Racksapce announced a while back (Few days ago) that there where releasing something called a Hosted Virtual Desktop Environment… The idea was that they would host a VM on their network (or in some cases, racks of servers, each with lots of VMs) and you just connect with a thin client and start work…

The idea sounds interesting… and i am actually managing to write this post from a Rackspace HVD test environment (The current machine is a Quad Core Opteron with 15.5Gb of RAM, 160Gb HDD, hosted in the US with a very nice interest connection. Its running Windows 2008 R2 Server Enterprise Edition, and has a copy of Office 2010). FireFox and IE are installed, and, as a basic machine, its nice… I am not an Admin on the box, so I wouldn’t be able to install Visual Studio or anything like that, which would make testing this a bit more interesting, but then again, there is a bit of LAAAAGGGG…..

  • Firstly, by my calculations, the VM is about 180ms away from my house in Dublin, Ireland, which means you can notice the lag while typing…
  • There is a feature for making this work quicker, but its an admin feature and i cant seem to enable it… don’t know if it would make a difference…
  • In the Rackspace white paper, there is mention of using Akamai as an Application Accelerator… Wondering if that would that make a difference…
  • YouTube, as you can probably guess, is not usable… Video is very buggy… one thing to node though: a Full 1080P HD video on YouTube does load Very Quickly!

Now, why would you need this? That’s a bit of a though question… If you are a company with a massive internet pipe, and have low ping times to either an Akamai pop or a Rackspace Data center, this could allow you to reduce hardware costs… buy a couple of thin client boxes, connect them to some monitors, and your good to go… no need to have dedicated hardware…

It might also be useful for On the Go type people… connect anywhere with an mobile device, and your at your main desktop machine… Not sure it would work for programmers though….

Interesting idea… and i can say, in all fairness, this is the first time i have written a post on a Virtual Desktop Environment… and it was interesting… and just a little slow….

[Bonus Material… some screen shots of the box. click for larger images]