Bring on that Nerdy Stuff

Finally blogging in Vietnam!  And cringing a bit, as it will be hard to make this first VN post half as interesting as crazy HK fishmarkets and night life.  But the truth is not always pretty ;-).

The truth on this trip is that we're trying to evaluate just how handy our VMware technology will be for helping our NGO partner build computer labs in orphanages.  More specifically, we want to use VMware View, which uses virtualization technology to run many desktop computers inside of one server, and then "screen scrapes" what is running on the server and displays it on a far away monitor.  So the users are sitting at desktop machines like normal, but every time they type or execute a program, the actual work gets done on a remote server running View.  Lost yet?  And what is cool about View for our NGO?

Basic View Architecture - server running the desktop workloads, and desktop computers across the WAN

Orphans' Impact is running roughly 10 computer labs in Vietnam, and each lab has like 8 computers. Now imagine they need to install a new application, or upgrade the OS of the machines.  They grab the needed software (on DVDs or thumb drives), and they jump on a motorcycle, drive out to their first orphanage, walk in and install the software on each of the 8 computers.  Then (assuming that worked), they jump back on the bike and drive off the next orphanage, rinse and repeat 10 times.  Quite a day for that poor software installer!  Now instead with view, all 80 desktops are actually running in one server in the Ophans' Impact office in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon).  They install the software once on one desktop, and then clone that desktop to create a new pool of 80 desktops.  Done.  Maybe 30 minutes instead of a full day or days, and the now-happier software installer never had to put his shoes on.  Cool huh?

Tad and Andrea on our first morning in VN - Anxiously awaiting coffee

Ok - but now the scary part.  Basically I'm the technical lead on this project, and there are some really hard technical problems about this effort.  So its both scary and exciting to think that the overall success of the project may come down to how well I can navigate those tough problems.  Example - View depends on good network connectivity between the server and the far away desktop machine.  Vietnam has pretty good internet, but "pretty good" is definitely in quotes when compared most view customers in the world.  The internet goes down fairly often, and can be both high latency and low bandwidth at times.  Another more personal challenge - I'm trying to build out a prototype of all this technology on very short notice with not a lot of hands-on experience on it (I can't bring my team to vietnam, though they still back me up).  So yes, I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder - what if everything goes great in the project, except I can't get the demo gear going, or something I assumed just breaks everything?  But if you got to make a mistake, go big I say, and this may be that kind of chance.  

Typical HCMC Scene - Scooter traffic is sometimes crazy

With the nerdy preliminaries out of the way, let's get back to our normal blogging topics.  Left HK on Sunday evening, totally cooked from all Bill's crazy social events, and got to Vietnam late Sunday, meeting up with Andrea, our project manager from VMware, and Tad, who's the director of Orphans' Impact in VN, and hence a big center of the action for this trip.   Its a fantastic coincidence that I got paired up with two really cool and like minded folks on this trip, and we've ended up having tons of long chats about how to help kids with technology.  Tad has a team of 4 young folks working for him, all vietnamese and all in their early 20's I think.  Their jobs are to help deploy the technology, train the teachers, build curriculum, work with the kids - OK, they do a lot of cool stuff.  So our first day we get here, we meet up with Tad's team and get settled in their office.  Fun kids all of them, and a surprisingly familiar feel to the office, like other IT labs I've worked in abroad.  The whole time we're learning about their work and the orphanages I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head - its the friggin' View demo kit.  One goal of this advanced trip is to try view out for small deployments and see how it works with the local internet challenges.  But a week before our trip, our allocated view demo kit got snatched by another colleague for his trip to the UK, and real paying customers.  The last thing I want to do is start a rift between sales and our philanthropy work.  So not a problem, we'll just find hardware, deploy software, config and test everything while Oh Yeah, gotta get my visa and pack and get travel plans sorted, not to mention that pesky day job, etc, etc.  So long story short, I showed up with a backpack full of cables and wires, servers and routers, all of which should magically become our highly touted view demo kit, even if it never has been a view demo kit in its whole life, and I've never built a view demo kit in my life.  Douh - back to the nerdy talk we go, that didn't take long.

Left to Right- Bao, Tim, Lum, Andrea and Anh

So tuesday I'm plugging in cables and working with Biswa, my view lead in Palo Alto, and nothing is going right.  Finally its 11:30pm Biswa's time - we are nowhere near success and I gotta send him to bed, and we need to regroup for one last push the next day.  Plan is (going backwards in time) - we will leave for the orphanage to test at 7am on Wed, and so Biswa and I will gather via webex starting at midnight my time on Tuesday night (9am his Tues am) and crank this out.  Long story short, Biswa put in superhero efforts and we worked through the VN night.  About 3am we finally saw that Biswa could open a desktop from our demo kit, while the kit sat on my desk in Vietnam and he sat in Palo Alto.   How cool is that!?  Took until 6am to wrap up and head back to the hotel, witnessing a glorious and quiet VN sunrise that I was too dopey to take photos of.  So I grabbed a shower and we headed to our first orphanage, me strutting past the breakfast buffet all "Oh yeah, no problem, its all goooood...".

3am Celebration as we finally got the View Demo Kit working - slightly creepy solo office night with Biswa on webex

This Orphanage is a pretty nice spot - its where Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt adopted their Vietnamese child, if your on the gossip track.  But the kids are kind of on lock down, and since there wasn't a computer class when we were there, we barely saw kids ;-(.  But it was an interesting chance to test out view in a real world scenario here.  When we got there we did our first test of the internet connectivity.  460ms of latency, 0.3 Mega-bits per second of bandwidth.  What?!  I can do more bandwidth than that by running down the road with a USB drive in my pocket.  Seriously!  It got better as we played, but not that much better.  But view looked roughly the same as the physical desktops, and so I guess it is what it is when it comes to the internet here - we certainly can't fix that stuff, as long as we don't make performance any worse.  Anyway - many heads were scratched as we all tried to understand how view networking and physical desktop networking is different, and what to conclude from the tests we ran there.  And we were able to easily connect from the orphanage outside of HCMC to the demo kit running in Tad's office, so that was like a huge weight off my shoulders.

Our first orphanage was bucolic, but oddly devoid of kiddies

So what did we conclude - can View work in this setting?  Honestly I'm too dopey from lack of sleep to know exactly what we learned.  The good news is that Tad, Andrea and I all seem to be able to swap points of view and ideas without taking too much of a position, and I think that's all very good. Yesterday we changed our ideas about deployment strategies so many times through the day that we were kidding, "Dude, the idea of deploying only in Ho Chi Minh City is so two-hours-ago.  Now its clear we need to get outside the city."  So what will be the right answer in two hours?  I'm gonna take a long nap and then hopefully I will know...

Tad Clarifies the Impact of Latency on View Deployments - or he's smooshing a bug, I forget