The Next Level Application manager:

Fig. 1: User account page on Horizon App Manager

VMware announced the launch of its new end user web application manager the VMware Horizon Application on 17th May 2011. This application manager allows the users to effectively manage the third party cloud applications on a single virtual platform in a similar way as a Microsoft Active Directory acts to manage the accounts on numerous applications based on the internal systems. VMware impressively changed the way the access credentials are managed for the ever increasing population of applications on the cloud such as Box.net, Broad Vision, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, WebEx and Workday.

By simplifying the management of the credentials used by the applications both the IT admin and the end users benefit. The application manager securely manages several access credentials of numerous different third party applications using only a single identity dedicated for both the enterprise administrators and the users. In addition, it provides a single platform to access all the cloud applications which are used by the enterprise and its users. The Horizon App Manager ensures that there is a granular level of secured access for all the different types of applications as well as secured control of the data.

The Horizon App Manager is a unique service which is very easy and fast to set up. The Horizon Application Manager is a paid service from VMware that costs $30 per user, per year. It allows you to use your local access credentials for all the applications based on Cloud/SaaS. In the Horizon App Manager the enterprise admin will use a light weight virtual tool to configure each of the web based or Cloud based applications which are to be used by the users in the enterprise. Once the configuration is done, the admin can assign access permission to the varied users for various SaaS, Cloud or web applications according to their account and membership using a simple check box on the virtual interface of the App Manager.

The Horizon App Manager is a foundational management engine which will allow the users to securely extend the enterprise directory services into the cloud or the third party SaaS applications. Overtime these management services will be leveraged to applications such as the thin Apps and other services from the third party vendors.

There are a few methods of running virtual machines on a Linux host: VirtualBox, VMWare, KVM, and QEMU are four of the most popular. Each method has it’s pros and cons. One of the cons of trying to use straight-up QEMU is that you’re going to be dealing with a command line method of creating and running a virtual machine. That’s not a bad option if you don’t mind a lot of typing at the command line. If you want to go the QEMU route, but don’t want to have to have depend upon the command line to do so, you can opt to use a GUI tool QTEMU. This tool is an easy to use graphical front end for the QEMU virtual machine tool. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to create a virtual machine using QTEMU. But why use QTEMU? QTEMU will work as a front end for either QEMU or KVM. So if you have the hardware to support KVM you can go that route and have a much more efficient virtual machine.

Installation

For the purposes of this article, I am installing and using QTEMU on a Debian system, so the installation will be done via Synaptic. To be safe you will want to search for (and select for installation) the following applications:

• virtinst
• virt-manager
• kvm
• python-libvirt
• libvirt-bin
• qemu
• qtemu
• virt-viewer
• bridge-utils

The above list will install more than you might need, but there are tools that can be taken advantage of later on. After you have selected all of these applications for installation, click Apply to install.

When all of the installation is done you will be ready to run QTEMU for the first time. If using KDE 4.x, you will find QTEMU in the System Tools sub-menu labeled Virtual Machine Manager. Fire that up and get ready to create your first virtual machine.

Creating a machine

Figure 1

From the main window (see Figure 1) you will want to click the “Create a new virtual machine…” button. You might think this would start up a wizard, but it doesn’t – sort of. Instead, when you create a new virtual machine, a single window opens up asking a couple of simple questions. The first question is what type of operating system you want to install. From the drop down you can select from Linux, Windows, ReactOS, or Other. For our example we will create a Linux virtual machine. Once you select that click the Next button to open up a new window asking for a name and a location for the new machine. The location is just the path that will store the new machine file. Fill that information out and click Next. The final window requires you to specify the size of the disk image. Enter the size for the image and click Finish. Now the real work begins.

Figure 2

As you can see, in Figure 2,  I have created an image for an OpenSuSE virtual machine. As of this point all that is done is the virtual machine file has been created. What has to happen now is to click on each of the following buttons and configure the respective sections as needed for the virtual machine.

• Memory: How much RAM to dedicate to the virtual machine.
• Hard Disk: This has already been created. You do not need to do anything here.
• CD ROM: Here you will specify where the virtual machine will find the image for installation. You can use either a CD/DVD or an ISO image file.
• Floppy Disk: Most likely not used.
• Network: Here you will want to enable networking (by checking the “Enable network” check box).
• Sound: If you need sound enabled, do so here.
• Other: Here you can enable seamless mouse, configure the number of virtual CPUs, enable local time, and add addition QEMU options.

Once you have all of that configured you just need to click the Start button to start up your virtual machine. It’s that simple.

Final thoughts

You now have yet another tool in your toolbox to enable virtual machines. QTEMU makes easy the task of creating virtual machines using QEMU or KVM. Give this a try and see if you prefer it over either Virtualbox or VMWare.

Live PCs can be added easily to the application. The labs section on the MokaFive website lists dozens of potential Live PCs ranging from various MS-DOS versions, Linux distributions to gaming systems and applications. One of the most popular Live PCs is the Fearless browser which is a hardened browsing suite that provides anonymization and security.

The core benefit of running the MokaFive Player is that it is dead easy to use. All it takes is to either start one of the Live PCs that ship with the product or download an additional Live PC from the website. It does not take more than a few clicks to work with a virtual PC system.

The system virtualization software adds a few new features to VMWare Player including:

• Seamless updates of virtual machines. In MokaFive LivePC Engine, users are subscribed to a LivePC so they automatically receive all updates. Updates are sent through an RSS feed that the LivePC subscribes to.
• Streaming and caching of virtual machine images. MokaFive LivePC Engine will stream virtual machine images over the network so you don’t need to download the entire image before starting. It will also cache the image locally so you can work disconnected.
• Integrated backup. When using MokaFive LivePC Engine on a portable device, it will keep a backup so if you lose your portable device, you won’t lose your data.
• Hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support. MokaFive LivePC Engine includes support for DirectX 8 and 9 3D programs. The host graphics adapter is exposed to the guest operating system as a mokzzile 3D accelerator so DirectX applications can run at nearly full speed. Many games exhibit strange behavior such as slow timing in Call of Duty 4.
• Zero install (needs administrative rights) when running from a USB drive. When plugging into a host that does not have MokaFive installed, MokaFive LivePC Engine will dynamically install itself, and then uninstall itself after unplugging.

MokaFive Player is an excellent easy to use system virtualizations solution.

I would advise to begin by downloading the excellent user manual which should answer most questions about installing and configuring guest systems using Virtualbox. It takes some time to read through the 108 pages of the manual but it is well worth it to understand the functionality.

Just download the 10 megabyte file from the VirtualBox website or as a torrent and install the software. Installation is really easy in Windows (just a double-click) but a little bit more complicated in Linux. Check the user manual for a detailed instruction for Linux.

I do not want to explain a detailed instruction to setup a new guest system because the user manual explains everything in such great detail that it does not feel necessary at all. You basically create a new virtual machine and assign a name, ram and hard drive space to it and select a source for the installation of the guest system. The source can be from hard drive or cd for instance, just make sure you have the source at hand.