Wim Coekaerts

So a nasty bug report came out the other day on linux, a serious exploit. Everyone scrambled to get a kernel built and (tested) and released and then there's of course the effort of bringing down applications, multi-tiered environments being way more complex in terms of orchestration of bringing down multiple systems, installing the updated kernel and rebooting and bringing everything back up in an orderly fashion.

Of course for all our customers that use ksplice and enjoy the cool zero downtime patching, theyt might not even have noticed if they ran *as many do* ksplice in automated mode or others just had to issue one single very simple command and they were done. No applications to bring down, no systems to reboot... and still safe, secure, patched, current.

some more specifics on the ksplice blog here.

There's also Time to release. The ksplice patch was available on Tuesday (5/14) while the RPM for the kernel was released on Thursday (5/16) by us and the other similar distributions. No hassle...

We just released version 5.0 of Oracle Secure Global Desktop (for those that don't know what it is, formerly known as Tarantella...). It's a great product that I have been using every for a long time now. I have it installed at home on my servers so that I can get access to my home network from anywhere...without vpn.

Anyway, a few nice things that I personally like in the new release :

(1) html5 client support. In particular, at this time the ipad. So now, I can use my ipad to log into SGD and connect to my apps without having to download and install a client. It just works with the built-in Safari browser. We will expand this over time, right now it's ipad only.

(2) the tta rpm will automatically pull in all dependencies on Oracle Linux 6. So all you need to do is download the tta (sgd) rpm from oracle.com and type yum install tta-5.00-907.i386.rpm. When Oracle Linux is configured to connect to ULN or just go to http://public-yum.oracle.com it will grab all the required OS rpms. This makes it super easy to install and get going.

To download the software, go to http://edelivery.oracle.com, go to the Oracle Desktop Virtualization Products product pack and click on Oracle Secure Global Desktop 5.0 Media Pack.

I am working on a little tool that makes it easy to import an Oracle VM template in a more automated fashion, using python's built-in SimpleHTTPServer. While working on this, I realized that in many environments the Oracle VM Servers might be in an isolated network so that they don't have direct access to the intranet. We're talking about the management network here.

One simple way around this, is to take one server that's on the same network as the Oracle VM Server's management network, for instance, the Oracle VM Manager system... and install something like TinyProxy on that machine. Then, use that servername as the proxy in Oracle VM Manager when you import a VM, VM Template or VM Assembly.

TinyProxy can be found in the EPEL repository (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL). The tinyproxy RPM will install without issue on Oracle Linux. It is very easy/simple to configure and this can be a good workaround or solution to make it easy to import templates or VMs while the servers are on a more isolated network.

A good Monday morning for Desktop Virtualization at Oracle.

We just released a few new products :

Oracle VDI 3.5

support for Ubuntu 12 and Windows 8 VMs

complete single server installation and the ability to just add nodes to scale

includes the latest version of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.10

install on top of Solaris 11 and/or Oracle Linux 6 support added

hd 720p video playback on the Sun Ray thin clients with Windows Media Player

Oracle Sun Ray Software 5.4

install on top of Solaris 11 and/or Oracle Linux 6 support added

new firmware update for the Oracle Sun Ray thin clients

hd 720p video playback on the Sun Ray thin clients with Windows Media Player

support IPsec from thin client to server with aes256

introducing vastly improved smart card support when using a Linux host

plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c for VDI and SRS

The press release is here

Release notes for VDI are here

Release notes for SRS are here