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Apparently that Luflogix thing was fake

Written on Apr 02 2008

Filed under: BrianMadden.com

8,083 views, 13 comments

by Brian Madden

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:

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

Luflogix was a class project from our five-day Citrix master class in Brisbane, Australia this week. 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?

Also, I loved that in yesterday's article, the commenters were saying things like, "It looks like you've been fooled," or "someone's pulling your leg." I love that it didn't occur to anyone that I was the actual person who made it up? :)

Comments

Alan Osborne wrote VDI session portability

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 3:09 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.

Guest wrote Re: VDI session portability

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 7:23 AM

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?

Guest wrote Not so far fetched

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 7:27 AM

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

Guest wrote uh...

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 9:10 AM

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... :(

Ormond Merino wrote Re: Not so far fetched

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 10:19 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).

Shawn Bass wrote Lots of long winded thoughts on this topic

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 10:22 AM

So I started writing some comments on this topic when I realized it was quite long and would probably get butchered by the comment length limits. So I created a blog entry to discuss the practicality of session suspend, transportation, and resumption. If anyone is interested on why we won't ever have this technology feel free to give this a read.

Shawn

Shawn Bass wrote Re: uh...

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 10:27 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 applications. It's just not possible. You can read my blog entry in the comment below this for an explanation of why it's not possible.

Shawn

Dan Shappir wrote Re: Lots of long winded thoughts on this topic

on Thu, Apr 3 2008 12:02 PM

Interestingly a year ago I wrote a blog post about the benefits of TS session virtualization as a means to better isolate users from each other and provide many of the same benefits as VDI (). Two people wrote comments that it would be nice if this technology would enable transferring sessions between TSs. I did not analyse this too much and simply responded that it would indeed be cool. Further thinking about this and reading your blog post leads me to agree with you: it is indeed impossible given the architecture of Windows (and to be fair - also Linux).

Guest wrote Re: Lots of long winded thoughts on this topic

on Fri, Apr 4 2008 4:27 AM

Don't say "it's impossible" to quick!

Remember, years ago people said it was impossible to fly or to go to the moon...

Heck, some people even said it was impossible for the personal pc to ever take off!

Maybe you should say "not possible right now" instead? ;-)

Tim Mangan wrote Re: Lots of long winded thoughts on this topic

on Sat, Apr 5 2008 7:53 AM

Shawn, you are on target with your blog post, however you used the wrong example. I think it would be possible to capture the state of a a local applicaiton such as word and resume it. Ultimately it is memory and re-establishing file handles and positions. The app with an open socket to a back-end component is the hard example as the back-end component also looses (or changes) state. The virtual proxy you mentioned would probably be an approach to those, but ultimately may need support by the back-end component.

Guest wrote OMG is that the "Thinstall Queen"

on Sun, Apr 6 2008 6:46 PM

It is! In the photo!

Guest wrote Lol, pwn3d by Ozzy, lol n00bs

on Sun, Apr 6 2008 10:43 PM

Lol you bunch of n00bs, u got pwn3d by kangaroos...got eat more jerky!

Guest wrote Only fools say "Never".

on Tue, Apr 8 2008 7:31 AM

If we can do this with individual applications, we'll be able to do it with desktop sessions. It's only a matter of time. Only a fool would say it's never going to be possible.

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