Well, it begins here, the hardware has arrived.
I’ve bought a Dell Optiplex 990 Desktop, i5-2500 (I couldnt see anything better with the i7 except hyperthreading), 16GB RAM and a 1TB disk.
Plan is to import my existing Vista Ultimate SP2 desktop, have a big VM for my development (might even try installing VMware Workstation on it), and a hardened Win7 to RDP into from the outside world.
I downloaded XenClient 2.0 Express Edition, which is free, from http://www.citrix.com/xenclient/download, burnt it to CD and booted the workstation to it.
As I’m not going to make a big deal of what can be done I selected the ‘Quick Install’. I gave it a good, secure password, accepted the licence and off it went. It took a while formatting the 1TB disk but the installation was easy and the reboot then brought up the Citrix Receiver for Xenclient.
My first VM was easy to create – there is a big + ADD VM button in the top left hand corner. This firts one is going to be the bigger of the 3, so I gave it half the RAM (8GB) and half of the disk (500GB). Also, as it is going to be a reinstall of the OS shipped with the hardware I took the options under ‘Details’ and ‘Advanced, which were – ‘Allow OEM Windows Install’, ‘Expose Physical Hardware Information’, ‘Expose Physical OEM Hardware’ and ‘Intel AMT Passthrough’. The last one allows me to manage the hardware. So far so very painless.
I installed the Windows 7 Professional from the recovery CD, which was straightforward and without any hiccups. Once installed I installed the XenClient tools from the pre-mounted ISO. This installed all the drivers neede for the XenClient presented hardware. It also allows the connection to USB devices etc. A reboot followed after tools install, followed by another (I assume hardware based) reboot, after which I had a perfectly presented and activated Windows 7 OS, no OEM license issues.
One problem that ocurred was that the graphics set was basic for the VM, in order to fix this I had to power it off and set 3d graphics to ‘Enabled’ under ‘Hardware’, this reset the graphics, plug’n'played the graphices, rebooted and worked very well. Currently only 1 VM can have this enabled.
For the import I followed the following blog http://www.opensourcerack.com/2011/01/24/xenclient-how-to-p2v-your-existing-os/
When I have more to report about my experience it will be here, paying work permitting of course.
