Recently, I’ve been playing with Linux, specifically Ubuntu, in an attempt to set up a simple, maintainable client for virtual desktops. Its been a fair while since I’ve used linux in a serious sense, so I thought I’d post up what I’ve done, as I progress (largely for my own reference, but hopefully others might find it of use!)
Key requirements are:
A virtual client! In this instance, the vmware open client will need to be installed and configured on the desktop. There are still limitations with the open client that may break the plan – limitations with remote media playback, and usb redirection are two areas in particular that may cause issues.
A working web browser! Of course, Firefox is an obvious standard, installed with Ubuntu, so thats not much of a challenge, at least on the surface. Beyond a working web browser, we need to possibly extend our server architecture to support browsers beyond Internet Explorer for our key wep applications, allowing a level of work to be carried out in the event of virtual desktop failures. This is where things get a lot harder!
A standard environment across different hardware, locked down for the default user. This is actually quite tricky. By default, linux is designed to be easy to customise and configure, so locking it down to a single user, while allowing network proxy changes and wireless connections, is actually quite a challenge. In addition, desktop launchers will need to be variable, depending on local printer installations for users on laptops with home printer (vmware-view allows you to redirect a printer, but you need to specifically do it by name).
An architecture to allow remote reconfiguration, support and updates across a company wide platform. This is one of the worst areas – linux still lags quite badly behind the sort of architecture taken for granted on a Windows network when it comes to administration through global policies. It’s still fundamentally a server operating system,and admin tools generally focus on supporting machines runnign in that capacity, not as clients. This is the hardest area of all, looking forward to a possible roll out of well over a thousand machines world wide, with a technical team with no linux experience! Keeping the client simple and cheap, allowing machines to be swapped instead of supported is a very high priority where possible.
Hopefully the next series of posts on this topic will be useful, although its quite a change of tack from SharePoint! Don’t worry, as new SharePoint issues come up, I’ll still be posting on that topic too.
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