I am at SIBOS this week, on Sun’s booth, demonstrating our Open Suite for Swift Solution to customers and prospects.
The demo has been prepared by Patrice in a Virtual Box image and requires significant resources to run as it includes, Java CAPS, Directory Server, Oracle XE, Microsoft MQ, Websphere MQ etc …
Our initial plans was to install that demo on our booth’s Sun Ray server but the machine was not sized appropriately to handle a dozen Sun Ray clients running Star Office, Firefox and, at the same time, our huge Swift demo VM.
The solution was :
- Start the VM on my own laptop, in headless mode (my laptop acting as a Virtual Server)
- On the Sun Ray, start our RDP client to connect to running VM, over the air
The full picture is then
Sun Ray device ---> Sun Ray Server ---> RDP Client ---> Virtual Box ---> Swift Demo
This setup works great ! People are always quite impressed when I plug my Sun Badge in a Sun Ray client and instantly receive my Windows screen running in a VM on another machine.
It is important to understand that Virtual box *is* the RDP server here, independently of any OS running as guest. This setup will also work with Linux or Solaris guest. Read this article to find more about Virtual Box’s headless capabilities.