Another super niche blog post. No one is ever going to find this…. So I had to dig into System Centre Configuration Manager today, probably Microsoft’s most complex product. I’ve been using this massively scalable and capable scheduling system since SMS1.2. But it still a bit scary to support… Machines cloned by VDI service VMware View were coming up with the same unique ID. The SMS client had been captured in the reference image that was cloned to create desktop pools.
Terraform is a tool by Hashicorp (who do Vagrant, Packer and other ops tools). You maintain a single configuration file and it trues up your environment, creating and deleting machines, to match the configuration file. Their products are coming together into a cohesive suite. The first part describes the Terraform product.
At 30 mins there’s a description of “DevOps” (that cuts through much of the BS). Basically:
Developers care about:
This seminar describes a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using only open source software (and a Windows desktop OS). This is of course a crazy thing to attempt. You’re more likely to pick an off-the-shelf products like VMware Horizon View or Citrix. The most interesting aspect of this seminar is that it explains the components of a VDI infrastructure and the challenges in making an OS designed for local disk work well in a VDI environment and shared storage.
