Remember the Virtual Workplace video Citrix showed at Iforum about 4 or 5
years ago? It was very Star Trekkish with a guy walking around with a little
portable computer holding a tele/video conference with people around the
world. He went from his office, to his car and then to his home where he
plugged into a cradle and brought the conference up on his giant plasma TV.
They connected people from all over the world. When the channel got staticy
and dropped and then came back up, he went Oh never mind we just switched
over to a new server.
Ok that was Citrix's vision of access back then. Any where, any place,
and any device. Fast forward to 2006. The CPS 4 package has much of this
functionality.. session reliability for example and application isolation so
apps don't step on each other. Conferencing built in and more.
Now stay with me here and I will take you on a visionary dream of mine and
eureka moment I had last evening in my sleep. (and yeah this happens all the
time)
Maybe we are approaching this whole virtualization thing backwards.
Instead of virtualizing servers and desktops I think we should be
virtualizing user profile sessions.
Here is my dream. You know how VMWare has that Vmotion stuff where you can
move a machine over from one physical server to another and not miss a beat?
That is pretty awesome stuff. I started thinking (while I was dreaming of
course0 why can't someone come up with a way to have multiple identical
servers with the same apps loaded on them and an admin tool that can take a
users entire logon session profile(everything they are doing) and move JUST
THE SESSION with the profile over to another machine. And then I took it a
step further. It could be automated with a tool to monitor users sessions
and move ones over that are stressing the CPU over to a less used machine.
So instead of moving a whole server or machine over just move the user over.
This is sort of what happened in the virtual workplace video.
I'm asking how hard can this be to do? Put the entire logon into a
"virtual session profile"..everything the user is doing. If the users
session slows down they get a flag that pops up that Asks if they would like
to be moved to a less busy server, if they say yes, it saves their session
state, tells the user to hang on a sec while it moves the session
profile over to a new server and then restores and restarts the session on
the new server. A step further...give the user the option to save their
session logon state..apps open etc into a "virtual session profile" so that
the could connect back in days, weeks or even months later exactly where
they left off. (and it wouldn't matter which machine they connect to) With
programs like softricity to hold the basic backend app information something
like this should be doable. This is not the same thing as virtual
desktops...I want virtual SESSION profiles not Desktops!
Such a virtualization method would be way more useful than virtual
machines because you could do things like create a virtual profile with
settings that would not be changed and use it across your organization, you
could then have a flex type of setup that saved session settings and
personal files in another home storage folder if necessary.
The benefits being you never have to reboot a server with users on it, you
can have way more users on a real server than you can on a virtual server
and you would have much more control over users sessions as you could set up
a system to monitor only the ones you want. ...ie.. always make sure that
the Directors virtual profile is sent to the least busy server. I know some
of this stuff exists today but this is the panacea I want. Think it will
ever happen? I do.
Jim Kenzig <web%20at%20kenzig.com>
Microsoft MVP - Terminal
Services<https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=23AEC72D-4582-47DE-8516-85D400AD929A>
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CEO The Kenzig Group
http://www.kenzig.com
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