How far Fog is from replaceing Vmware Horizon View older systems ?
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i am looking a for an alternative solution to a very Problematic and Giant headache called Vmware view 5.3 and Vcenter that control it
Fog can join windows pc to the windows domain, yet i don’t know about its Clone features compared to Vmware system.
thoughts , ideas ? what will i need to test this ?
the Main feature i am interested is the Recompose …
regards -
VMware Horizon View is a VDI solution, fog is not this. Vcenter is VMware’s proprietary centralized management point for ESXi hosts, fog cannot replace this, and does not do the same thing.
VMware is infrastructure for virtualized environments.
FOG is infrastructure for cloning OSs, and has some capabilities for management of OSs.
At home, I do all of my virtualization using various Linux distributions as hosts with libvirtd installed on them - and I use virt-manager to do easy & simple GUI management - but often times I do migrations from one host to another via CLI, or snapshots or automated tasks via CLI.
There’s also something called XenServer, which is open source & free and has many of the features that VMware has.
VMware’s backend is Linux and it uses many open source components - but VMware probably has a more polished proprietary GUI & management, whereas the others need a little more manual work and without sound Linux skills you would have a hard time with that.
Myself and others have a suspicion that Microsoft’s Hyper-V runs a Linux instance in order to accomplish virtualization in Windows due to the match-up of feature sets along with… the windows kernel just not being capable.
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First, I’ll try to break down my thoughts on things just so you understand what fog IS vs. what it’s “aim” to replace things are.
FOG derived from a more affordable and faster medium compared to Ghost back in the day’s when it essentially ruled the roost. While there were alternatives to Ghost back in 2007 such as PING (Ping Is Not Ghost) and utilities that helped perform image capture, there wasn’t much of a simple means to perform the actions needed. This made imaging systems, useful, but almost everybody tied to using Ghost.
Chuck and Jian had a need for imaging systems but could no longer afford Ghost so they decided to write a tool to perform actions with a relatively simple interface. The initial release of FOG was intended to be more a “proof” of concept and was not expected to gain such a following (at least I don’t think it was).
FOG was created to Image systems using a simple interface. The idea of the interface was to be easily manageable without requiring the “admin’s” to get up out of their seats if possible. This is why FOG has a web based GUI vs some of the other more manually intense mechanisms.
It wasn’t until later on in the use of FOG by other people that FOG started becoming an Imaging Solution AND System Management solution.
To break it down, FOG is not a Virtualization system, nor is it a backup solution. It’s purpose in the realm of Information Technology is to allow you to create “clones” of one system and place those clones onto many other systems. These clones, while most still kind of use a Hardware Dependent setup, can be used on nearly any system you want. With the use of the FOG Client it can also be used to join systems to a domain, manage software installations or script operations through snapins, add/remove/manage printers, automate task actions, perform power management such as shutdown/reboot, wake systems up, and log users out. With the registration of systems, you can also maintain an inventory record of systems.
FOG’s intention is not to replace anything, but to be a more useful alternative to other imaging tools as possible.
