Marketplace

Brian Madden Live's Blog

Home

Syndication

A conversation with Ardence's Pete Downing

Written on Feb 28 2007 18,014 views, 10 comments

Attachment: bml02272007-2.mp3

by Brian Madden

As part of the Citrix Ardence EMEA partner conference I'm attending in Nice, France this week, I was able to sit down with Ardence's Pete Downing. Pete is an SE with Ardence, and we had a geek-to-geek conversation about how Ardence works.

This podcast is the "raw" style that I debuted yesterday--no editing, no music, just a recorded interview.

In this interview, Pete explains how Ardence actually works--how they share disk images, how they deal with shared computer names and SIDs, and how the network connectivity takes place. This conversation is an excellent addition to the white paper I wrote last year about Ardence.

How Ardence "fakes out" the Windows computer name and SID
Why Ardence chose to use UDP instead of TCP
Where the Ardence cache file can be saved
How people start using Ardence
How the Ardence PXE boot process works
How Ardence can share vdisks across multiple hardware platforms

Overall this was a great trip. I'll write more about my thoughts tomorrow. (I definitely have a lot.) Right now it's 4:39am. I've been up all night, but my flight tomorrow leaves at 7:30, so I figured that I should probably just plan on staying up all night and sleep on the plane ride home tomorrow.

Comments

Jim Kenzig wrote Unbelievable!

on 03-08-2007 9:00 AM

This stuff is totally mind boggling! This is going to totally change the way the data center works.
Jim

Michael Platsis wrote good summary

on 04-28-2007 9:27 PM

would have loved a bit more technical detail, but overall a good summary as to how the technology works.

Guest wrote How about the boot up time?

on 05-25-2007 2:59 PM

That sounds all great but what is the boot time like? I can imagine that it might be all right being booted of a SAN or a NAS. Can someone tell me any details on that?

Viktor

Guest wrote great product

on 05-30-2007 7:37 AM

I really love the concept; especially in combo with VMWARE's ESX that's the idea of scaling out without the overhead of extra harddisks

Pete Downing wrote RE: How about the boot up time?

on 06-05-2007 7:32 AM

Viktor,

Because Ardence is not streaming let's say a whole 10 Gigs of the Ardence VDisk, the boot time is great! For example booting a machine can pull down on the intial boot 70 MB to 120 MB (depending on the OS) and take in the ball park from 45 seconds to 120 seconds to boot. Factors like network backbone and NIC card in the machine play into this, as well as netowrk latency. Overall you will see a favorable performance in the machine and in most cases the user would never know the OS is being streamed.

You can store the VDisks on a SAN or NAS. Brain does a great job in describing this in the following article:

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Using-Ardence-Disk-Streaming-with-Citrix-Servers

Hope this helps!

PJD

Guest wrote IT Workstudy - Westwood College

on 07-12-2007 1:48 PM

We are fighting with turning our systems to Ardence without losing our previous ghost images, is there any way that this could be pulled off?

Guest wrote How to monitor ardence

on 08-07-2007 7:13 AM

I would like to know how i can monitor the performance of ardence....that is ...when does the streamed OS becomes functional.... How much time it took to stream it(automated ofcourse)..Any ideas??

Guest wrote Ardence is not the only OS streaming solution

on 06-25-2008 8:42 AM

HP Neoware Image Manager is THE other OS Streaming solution.The deployment of HP Neoware Image Manager is much simpler than Ardence/Citrix. And it can run the virtual disk image server standalone on linux servers.Worth a try...

Guest wrote How does Ardence chage ACLs

on 06-25-2008 8:51 AM

Very interesting podcast, but I wonder how does the "SID changer" changes the ACLs associated to the files and registry entries?I understand the process with domain SID but not with local SIDs Especially, ACL can contain entries built from LOCAL machine SID, that correspond to the LOCAL user accounts. If you change the LOCAL machine SID, then the existing ACLs must be changed as well, meaning that you need to scan all files and registry entries in order to change them and to replace the "old" SID with the "New SID", just like NewSid from sysinternal did. GhostWalker does the same.Sysprep /reseal removes all the ACLs so that you do not have any issue with existing ACLs but then you loose all the access rights that you have previously set on your files/folders and registry.So how does Citrix Provisionning Server deals with MACHINE SID ? Thanks in advance

Guest wrote Re: Ardence is not the only OS streaming solution

on 06-25-2008 12:20 PM

Add to that (other streaming OS solutions) emBoot's netBoot/i and winBoot/i...

(Note: You must be logged in to post a comment.)

Syndication

Recent Posts

Tags

Archives

A conversation with Ardence's Pete Downing

Comments