Friday, May 6, 2011

Moving to the Cloud

For half a year I've been doing some of my development work on a virtual computer hosted in a data center that I've never seen.  It works remarkably well and is like using RDP to connect to a desktop at work when you're telecommuting.  I fire up VMware View and connect to the computer, giving it one of the Dexpot screens on my laptop.  I can even connect to it on my iPod Touch using WYSE Pocket Cloud and zaTelnet.


The downside has been that I use other machines to run tests and those machines were seven network hops away from my cloud-based development machine.   Any network interaction with those machines was painfully slow.  So slow that I stopped using the virtual computer for much of anything.

Recently that situation changed.  Most of the rack-mounted machines that we own were moved to the same data center, so that now it's seven network hops from my desk to all of the machines I use.  But it's now only one hop from my cloud-based virtual computer to them.  The situation is reversed and the virtual computer is a life saver.  I log in, pop up VMware View and the rest of my computing day is spent in the cloud.