As every year, JavaONE attendees have access to a public set of SunRay thin clients for Internet access.

This year however, the user experience is different.  Attendees do receive access to a full, dedicated virtual machine with their OS of choice : OpenSolaris, Ubuntu or Windows Vista.

When the attendee inserts its conference card into the SunRay, he is prompted to choose a desktop, the desktop is booted in a virtual machine on one of our servers and delivered to the thin client in a couple of seconds.

When the attendee removes the smart card from the SunRay, the virtual machine is suspended and stored for later usage, the day after or later.

Each time the attendee reconnects the smart card in any of the 200 available SunRays thin clients, it receives back its very own personal virtual machine.

Wonder about the infrastructure we deployed to provide this service ?  Check out this article which goes pretty much into all the details.