Live Boot USB or VirtualDisk image for demonstration
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I have used FOG over the years in different environments & I am always amazed at how well it performs no matter what I throw at it. In fact, I am constantly surprised at how little people have heard about it? With that in mind, I am constantly wanting to talk about it & demonstrate it to people but, being able to run through installing Linux (plus various packages & FOG) in a MS centric house can be frightening for clueless management let alone time consuming. Having the ability to walk in with a virtual machine or live USB boot environment would just be the shiznit! Minimal time involved plus, no Windows PC’s would be harmed during this demonstration. I’ve used [URL=‘http://virtualboximages.com/’]Virtual Box[/URL] in the past due to convenience to show features for other products but any of the VM’s would suffice. Any thoughts on building one? I understand limitations might need to be put in place but, I believe the overall features & functionality would be able to be shown off in a short amount of time.
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Create a Virtual machine and export the Virtual machine to a large external hard drive, or usb drive, i think there are some as large as 128gb now, this should suffice for fog demonstration.
I use Virtual Box because it is fast to set up, doesn’t require a dedicated server, and it runs along side my current OS installation. I would recommend using Virtual Box.
I would stay away from VMWare unless the places you are going to be showing FOG off at have a VMWare server. The reason I say this is because VMWare uses particular hardware when setting up your VDI and it is a pain to convert to other medium to import to say Virtual Box or another Virtual set up. You can change the hardware before you install anything to it, I am not very versed in VMWare though, and I think Virtual Box has made it pretty easy to understand for dummies (this is a reference to myself not you
)Hope this helps, good luck!
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I have to agree with Jaymes here.
VMWare is great if you have the proper hardware, but for convenience and adaptability Virtual Box seems to be the way to go.
With that said, another option I could recommend is a bootable Linux Distro right on the USB. You don’t necessarily need to boot a VM to have a FOG Server. There are plenty of Linux Distros, and I think Ubuntu has options to install directly to a USB Thumb Drive using a utility called unetbootin. With that, you could then install the FOG Distro and make it persistent. Then you’d probably have to keep the fog installation as 127.0.0.1 on the thumbdrive. However, when the system is booted up, all you’d need to do is point a browser to that new IP Address. This gives the adaptability you’d need. You may not be able to download/upload an image from the thumbdrive, due to the displaying of the concept but at least you could show the GUI and maybe do a quick registration if the network admins will point tftpboot to your server ip address.
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I hadn’t even thought about that, It’s a great idea Tom!