The VDI plugin for Lync 2013 allows using Lync 2013 (which automatically becomes SFB after some updates are installed) over a remote desktop connection without performance penalties, by offloading the audio/video processing to the RDP client.
But what to do if you are using Office 2016 and Skype For Business 2016 on your virtual desktops / terminal servers?
I want turn a physical machine running MS Windows 7 into a VirtualBox virtual machine. This is easy, I have done this before, but this time I needed the virtual size/capacity of the disk to be a fixed and smaller size.
It needs to be fixed because I will install PGP disk encryption on it for compliance reasons. This will expand a dynamic disk to it maximum size.
Aside from this special case there are other reasons for wanting disks to be smaller and fixed. Is my experience. If you run for example a Jenkins build server on a dynamically expanding disk you could see the disk expanding quickly to its maximum size while in the guest OS disk space usage is stable and there is lots of free space.
Using Disk2vhd I have created a vhdx file. This file I converted to vdi format.
vboxmanage clonehd --format VDI MSWIN7.VHDX MSWIN7.vdi
Purportedly with vdi you could decrease virtual size/capacity with commands similar to
vboxmanage modifyhd MSWIN7.vdi --resize 160000
I found that this doesn't work. Even if you try variants you will consistently get error messages like:
Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED VBoxManage: error: Resize hard disk operation for this format is not implemented yet!
Below is the disk layout of my vdi disk. I added this to a Ubuntu VM to look at it using Gparted and CloneZilla. Capacity is around 300GB. Unallocated 145GB. Used is around 153GB.
I want to shrink capacity to around 160GB. This should be enough to fit /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2.
BTW, I tried CloneZilla but it also does not seem to like to shrink the capacity to a smaller disk. I tried various settings in CloneZilla but no success.
How can I decrease virtual size/capacity?
My company is looking at desktop virtualization, and are planning to move all of the desktop compute resources into the server room or data center, and provide users with thin clients for access.
In most cases, a simple VNC or Remote Desktop solution is adequate, but some users are running visualizations that require 3D capability--something that VNC and Remote Desktop cannot support.
Rather than making an exception and providing desktop machines for these users, complicating out rollout and future operations, we are considering adding servers with GPUs, and using HP's Remote Graphics to provide access from the thin client.
The demo version appears to work acceptably, but there is a bit of a learning curve, it's not clear how well it would work for multiple simultaneous sessions, and it's not clear if it would be a good solution to apply to non-3D sessions. If possible, as with the hardware, we want to deploy a single software solution instead of a mishmash.
If anyone has had experience managing a large installation of HP Remote Graphics, I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.
Edit: In particular, we're interested in feedback regarding:
I'm having trouble with the title on this one, please edit.
When they connect using ssh -X forwarding they get a local window managed by the local windo-manager that is not persistent.
1: is there a way to run a program on the VM and have it managed locally AND have it persistent?
2: can the client be on windows or OS-X?
ps: in this case the vm's are running Ubuntu
I'm head of the IT department at the small business I work for, however I am primarily a software architect and all of my system administration experience and knowledge is ancillary to software development. At some point this year or next we will be looking at upgrading our workstation environment to a uniform Windows 7 / Office 2010 environment as opposed to the hodge podge collection of various OEM licensed editions of software that are on each different machine.
It occurred to me that it is probably possible to forgo upgrading each workstation and instead have it be a dumb terminal to access a virutalization server and have their entire virtual workstation hosted on the server.
Now I know basically anything is possible but is this a feasible solution for a small business (25-50 work stations)? Assuming that this is feasible, what type of rough guidelines exist for calculating the required server resources needed for this.
How exactly do solutions handle a user accessing their VM, do they log on normally to their physical workstation and then use remote desktop to access their VM, or is it usually done with a client piece of software to negotiate this?
What types of software available for administering and monitoring these VM's, can this functionality be achieved out of box with Microsoft Server 2008? I'm mostly interested in these questions relating to Server 2008 with Hyper-V but fell free to offer insight with VMware's product line up, especially if there's any compelling reasons to choose them over Hyper-V in a Microsoft shop.
Edit: Just to add some more information on implementation goals would be to upgrade our platform from a Win2k3 / XP environment to a full Windows 2008 / Win7 platform without having to perform any of that associated work with our each differently configured workstation.
Also could anyone offer any realistic guidelines for how big of hardware is needed to support 25-50 workstations virtually? The majority the workstations do nothing except Office, Outlook and web. The only high demand workstations are the development workstations which would keep everything local.