I have few queries related to Amazon Workspace.
Q1) I am building a .net website from where I want to access the Amazon Workspace. What could be a better way to do so? Is it possible that I create a webpage in my website and from there I can access the Workspace desktop in an iFrame or something? or is there any API support for same?
Q2) Can we set some startup program in Amazon Workspace which initiates any application for eg: photoshop, whenever the Workspace is started?
I think you're missing the point of Amazon Workspaces - they are a virtual desktop solution (loosely similar to Citrix), which provides a Windows 7 or Windows 10 'Desktop Experience' running on top of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2012 respectively.
So, to answer your questions:
Q1) I am building a .net website from where I want to access the
Amazon Workspace. What could be a better way to do so? Is it possible
that I create a webpage in my website and from there I can access the
Workspace desktop in an iFrame or something? or is there any API
support for same?
You don't want to embed a Workspace instance inside of a web-page, either as an iFrame or by using some other magic. It is probably possible, but you will need to jump through many, many burning hoops of death to achieve it.
If you want to access a web-page that you are building from the Workspace instance, treat Workspaces as just any other desktop and use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc. to access the site.
If you are looking at how to access Workspace Instances, AWS have desktop clients for all major Operating Systems, as web-based version (not to be confused with the web-page that you personally are writing); alternatively, Workspaces can be accessed from physical PCoIP Zero-Client devices. Take a look at https://clients.amazonworkspaces.com/ for the full list.
Q2) Can we set some startup program in Amazon Workspace which
initiates any application for eg: photoshop, whenever the Workspace is
started?
Yes you can, configure a Group Policy Object in your underlying Workspaces Directory to start an application on logon.
However, if you are going to run something intensive such as Photoshop, I would recommend either the Performance or Graphics Bundles - see https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/details/ for more information.
Related
Need to launch windows machine with Microsoft Edge browser in the cloud.
You should be able to do create a Windows 10 VM in most cloud, like Azure or AWS. You also have the option to do create virtual desktops. If sounds like you want to do browser testing, if that is the case, then I would encourage you to consider something like https://www.browserstack.com/.
If this doesn't answer you question, can you please add additional details.
I'm using Amazon Directory Services with a Simple AD instance. I can join computers to the domain, but I can't figure out how to add users to the domain (and do not see in the documentation whether this is even possible).
How do I create a user in Amazon Simple AD?
You can manage users (and groups) via a bound instance's Active Directory Users and Computers tool. Details are here.
Note that due to a bug, this must be done from a Windows Server 2008 R2 instance at the time of writing. Windows Server 2012 is not supported at the time of writing per this post (registration required).
Let's say that I setup my own cloud using the open source cloud foundry implementation provided on cloudfoundry.org. Will each app that I deploy be run as a separate user? Or is there any of VMWare's virtualization technology in use here? E.g. would each app run in a separate virtual machine or anything like that? How can I configure the memory, cpu, and disk resource limits for each app?
I asked this on the mailing list. Here's the response I got:
If your DEA is configured to run in secure mode, then each app runs as its own user and process isolation is used to protect them. We are moving toward a model of using linux cgroups http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups when on linux, using the warden cgroup wrappers that are already in our source tree.
VM based isolation for a single app is pretty heavy weight, but we have long term plans to provide this for apps that need/desire it. (As opposed to the warden/cgroup work which is a near term project)
Since this is related to the open source for cloud foundry, you can try asking your question on https://groups.google.com/a/cloudfoundry.org/group/vcap-dev
You should get a quick response there!
Does anybody of you know if there are any Webservices (or other interfaces) to monitor an, for example ASP.NET application, which is hosted within Windows Azure from a NON .NET environment?
If you're talking about monitoring things like performance counters and diagnostics (logging), those may be accessed from any language, as that information is ultimately stored in table Storage (you need to just set it up in your Windows Azure app as it starts up). Storage is accessed via a REST interface. Additionally, there are SDKs for PHP and Java to facilitate this. There are a few additional open source project I've seen as well - for instance, Ruby.
For a desktop monitoring tool, check out Cerebrata's Azure Diagnostics Manager.
Note: the Management API is also REST-based, so you can control deployments from other languages as well (e.g. scaling instances up/down, stopping/deleting a deployment, creating a new service, etc.). You'll see that the PHP SDK already wraps most of the Management API. See here for detailed API documentation.
Dirk, it depends on what you're trying to monitor. There are many partner products like AzureWatch from Paraleap that can monitor applications in Windows Azure, or you could always write an application yourself to monitor your Windows Azure application using the Windows Azure APIs (try AzureMonitor on CodePlex] as a start). You can find out more information about Monitoring on MSDN and the Windows Azure Managed Library Reference.
We recently bought a new rack and set of servers for it, we want to be able to redeploy these boxes as build servers, QA regression test servers, lab re-correlation servers, simulation servers, etc.
We have played a bit with VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, creating a virtual build server, but we came across a lot of issues when we tried to copy it for others to use, having to reconfigure every new copy of the VM.
We are using Windows XP x86/x64 and Windows Vista x86/x64, so I had to rename the machine, join the domain etc for every new copy.
Ideally we just want to be able to add a new box, deploy a thin boot strap OS (Linux is fine here) to get the VM up an running, then use it.
One other thing we have limited to no budget, so free is best.
I would like to understand others experiences in doing the same thing.
FYI, I am not in systems IT, this we are group of software engineers trying to set this up.
Any links to good tutorials would be great.
The problem you're running into is the machine SID must be unique for each machine in a domain. Of course by copying an image you now break that unique constraint.
I'd suggest that you read the documentation for Sysprep in the reskit and Vista System Image Manager - your friends for XP/Win2k3 and Vista/Win2k8 respectively.
These tools enable to "reseal" your configured instance of the OS such that the next time it boots - it can prompt for information such as network configuration, machine names, admin user ID's, run scripts etc.
Also be aware that the licencing restrictions for Windows desktop clients are generally per image - not per server.
Using these tools with HyperV we created complete preconfigured instances of Win2k3 & Win2k8 that boot to finish installing Sharepoint - going further we used the diffing disks to overlay Visual Studio so our devs could use the production images for their work. It has radically changed our development process.
At this point our entire public website is run on HyperV with of 5 boxes running 15 images for a mix of soft and hard redundancy - they take several hundred million page views per week.
Another option for dealing with the SID probelm is NewSID. This is a simpler tool than sysprep, in that all it does is rename the machine and reassign the SID; if you don't need all the other features of sysprep this is a much easier tool to use.