Apparently that Luflogix thing was fake

Posted by Brian Madden on April 02, 2008. send this link to your friendsprint this post
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I thought it was too good to be true, but I guess I fell for the Luflogix rumor too. I received this photo from the alleged Luflogix product team:

The original Luflogix team

Note the particularly good-looking guy in red under the "F" in "Fools." :)

It turns out that Luflogix was a class project. Think of it as a future tense real-world case study.

The scary part is that as we wrote this article, we started to wonder why this technology doesn't actually exist? I mean sure the TS session portability will probably never happen. But why can't I "flow" a remote VDI session from a remote host to a local workstation? Or does anyone even care?

Reader Comments
VDI session portability
Thursday, April 03, 2008 3:09:15 AM

Not to feed the rumour mill, but I was at a VMware conference recently and chatted with one of the SEs. VMware is apparently working on this right now. Couldn't draw much in the way of details out of him, but I'm guessing that "portable" offline VDI VMs (running in VM Player or ACE I guess) that will sync up when the user "plugs in" will be a reality soon. If true, VDI will really take off and leave traditional SBC in the dust.

Re: VDI session portability
Thursday, April 03, 2008 7:23:08 AM

Guest

I was at the sam VMWare confrence in Cannes and was talking to one of the CITRIX people at their stand and he too mentioned that they were looking into something like this technology.

But I got the lowdown on the VMWare solution it syncs DELTA changes to/from the client machine. This will not work if the client/user is located on the end of a low bandwidth link.

Unless the user syncs up frequently that is. but if you think about it. Sync'ing up frequently will possible consume the  same amount of network bandwidth as a traditional FAT client.  So why bother?

Not so far fetched
Thursday, April 03, 2008 7:27:18 AM

Guest
Hi Brian, You are right about this being unlikely to happen in TS – each session is intimately tied to particular instances of kernel data structures and there is currently no easy way to virtualize all these. For VDI it is much simpler because we already have the virtualization layer. We just need to flow the image between servers and desktops or laptops -  we can already copy VMs down but whether that is useful would depend on network impact and how long it took and hence whether we need a more intelligent approach.  The problem for now is that the image would still end up having to be run under a player rather than natively on a hypervisor. Martin Ingram, AppSense
Re: Not so far fetched
Thursday, April 03, 2008 10:19:19 AM

Offline VM is definitely the next frontier for VDI. Multiple vendors are working on solutions. I was going to make my first million by using Bittorrent as a delivery mechanism is my solution. :) The player thing is a problem too, as we had issues with ACE where the end user already had an older version of VMware Workstation installed on their machines, and the player would not function properly. In the future, I see a 'player' being bundled with the vm, and running in an isolated environment (kinda like Thinstall).

uh...
Thursday, April 03, 2008 9:10:34 AM

Guest

I have users right now that are able to play application on laptops and sync them when connecting to TS and Citrx.  Or....I've made a huge HUGE error of misunderstanding, and the federal government of the US is using some kind of fake application.....

I'm very confused here guys... :(

Re: uh...
Thursday, April 03, 2008 10:27:00 AM

You're confused.  We're not talking about syncing data between laptops and file servers/database servers, etc.  What we're talking about is running applications on a Terminal Server or VDI environment, then clicking a button and having the complete operating environment (including running applications) magically transported to your laptop to then take offline and resume using your