Ramblings from Academia

Apple Education Licensing Program

I met with our Apple rep who wanted to talk about the new Apple Education Licensing Program today. It was good to see Apple start to understand that some changes are needed on their behalf to ease adoption of their products in higher education. The way it works is that a University pays a yearly fee based on the number of Macs they have (will talk about how that number is obtained in a bit) and they'd be covered for the OS, iWork and iLife. To join the program, there's a one time 10% fee of the total amount. Additionally, AELP covers different software like Final Cut Pro, and in order for Universities to take full advantage of those prices, some of their ordering processes might need to change. It will not be very efficient for each department to keep ordering a 5 or a 10 bundle Final Cut Pro. Software ordering centralization (if that's not already the case) would be the way to go since it'll be cheaper to pay for a 100 seat bundle than four 25 seat bundle. The program also has good student discounts in case a University wants to sell some of the software directly to their students. The prices look good but i had a few concerns mainly about the "Mac Software Collection" which is the OS, iWork and iLife. 

• If I'm buying a new Mac that's covered under AELP, i don't get an option of buying the Mac without an OS license. So, in some ways, i'm kinda paying for the OS bundle twice, once when i buy the machine and then when i pay my annual fee. The Apple rep said to look at it more as an OS bundle maintenance fee. The way we do with Dell and Microsoft is that when we order new machines from Dell, we get the machines with the home version of the OS (saves us a bit of money) and our Microsoft Agreement allows us to put the OS Pro version on there. So, a few things to think about before joining the program is whether it's less costly as opposed to just buying the OS upgrade (there's a new OS around twice i year i think) and the other bundles if needed when released. The other thing is whether your users need or use iWork and iLife. Personally, i use iLife on my own laptop and not my work iMac and i only use Keynote out of iWork. The general feeling i did get from the Apple rep is that Higher Education will have the option of buying separate packages, but at the end of the day, Apple's strategy is aiming on getting Higher Ed institutions under the AELP.
• Didn't Microsoft get in trouble for integrating IE with the OS? Granted Apple's not doing that with iWork or iLife, but by bundling it with the OS as a Software Collection and applying the discount on that bundle, it somewhat feels like it's being pushed on us.
• To join the program, you'd need the number of machines that this program would apply to in order to calculate your cost. So, if you're planning on covering all your Macs, Apple has a record of all the Mac purchases for the past 4 years and that's the number they use. I think that's a pretty fair way of doing things. The other cool thing is that if u add machines throughout the year to your footprint, Apple gives you a 30% (out of the total number of machines currently under AELP) leeway and those can be added to your existing contract the next year. 

It's good to see Apple finally start catching up with the other vendors on their licensing model. I'm curious to see how providing iWork as part of the bundle would affect it's usage.

Virtuality

While at an IT Conf in Fall Creek Falls and at the recent Educause Conf in Denver, there were a lot of sessions on Second Life and i was curious enough to attend one just to see what Higher Ed is trying to accomplish through it. A couple of years back, i created an account to check out Second Life out just to see what all the buzz was about. I never wrote down what i thought but at some point i had a tweet that said: 

"Feels like the virtual is integrating with the real. So why spend time building a virtual world"

I woke up today thinking about it for some reason (think it was all that time spent on Modern Warfare 2 and how realistic the maps looked) and while surfing on slashdot and i found the proper wording: Augmented Reality . The idea is about adding virtual objects to our reality thus augmenting it. That's been my argument against Second Life and its supporters. We don't gain anything by building a virtual world based on the real world. Why do i need to see some virtual campus when i could get on google and see the real campus? With AR (Augmented Reality) you'd have an extra layer on top of the real. So, i think the next challenge would be who controls that new "virtuality"?

Federation and VDI

Spent the week in Denver for Educause 2009. First time i've been to either Denver or to the main Educause conference. Everything is getting a Virtual or Cloud computing label. It's kinda sad to see higher education jump on the "Cloud Computing" bandwagon. You'd think as Higher Ed Institutions, they'd correct things rather become part of the hype cycle. That being said, here are a couple of observations:

• A lot of schools are looking at VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), but what they fail to understand is that VDI doesn't solve the application layer where most of their problems reside. VDI doesn't enable them to centralize software distribution. A VDI solution might make it easier to develop an application virtualization solution, but it's still a separate layer that needs to be dealt with down the line. So, to me it feels like a lot of the Higher Education institutions are riding the wave of "Inflated Expectations" when it comes to VDI and its role.
• Federation! This is a time when universities are looking outward and trying to find means to collaborate with other institutions. The problem they're dealing with is identity management. If i attend a certain university (A) who has an agreement with university (B) to share library resources for example, how can university (B) know that i belong to university (A)? The framework (InCommon) and the technology are already in place and more schools are joining the federation. I think this will open up the possibilities of "richer" institutions hosting or even providing services to smaller institutions thus turning some institutions to service providers. In addition, this would force vendors that already provide hosted or "cloud" services to be part of InCommon to gain Higher Ed business. I attended a session that discussed InCommon and federation, but some of the repercussions of the future of a federated system(s) wasn't mentioned. What do i mean? I think federation would establish multiple federated systems made of numerous colleges and universities. Each "federation" would have its own rules and standards for joining and each institution interested and membership would need to add/improve the federation since there's no point in duplicating efforts. This would mean that the smaller or the less fortunate general degree providing colleges would wither away cause they would not be able to compete with the federated systems. Hence, if u're in the teaching business, you need to work on distinguishing yourself otherwise you will not survive. 

Cloud Computing ... not if you're running a Windows Cluster

I had just gotten home when my cell phone started ringing. It was work! Wasn't sure how serious it was until i logged in remotely to check on things. Our Softgrid client connects to a Virtual IP and that IP is load balanced and points to multiple application servers. The first thing i did was to try and connect directly to each application server in order to rule out a load balancing issue that we've once experienced. The client was having the same problem when trying to connect to the servers directly and not through the virtual IP. Tried restarting the Softgrid service on one of the application servers, and the service failed to start. I tried to remote into our Microsoft SQL Server (we have a cluster set up as active-passive), I got this nice message:

I connected to the passive SQL server and through the clustering service, tried to move resources from the crashed server to the passive one, but the didn't work either. I finally had to get back to work and manually power off the crashed one. All seems to be well now. The error log and some googling points to some memory leak by an app or some driver. Will have to keep an eye on things and try to figure out what's causing it.

All this makes one think about cloud computing and the risks involved. I like the idea of SaaS and all the talk about cloud computing, but i think there are some issues to be resolved before we move everything into the cloud.

Why Softgrid/App-V

When i first got my job, i was helping out building images for the computer labs across campus. I remember all those long August hours testing things and finding out last minute that something wasn't working right and having to re-ghost the machine to add some icon to the default user profile. Or being almost done with the image, only to find out that there's a new Java update that just came up a couple of hours ago. I don't know how we finally made it, but we did as best as we could. We were running on a Novell network using Zenworks to push out some of the software while the rest was locally installed and part of the image. We were at a crossroads though. The version of Novell we were running was unsupported and i also started thinking about August of next year. I honestly didn't want to go through this nightmare again. We started looking at some solutions for the following problems:

- How to keep the software up-to-date?
- How do you update a license for an installed program when the image has already been pushed out?
- Image bloat.
- Software usage reporting.
- Software conflict and running multiple version of the same software.
- Integration with the campus Active Directory implementation.

The Softricity guys happened to be in town and gave us a demo of what Softgrid is all about. It was very intriguing and also made us think about the ability of offering students access to software from anywhere. At the time, Softricity had an add-on called ZeroTouch that pretty much ran a Windows Terminal Server running the Softgrid client in the back-end and a nice front-end for user access. My co-worker had also looked at Citrix the year before and even though he seemed to like that solution, it was quite expensive and didn't getting any backing from IT. In addition, the way the University budget works, allocating the money to buy servers to support the Citrix environment rather than spending it on lab computers would've needed a major adjustment in operations and no one was ready for that. I will probably have some post later on about this whole process.
We got our hands on the trial software and set up a small environment just to see the possibilities and how it all works. Nothing against sales people, but i have not met a single sales person who has not told me that their software can either do it or they always welcome client suggestions and will be willing to possibly add some of the requested features. Since that's the case, i needed to play around the software and figure out some of the limitations, cause that's definitely one of the main things that you can't get from the sales people. What limitations did we experience with Softgrid:

- Not everything can be sequenced.
At the time, Softricity was kinda new and googling stuff didn't really help out. We were told though, that anything dealing with drivers will not work. Nowadays, information and recipes all over the place. Here's a good one on what can and can't be sequenced.
- Applications can't be assigned to a computer.
We had some limited licenses for certain software (if i remember right, ArcGIS was one of them). In our old way of doing things, after ghosting the computers in a certain lab with the main image, we'd locally install the software that we have limited licenses for (ex. ArcGIS). This created some problems, since we'd have to test and make sure that adding this software didn't break any of the other stuff. At times, we were able to use Novell Zenworks to push it out. Zenworks had the ability of assigning an application to computers. When we asked the Softricity folks about that ability, we got the sales pitch of them looking into adding it as a feature in their next release. We kinda had hope at first since Softricity was quite a small company at the time, but that hope died as soon as they were bought out by Microsoft. Microsoft's answer to our question was to use SMS which we weren't really interested in.
- Some programs tie their licenses to the MAC address of the machine.
In some cases you can change the licensing agreement and maybe set up a license server to handle things.

Even though we had those limitations, we liked what we saw and the potential of it. In future posts, i will break down our implementation in the different phases and talk about what we came across and how we dealt with some of the issues that came about. After this trial, we ended up heading to Boston for official Softgrid training. It was my first visit to Boston and i loved it. Eventhough it was a bit colder than what i'm used to, just walking around MIT, Harvard, Boston College ... makes you feel pretty good. Training was hands on. Most of the people in class were Citrix people trying to cut down on the number of silos in their farms. We also met with some of the tech folks at a University in Boston who had already implemented Softgrid in their labs and appeared to be very pleased about it. If you haven't read my previous post, the main idea behind this blog sorta came about from that visit. It astonished me to hear them talk. Even though, it was a completely different city, different university, the environments are very similar. The software they use, the computers in the labs, student needs, faculty needs, the politics .... That meeting made us feel even more comfortable about our decision to go with Softgrid having seen and talked to someone who faced similar challenges as us. Fast forward a couple of months when we had a bit of a scare right before August though when we heard the news about Microsoft purchasing Softricity. We just weren't really sure where Microsoft was heading with this product, but we got some assurances from our rep and by reading some of the comments about the purchase, it felt like Microsoft is serious about getting into that market. August rolled over and the journey had started. In my next post, i will be talking about our phased implementation.

Software Anywhere Anytime

I work at a University managing labs and a lot of random projects to make the student experience the best it can be. A couple of years back we started a project labeled "Software Anywhere Anytime" in which the end result would be providing some software to students anywhere they might be (on or off-campus) and at anytime. Before getting to this point though, we also needed to improve how we image and distribute software to all our lab machines. After evaluating the options, we decided to go with a product called Softgrid from a small company in Boston called Softricity. Eventually this company was bought out by Microsoft and the new Softgrid name is App-V.
In addition to Softgrid we use some other software to manage our labs like Deepfreeze by Faronics and software for printing ....
What's this blog gonna be about?
A lot of times my co-workers and i find ourselves thinking: "What are other colleges doing to handle this? How is this university dealing with that?" I'd like to have this type of discussion here. When we went to Softgrid training, we met with some college folks that had already implemented Softgrid and it was great talking to them cause we realized how similar the environments are. They dealt with a lot of the same software, ran into the same problems .... After hearing their point of view on Softgrid, we felt a lot more confident going forward with our implementation.
That's the point of this blog. This is my very first blog by the way. I will be posting things that i think would be good to share and some random ramblings or ideas that we're thinking about. Feel free to leave me any comments.