Wednesday, October 3, 2012

A Story Of Window 8, HP, Apple iPad & Splashtop

Wow! On my HP Elitebook notebook with an I7 Intel CPU, SSD HD and 16 GBs of RAM I run Windows 8 RTM version with Hyper-V enabled. On the SSD I run all my VMs which – guess what – run some System Center 2012 components like SCOrch and OpsMgr 2012.

On itself it’s already awesome: when I put my notebook into hibernation, the VMs will be set into a saved state, basically meaning when I start my notebook again, the VMs will run from the moment they were paused.

So my VMs are running for more then a few weeks now, without any glitch at all. All the screens which I had opened in all my VMs before hibernating my notebook, are found back in the exact same way after my notebook is on again. Even better, all processes which I started run from where they left off...

And that’s really something very good Microsoft pulled of here. So no more need for any other hyper-visors on my Windows 8 machine! Again, awesome! Respect. This feature on itself is for me enough to migrate ALL my pc’s to Windows 8!

Where the iPad comes in..
It’s nice to have my own environment with me in order to show my customers what I am so excited about. However, sometimes I find myself in places where beamers aren’t available. Whether they’re missing, defect or just too old to show a proper resolution doesn’t matter. But I simply need a kind of projection in order to showcase my sales pitch, training sessions or demonstrations Glimlach.

Yesterday a well respected colleague of mine pointed out an awesome app for the iPad, Splashtop. It consists out of two parts: the iPad app and the streamer part which is installed on the related Windows machine you want to connect to.

I have already tried many other apps but somehow they just didn’t work out as expected or hoped for. Many times because they try to mimic a RDP client which doesn’t work well with an iPad.

But this app really rocks! Also because it introduces iOS gestures to the Windows machine which makes it even more functional then it already is.

Some pictures to show what I mean:
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Above in the picture my laptop running W8 with an open OpsMgr 2012 Console, connected to one of my VMs. Below the laptop my iPad running Splashtop and connected – over WiFi – to the Splashtop streamer running on my notebook. Also the iPad shows the OpsMgr 2012 screen and is fully operational!

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A picture, showing the running and fully operational OpsMgr 2012 Console on my iPad. Since it’s an iPad with the Retina display it can run at a much higher resolution as well Glimlach.

Since I always carry my iPad with me, and today all places I come have WiFi, I know now for sure I can always run some cool demonstrations without a beamer. Just run Splashtop on my iPad, connect to my notebook from that app, open the OpsMgr 2012 Console and give my customers my iPad while running some cool demonstrations…

This makes me the perfect System Center 2012 road warrior!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Marnix,

My compliments for your great website!

Here's a small sidenote about a possible RDP client on an iPad: I use iTap myself since the first release and its awesome. Greatest advantage to me is that I don't need to install software on the server-side (because it's a RDP client). Use of smart gestures makes this a really great solution.

Regards,
Dimitri Koens