By Mike Laverick

This week I spent some (not all) of my time playing about with a Panologic Device.

[Oh, and contrary to popular belief - they didn't pay me to do this, and I didn't ask for any money. I all asked for was a the device and software so I could play. Remember, after years of documenting VMware technologies - mainly for free - VMware has never given me a penny. He who pays the piper calls the tune - does NOT apply on RTFM. Got that?]

It’s not a PC and its not a dumb-terminal. It’s something else all together – its what’s called a zero-client. What that means is essentially the device is truly stateless. It boots over the network to what’s called the Pano Manager, which then acts as a broker to your virtual desktops. I’ve been writing a guide to VMware View 4.5 (which is currently in beta), and thought it was about time that I looked at dumb-terminals and zero-clients. If first came across Panologic at the North Carolina User Summit in 2008, and then again when they presented at the London User Group. Panologic is not alone in creating a zero-client, there are others on the market – and I’d be happy to evaluate them if the respective vendors can setup me up with a device and necessary software. It’s important to really understand what zero-client really means – it means literally there is no software or firmware on the device. You plug it, and so long as the appropriate system services are in place (DHCP, the zero-client manager/broker, vCenter and Virtual Desktops) – then the client simply boots, presents a logon screen and the user gets their desktop. I’m going to experiment with my Pano over the next couple of weeks, hopefully using my partner as a guinea-pig (I’m sure she wouldn’t not like being compared to furry rodent, despite her feline qualities!). She’s working in London, and wants to leave her laptop down there, but she will still need to browse the web and stuff when she gets home for the Le Weekend. Rather than letting her “borrow” my Mac Book Pro, and have complain about where the DEL key is – I thought I would take her keyboard, screen and mouse – and plug them into the Pano. She’s always complaining about her old Jurassic Windows XP laptop being to slow – so perhaps she will find the virtual desktop experience a better one.

I won’t bore you with a details step-by-step setup of the system – but  will give you here an overview how to get started and what I felt about the overall system. Remember I’ve only been using a zero-client for about a week so my experiences will be quite narrow and partial. I’m not doing (yet) a bake-off between various zero-clients.

First,  I download and imported the Pano Manager. This is a pretty straightforward job – as it ships in a .OVF format which means so long as your on vSphere4, it just gets imported into the cluster. It’s a pretty straightforward post configuration to from the vSphere Console – you just need to assign a static IP address to the Pano Manager (in my case 192.168.3.130), and set your passwords up! The real post configuration is in the administrative web-pages of the Pano Manager itself which is based on this nice, new Adobe Air environment – its seems like every vendor who has a web-page based admin tool is adopting – including VMware…

There’s two mandatory and seven optional components that need to be setup. Firstly, you need to tell the Pano Manager about your Active Directory configuration and then your vCenter configuration. Of course, being a lab environment I just cheated and used the built-in administrator accounts – but best practice would be to use dedicated accounts for this stuff. The Pano Manager needs your AD environment for authentication – and the vCenter to locate the desktops – it also needs these if you chose to use the Pano Manager to provision desktops. This isn’t mandatory – unless you have no other provisioning method already in place. If you have VMware View for example, you could let View handle the provisioning processes, and then just point the Pano Manager to the desktops already created.

Read On…

Take a look at RTFM Education.com – a website/blog created by Mike Laverick