should be looking beyond simple virtualisation.

So what it? Well simply put, it’s about moving the execution of your desktop environment away from your users desks and into a managed central location, probably a data centre. So no more desktop computers (well, probably… but we’ll come to that another time).

Instead, on each desk you put a Thin Client. These are small, cheap, power efficient devices that really don’t do much more than receive the ‘screen’ from the newly centralised desktop and send the keyboard and mouse information back down down the wire. The actual OS and applications are running in a far off data centre. This is where is get interesting, as there are many platforms that these can run on.

The solution most people think about with VDI is running the desktop OS and apps on a virtual machine. In this scenario you’d typically have a server running a hypervisor such as VMWare, Hyper-V or Citrix’s Xen. That server would host a number of desktop OS’s that can be presented out to the thin clients on peoples desks.

Now that’s a good approach for most people, but it’s not the only one. For high end users, guys doing CAD or analysis work, a VM isn’t going to cut it. A share of CPU time and memory might not be enough. For these sorts of users something like HP’s Blade Workstations could be an answer. These are basically high spec computers squeezed into a blade form factor. If you’re familiar with blade servers they’re basically the same thing but with better graphics capability.

So using Blades you can give end users very high end computing capacity from a remote location. But what about the other end of the spectrum, the people in your organisation who have very low computing requirements. There’s a pretty good chance that for some people even a desktop VM is overspec’d. For these guys more traditional Citrix/Terminal Services type solutions are still a very good fit.

In that sort of scenario you’d have single server OS that many people would connect and logon to. They can then share the OS and applications running on it as they are presented back to the thin client. Of course in that instance each user is only getting a share of the server and OS resources, but the point is exactly that. Each user consumes a share of a single server (and its costs) and a single OS (and its costs). Per user its cheap!

So that’s what the two ends of the solution look like. But how do you link them up? First lets talk about how the ‘screen’ gets from the centralised desktop to the thin client (and of course the keyboard and mouse back the other way.

There are a number of protocols for achieving this. For years Citrix has had ICA. It’s tried and tested, I’d hazard a guess that most larger businesses are probably using it in some way or the other. Microsoft has RDP, which has shipped with every version of windows since Win2000. Again, it’s tried and tested, remote assistance uses it for example, and imagine pretty much every Windows server in the world uses it for management. The problem with these protocols has been that whilst they’re great for running bog standard Windows and office apps, as soon as you throw anything complicated like graphics or media at them they start to choke. They’ve improved a lot over the past few years, but there are still limitations.

In addition to the Citrix and Microsoft protocols there are more specialise alternatives that aim to improve the experience for media intensive applications, or users over long connections. A good example of this is HP’s RGS protocol or Citrix’s HDX. Last year we ran a proof of concept using RGS that saw people in our Bangalore office happily using AutoCAD on desktops hosted out of an office in Bristol. It works very well indeed.

There are other solutions such Teradici’s PCoverIP which originally used hardware acceleration at both ends to improve performance, but is now being used by VMWare in a software only capacity as part of it View product. On paper this looks very good, but I’ve not really had a chance to try it first hand yet.

What connects the thin client to the centralised desktop? In the simplest of deployments you can actually hard code a thin client to talk to a specific desktop/server. In essence this gives you a 1:1 connection. That’s not necessarily the smartest route though. Most solutions will now use a connection broker to negotiate the right central desktop for each thin client or user. To my mind good broker is where the intelligence come into the solution.

Personally I feel that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for VDI. Perhaps for some organisations that’s not true, but for many I think a blend of solutions will be the best choice. A broker helps you do this. Say you have a mix of virtual desktops and blade workstations. How do you make sure your users get the right desktop? Well a broker will look at the connection request, who it’s from or where, and connect the thin client to the right back end.

What’s more, because this process is dynamic it doesn’t necessarily have to connect the user to the same desktop each time. Say some of your central desktops are down for maintenance, the broker would direct them to one that was working. Even better, if you have say 10,000 people in your company, it’s a fair bet that maybe only 80/90% of them are working at any given time. In that case why have 10,000 desktops computers and licenses? Just have say 8,500 and let the broker make sure they are utilised. Depending on the solution the broken can even go off and provision more VM’s should extra people show up.

Of course in truth it’s not quite that simple. For one thing if your desktops aren’t going to be persistent, (i.e. not tied to a single user/thin client) you need to work out what to do with your users applications, ‘profile’ information and data.

Data is the easy one, just don’t have any of it local. Put everything on network shares, in Sharepoint or in some other system. If your desktops are in a data centre next to those storage systems they’ll get fast access to everything they need – faster than a traditional desktop would get. Local data is pretty much always a bad idea anyway. The one exception might be with Blade workstations, where demanding apps might need local storage to caching data etc.

Your users ‘profile’ information is slightly more tricky. If they are effectively moving to a different computer every day, you need to make sure that they’re settings follow them across those different desktops. One solution would be Windows Roaming Profiles. These have been around for years and can work well. Other solutions such as Appsense or RTO’s Virtual Profiles do things in a slightly different, more efficient way, but achieve the same goal.

Applications, now that’s the difficult one. If you think of a normal PC, apps are almost always installed locally, either by CD/DVD or in business probably over the wire using something like SMS/SCCM. That installation takes time, and it’s not something you can afford to do every time a user logs on to a centralised desktop to make sure they’ve got the right applications.

There are two answers to this. Application Virtualisation and (once again) Terminal Services. App Virtualisation has been around for a few years, but has only really taken off over the last year or so. It’s a complex technology, but basically it separates the application from the OS, allowing it to run in it’s own mini-virtual environment. With the app separated from the OS, your not restricted to traditional installations. Most app virtualisations technologies will allow you to ‘stream’ the application down to computer as and when it is needed. Again, this is complex but for an end user is means that when they click on the icon, the technology downloads the application components as they are needed so there’s no long installation, just a small initial delay.

There are however some limitations to app virtualisation, which means that other solutions like terminal services may still have a place in a VDI environment. say you have an app that just won’t work in App-V or XenApp or other virtualisation tools? In that case you can install them natively on a Windows OS and present them out to the virtual desktops using terminal services. it may sound a little convoluted, but it works.

So… that’s a real high level view of what VDI is. Hopefully it all made sense. I’m planning to to some follow up posts with some more detail, but for now here’s a quick diagram showing a reference architecture for a VDI implementation (the diagram above). Again, it’s quite high level, but I think it shows how these things all fit together.

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Google Wave for Apps Premier and Domains

Tom Basham — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:29:44 +0000

I meant to post something up about this the other day… it’s just a quick post about Google making Wave available for Google Apps Premier and Apps for Domains customers.

If your Google Apps running on your domain, you can add Wave by going to your admin control panel, clicking ‘Add more services’, finding Wave then clicking ‘Add it now’.

What’s more you can give your Apps users a nice friendly URL for Wave, for example ‘wave.mydomain.com’ in the same way as the other Google Apps. Simply create a CNAME for ‘wave’ in your domain DNS records, then from Admin console, go to the Google Wave Settings page and click the ‘Change URL’ link. Enter in your details and you’re away. (More detailed instructions are available from Google!)

Now if only anyone else I knew used it!