...are coming! Because most Sun Ray customers are Windows users, most of the development effort has been directed at improving the experience for Windows users. To that end, not much work has been done in terms of improving video watchability on native sessions (UNIX or Linux sessions not through VDI). However, about a month ago, two YouTube videos were referenced on the SunRay-Users public mailing list, which Oracle employees then confirmed as demonstrating features to come in a future version of Sun Ray Software. What I see from the video appears to be fairly smooth HD video playback, even over an SSH-tunneled X session initiated from a Sun Ray server! Hopefully the improvements help with Flash as well, given the explosion in popularity of YouTube and other Flash video players on the web.
Here are the links to the videos, which were posted by Wim Coekaerts, the Senior VP of Linux and Virtualization at Oracle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fgf8wGD24g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_WTlvLyQoM
Showing posts with label sunray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sunray. Show all posts
Monday, April 25, 2011
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sun Ray Software 5 Released
SRS 5 was officially released today. While I didn't get a chance to evaluate the few new features added in EA 2, I look forward to deploying the final release version within the next month or two.
Here are the download links:
Sun Ray Software 5
PC/SC-lite 1.2
Sun Desktop Access Client 1.0
Here are the download links:
Sun Ray Software 5
PC/SC-lite 1.2
Sun Desktop Access Client 1.0
Monday, September 28, 2009
Yet Another Overlooked New Sun Ray Feature
The Ctrl-Alt-Bksp-Bksp keystroke used to hard terminate a session can now be disabled. While not listed as a new feature, the documentation has been updated with the note that it can be disabled using the utxconfig command, specifically using the -q option. Disabling this keystroke can be useful in lab environments where users that know about it abuse it to free up locked terminals.
ADDED 10:15am:
In addition, a new -A option is also available to make certain settings mandatory. This was probably added in complement to the above.
The -c, -D, and -L options are now marked as reserved, but they used to have the following descriptions:
-c config-file: Sets a specific configfile to use. The usage of this option is beyond the scope of this manual.
-D: Debug flag.
-L geom: Lists out the X server screen device start-up arguments for the user preferred geometry set with -R or for geom if none is set.
ADDED 10:15am:
In addition, a new -A option is also available to make certain settings mandatory. This was probably added in complement to the above.
The -c, -D, and -L options are now marked as reserved, but they used to have the following descriptions:
-c config-file: Sets a specific configfile to use. The usage of this option is beyond the scope of this manual.
-D: Debug flag.
-L geom: Lists out the X server screen device start-up arguments for the user preferred geometry set with -R or for geom if none is set.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Sun Ray Portrait Mode
One of the friendly bloggers over at Sun reported that Sun Ray Software 5 EA2 now has support for screen rotation! As it turns out, the feature was actually added to the Sun Ray X server in Sun Ray Software 5 EA1, but was another one of the new features that was not listed in the documentation. Happy rotating!
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Microsoft Uses Sun Ray
Microsoft recently released a white paper titled "Virtualizing Windows on Sun Ray Thin Clients at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center", available here. Even Microsoft uses Sun Ray (albeit with Windows).
Monday, July 13, 2009
Thin Clients and Ultra Thin Clients
There's a distinction made between fat clients and thin clients, but a lot of people overlook the difference between the different types of thin clients. For instance, Wyse thin clients aren't as thin as Sun Ray thin clients. The former run embedded versions of operating systems, while the latter runs a firmware. Sometimes, Sun Ray-types are referred to as ultra thin clients, which is probably where the "ut" prefix on Sun Ray commands comes from. The security track record of Sun Rays are also comparably superior. Wyse thin clients, on the other hand:
'Secure' Wyse thin clients vulnerable to remote exploit bugs
'Secure' Wyse thin clients vulnerable to remote exploit bugs
Friday, July 10, 2009
Sun Ray 5 EA 1 GUI Firmware -- Update
One of the Sun Ray engineers responded to my question regarding the new Advanced options. I realized what "Video Input Disable" was last night before reading his reply, but basically on some models of Sun Rays, there is a source button to switch to using the Sun Ray as a monitor for another device. In some cases, this is problematic (for instance, when using Sun Rays as kiosks, or in places where users are apt to press random buttons to get things to work). I wonder if the option would be more aptly named "Source Button Disable" instead, since initially I thought "video input" was referring to the composite video in port on Sun Ray 1 models.
The Fast Download apparently improves tftp firmware downloads over high latency connections. I've found that firmware downloads in the default mode over my home broadband connection are reasonable, though, so I don't have a strong reason to test this feature now.
The Fast Download apparently improves tftp firmware downloads over high latency connections. I've found that firmware downloads in the default mode over my home broadband connection are reasonable, though, so I don't have a strong reason to test this feature now.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
More Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1
A couple more hours of evaluation and a lot more to report!
Adobe Flash HD
This time I used the 2009 JHU Commencement highlights video, after clicking the little HD button. The size of the video on-screen was approximately 896x504. Here's a table again:
So even with HD YouTube, the enhancements help a lot, especially in reducing bandwidth used. However, this time it couldn't match MPlayer's playback quality.
According to a post in this forum thread, Flash enhancements for UNIX are coming in a future release. Hopefully that's sooner rather than later.
Soft Client on Linux
It works with Wine on Linux. I couldn't test it with Wine on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, and the way I tested it on Linux meant that I couldn't check if sound worked, but otherwise it seemed to work pretty well.
New GUI Firmware Options
There are at least two new options in the Advanced menu; these are ones that I took note of because it's not obvious to me what they do, and the documentation only lists them but does not describe them:
REAL BONUS - new X extension: XRender
I have to say REAL here since last time I said BONUS, it turned out that it was in the SRSS 4.2 What's New list, but not in the SRS 5 What's New list (see the edit that I made to yesterday's blog entry). This time, I'm much more sure it's not obvious from the wiki docs. The only place it's mentioned is in the man page for utxconfig (and the corresponding version included on wikis.sun.com).
By default, the XRender extension is not turned on. You can turn it on for your token by running "utxconfig -n on", then logging out and back in. I have no idea how XRender support will affect performance of apps like Firefox on Sun Ray (Cairo uses XRender), but what I do know is that KDE 4 should now be usable! Over a year ago, I compiled the base libraries and desktop for KDE 4.0.5 (with QT 4.3.3). I logged in to see how well it was working, and I was not impressed. The desktop was very ugly and the Logout button didn't even work! (There's a screenshot linked to from this forum thread, but the link seems to be dead now.) I abandoned ship and waited. Today I pulled out that archived set of packages and it works great! As it turns out, the logout button fails if XRender isn't present.
A KDE developer had previously suggested to me compiling QT 4.5 with -graphicssystem raster to work around the lack of XRender. I never got a chance to do this, so I don't know if that would perform better than letting it use the new XRender extension. With the QT and KDE that I have now, running over my desktop icons rapidly and continuously results in Xnewt usage of 50% CPU and plasma process usage of about 35% CPU, as well as a bandwidth stream of 10 Mbps. Contrast that to about 30% CPU usage of the Xorg process when I used KDE 4 from the VirtualBox console (plasma CPU usage was comparable). It's possible a newer QT and KDE, even with XRender, would do better because of optimizations made to the code since I compiled it. I don't know whether raster would do better or worse though. I do know that someone on the SunRay-Users list had tried QT-raster on Linux and found it unusable since QT made the assumption that the color mask on the X server was RGB, instead of querying and determining that Sun Rays actually use BGR. It's possible this issue would not appear on Solaris.
To get a more objective idea of how XRender actually performed since one of the Sun Ray engineers had mentioned on the mailing list that the feature would be kept in for release if it performed well, I downloaded render_bench and ran it against both the Sun Ray and the X console running in VirtualBox. The first time I ran it on the Sun Ray, the X server crashed or reset for an unidentified reason before the test completed. The second time, the test completed without incident. I found that off-screen XRender and Imlib2 tests were comparable between the Sun Ray and console, but that for on-screen XRender, the Sun Ray took 5-12 times longer to complete the test. Subjectively, though, it still looks pretty good.
This ends my formal testing of EA 1. I will make another post if I find another hidden new feature, or have an update on something else I've already blogged about. Otherwise, we wait for EA 2!
Adobe Flash HD
This time I used the 2009 JHU Commencement highlights video, after clicking the little HD button. The size of the video on-screen was approximately 896x504. Here's a table again:
| Test | BW (Mbps) | CPU (%) | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| WinXP/off | 15 | 40 | Very Poor |
| WinXP/x11 | 35 | 65 | Poor |
| WinXP/xvideo | 50 | 60 | Fair |
| WinXP/all | 4 | 17 | Good |
| S10/Firefox 3/Flash 9 | 25 | 40 | Poor |
| S10/XVideo/MPlayer | 65 | 65 | Better |
So even with HD YouTube, the enhancements help a lot, especially in reducing bandwidth used. However, this time it couldn't match MPlayer's playback quality.
According to a post in this forum thread, Flash enhancements for UNIX are coming in a future release. Hopefully that's sooner rather than later.
Soft Client on Linux
It works with Wine on Linux. I couldn't test it with Wine on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, and the way I tested it on Linux meant that I couldn't check if sound worked, but otherwise it seemed to work pretty well.
New GUI Firmware Options
There are at least two new options in the Advanced menu; these are ones that I took note of because it's not obvious to me what they do, and the documentation only lists them but does not describe them:
- Enable Fast Download
- Video input disable
REAL BONUS - new X extension: XRender
I have to say REAL here since last time I said BONUS, it turned out that it was in the SRSS 4.2 What's New list, but not in the SRS 5 What's New list (see the edit that I made to yesterday's blog entry). This time, I'm much more sure it's not obvious from the wiki docs. The only place it's mentioned is in the man page for utxconfig (and the corresponding version included on wikis.sun.com).
By default, the XRender extension is not turned on. You can turn it on for your token by running "utxconfig -n on", then logging out and back in. I have no idea how XRender support will affect performance of apps like Firefox on Sun Ray (Cairo uses XRender), but what I do know is that KDE 4 should now be usable! Over a year ago, I compiled the base libraries and desktop for KDE 4.0.5 (with QT 4.3.3). I logged in to see how well it was working, and I was not impressed. The desktop was very ugly and the Logout button didn't even work! (There's a screenshot linked to from this forum thread, but the link seems to be dead now.) I abandoned ship and waited. Today I pulled out that archived set of packages and it works great! As it turns out, the logout button fails if XRender isn't present.
A KDE developer had previously suggested to me compiling QT 4.5 with -graphicssystem raster to work around the lack of XRender. I never got a chance to do this, so I don't know if that would perform better than letting it use the new XRender extension. With the QT and KDE that I have now, running over my desktop icons rapidly and continuously results in Xnewt usage of 50% CPU and plasma process usage of about 35% CPU, as well as a bandwidth stream of 10 Mbps. Contrast that to about 30% CPU usage of the Xorg process when I used KDE 4 from the VirtualBox console (plasma CPU usage was comparable). It's possible a newer QT and KDE, even with XRender, would do better because of optimizations made to the code since I compiled it. I don't know whether raster would do better or worse though. I do know that someone on the SunRay-Users list had tried QT-raster on Linux and found it unusable since QT made the assumption that the color mask on the X server was RGB, instead of querying and determining that Sun Rays actually use BGR. It's possible this issue would not appear on Solaris.
To get a more objective idea of how XRender actually performed since one of the Sun Ray engineers had mentioned on the mailing list that the feature would be kept in for release if it performed well, I downloaded render_bench and ran it against both the Sun Ray and the X console running in VirtualBox. The first time I ran it on the Sun Ray, the X server crashed or reset for an unidentified reason before the test completed. The second time, the test completed without incident. I found that off-screen XRender and Imlib2 tests were comparable between the Sun Ray and console, but that for on-screen XRender, the Sun Ray took 5-12 times longer to complete the test. Subjectively, though, it still looks pretty good.
This ends my formal testing of EA 1. I will make another post if I find another hidden new feature, or have an update on something else I've already blogged about. Otherwise, we wait for EA 2!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1 First Impressions
After several hours of testing, I've got a somewhat lengthy initial evaluation of two of the major new features: Adobe Flash enhancements and the Soft Client. I don't have Windows Server 2008 that I can play with, but I trust it just means that some extra QA testing has gone into making the Terminal Services Client play well on 2008, as well as added support for multimedia features. With that said, a quick description of my testing setup:
Adobe Flash acceleration
Short comment: It works great!
Long comment: Flash (while limited to IE 7 and 8, sizes less than 1024x768, and Sun Ray 2 series DTUs) has been brought up to par with other video enhancements already made in earlier releases. Here's a table of bandwidth and CPU usage, as well as perceived quality of a particular YouTube video. For those interested, the video I used was the NewsChannel8 story on the TJHSST Sun Grant. Perceived quality was differentiated at about 0:51 (video of walking across the room). CPU usage only accounts for the Xnewt (X server) process, and in the case of Windows sessions, the uttsc process as well. For the WinXP lines, the word after the slash is the argument passed to uttsc. Off equates to how performance was before SRS 5.
As with a lot of the other multimedia enhancements, Sun Ray 1 series DTUs don't fare as well. While I haven't actually tested them in this case, according to the documentation, WinXP/FlashAll isn't even an option there. Now...if only video on *NIX could get some love, too. But, as Sun once told us, most of Sun's Ray customers use Windows, so that's where most of the engineering effort goes these days. Oh well. C'est la vie.
Soft Client
Short comment: It works! Needs some polish and advanced features, but otherwise works!
Long comment: To get the soft client to work, remember to enable "Software Client Access" from the administration GUI or set a utpolicy that has "-u pseudo". You also need to be using the EA version of SRSS as older versions don't understand soft clients. I initially overlooked these two requirements and almost passed the Soft Client off as not working.
The overall experience was comparable to that of a hardware DTU (even sound works!), although the performance in some intense cases (i.e. video) seemed slightly inferior. This is surprising since the Soft Client is running on my comparatively powerful Windows PC, while the Sun Ray has a little 4 watt embedded CPU. Of course, the DTU firmware has probably been significantly optimized. Note that I was able to test the Soft Client with a fully powered Sun Ray server (Sun Fire X4150, 8 core Intel Xeon X5460, 24 GB RAM), although only over my home WAN connection (DSL, 3 Mbps downstream). I don't know how well it would do in a LAN environment with that same server.
What is missing is hotdesking and support for non-Windows! Actually, I think hotdesking would work with NSCM, but I have my own reasons for not using it where I work. Having said that, Soft Client tokens can be registered just like other smart card and DTU pseudo tokens, so by setting up alias tokens, you can effectively use the soft client to attach to an existing smart card session, enabling hotdesking without NSCM! It'd be nice if the Soft Client could offer to present different tokens to the server though, since as a systems administrator, I've got about 5 different smart cards that I use (one for each FOG, redirected using AMGH). But for most people, the default of one token should be fine.
The Soft Client is Windows-only...but it shouldn't be too hard to port to *NIX! In fact, if you look in the installation directory, you find none other than GTK+ libraries. GTK is widely used on *NIX anyways, so I guess it's just a matter of customer demand. Personally I'd find a Linux version very interesting, since it then opens up the possibilities of building a Sun Ray netbook (the existing Sun Ray laptops don't impress me all that much in terms of battery life and lacking a middle mouse button, as well as lacking other modern laptop features).
BONUS new security feature: Client Authentication
It's in the docs. It's in the administration GUI. It has new commands and man pages to go with it. But it's not listed on the "What's New" listing! I won't say too much more here since the official documentation explains it pretty well. Perhaps Sun wasn't all that ready for it yet; the docs on the new wikis.sun.com for it even have colored notes left inline for documentation editors to address.
That's all for now, folks. More to come soon :)
As a footnote to help un-confuse some things, SRS 5 includes SRSS 4.2, SRWC 2.2, and Soft Client 1.0. SRS refers to the entire suite and stands for Sun Ray Software, while SRSS stands for Sun Ray Server Software.
EDIT 7/9/2009 11:56 AM: Client authentication is listed as a new feature in the SRSS 4.2 docs, but not in the SRS 5 docs.
- Windows XP laptop (ThinkPad T61, Intel Core 2 T8300 dual core CPU, 3 GB RAM) -- doubles as both the Windows Remote Desktop server and the host for the Solaris 10 VM. The Soft Client was also tested from here.
- VirtualBox (3.0) VM running Solaris 10 Update 7 and SRS 5 components (32-bit, 2 VCPUs, 768 MB RAM)
- Sun Ray 270
Adobe Flash acceleration
Short comment: It works great!
Long comment: Flash (while limited to IE 7 and 8, sizes less than 1024x768, and Sun Ray 2 series DTUs) has been brought up to par with other video enhancements already made in earlier releases. Here's a table of bandwidth and CPU usage, as well as perceived quality of a particular YouTube video. For those interested, the video I used was the NewsChannel8 story on the TJHSST Sun Grant. Perceived quality was differentiated at about 0:51 (video of walking across the room). CPU usage only accounts for the Xnewt (X server) process, and in the case of Windows sessions, the uttsc process as well. For the WinXP lines, the word after the slash is the argument passed to uttsc. Off equates to how performance was before SRS 5.
| Test | BW (Mbps) | CPU (%) | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| WinXP/off | 35 | 100 | Good |
| WinXP/x11 | 40 | 85 | Good |
| WinXP/xvideo | 65 | 85 | Better |
| WinXP/all | 6-7 | 25-30 | Best |
| S10/Firefox 3/Flash 9 | 40 | 70 | Better |
| S10/XVideo/Xine | 30 | 40 | Best |
As with a lot of the other multimedia enhancements, Sun Ray 1 series DTUs don't fare as well. While I haven't actually tested them in this case, according to the documentation, WinXP/FlashAll isn't even an option there. Now...if only video on *NIX could get some love, too. But, as Sun once told us, most of Sun's Ray customers use Windows, so that's where most of the engineering effort goes these days. Oh well. C'est la vie.
Soft Client
Short comment: It works! Needs some polish and advanced features, but otherwise works!
Long comment: To get the soft client to work, remember to enable "Software Client Access" from the administration GUI or set a utpolicy that has "-u pseudo". You also need to be using the EA version of SRSS as older versions don't understand soft clients. I initially overlooked these two requirements and almost passed the Soft Client off as not working.
The overall experience was comparable to that of a hardware DTU (even sound works!), although the performance in some intense cases (i.e. video) seemed slightly inferior. This is surprising since the Soft Client is running on my comparatively powerful Windows PC, while the Sun Ray has a little 4 watt embedded CPU. Of course, the DTU firmware has probably been significantly optimized. Note that I was able to test the Soft Client with a fully powered Sun Ray server (Sun Fire X4150, 8 core Intel Xeon X5460, 24 GB RAM), although only over my home WAN connection (DSL, 3 Mbps downstream). I don't know how well it would do in a LAN environment with that same server.
What is missing is hotdesking and support for non-Windows! Actually, I think hotdesking would work with NSCM, but I have my own reasons for not using it where I work. Having said that, Soft Client tokens can be registered just like other smart card and DTU pseudo tokens, so by setting up alias tokens, you can effectively use the soft client to attach to an existing smart card session, enabling hotdesking without NSCM! It'd be nice if the Soft Client could offer to present different tokens to the server though, since as a systems administrator, I've got about 5 different smart cards that I use (one for each FOG, redirected using AMGH). But for most people, the default of one token should be fine.
The Soft Client is Windows-only...but it shouldn't be too hard to port to *NIX! In fact, if you look in the installation directory, you find none other than GTK+ libraries. GTK is widely used on *NIX anyways, so I guess it's just a matter of customer demand. Personally I'd find a Linux version very interesting, since it then opens up the possibilities of building a Sun Ray netbook (the existing Sun Ray laptops don't impress me all that much in terms of battery life and lacking a middle mouse button, as well as lacking other modern laptop features).
BONUS new security feature: Client Authentication
It's in the docs. It's in the administration GUI. It has new commands and man pages to go with it. But it's not listed on the "What's New" listing! I won't say too much more here since the official documentation explains it pretty well. Perhaps Sun wasn't all that ready for it yet; the docs on the new wikis.sun.com for it even have colored notes left inline for documentation editors to address.
That's all for now, folks. More to come soon :)
As a footnote to help un-confuse some things, SRS 5 includes SRSS 4.2, SRWC 2.2, and Soft Client 1.0. SRS refers to the entire suite and stands for Sun Ray Software, while SRSS stands for Sun Ray Server Software.
EDIT 7/9/2009 11:56 AM: Client authentication is listed as a new feature in the SRSS 4.2 docs, but not in the SRS 5 docs.
Sun Ray Software 5 EA 1 Announced
Sun just publicly announced the Early Access 1 program for Sun Ray Software 5 beta on the community SunRay-Users mailing list (at http://www.filibeto.org/)! Key features listed in this EA are Adobe Flash enhancements for Windows sessions, Windows Server 2008 support, and a new Sun Ray Soft Client. The announcement also mentions that EA2, due later this summer, will feature USB redirection for Windows sessions.
While it's not Adobe Flash enhancements for UNIX, it still sounds like an exciting release which I will be sure to test!
The program officially starts at 3:00pm EDT today. Details and the original announcement can be found here.
While it's not Adobe Flash enhancements for UNIX, it still sounds like an exciting release which I will be sure to test!
The program officially starts at 3:00pm EDT today. Details and the original announcement can be found here.
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