Sphere 3D Corp. (ANY)

[43de]

Glassware Tested - It works!

I set up and played around with Glassware during some down time at work. I work professionally as a solutions architect.

Here's my log from that:

I first created a new Sphere 3d virtual machine image in Azure using an A1 tier VM.

You can find the pricing overview here, broken down by resource pool utilization, showing Sphere's cut on the deal:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/sphere3d/glassware/

I found this guide from sphere and decided to follow it during setup.

"G-Series Cloud Administrator's Guide for Virtual Machines on Microsoft Azure Powered by Glassware 2.0"
https://overlandstorage-public.hosted.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-3185
All docs from Sphere: https://community.sphere3d.com/search.jspa?q=glassware

Reading the doc you'll find the login steps are backwards, and this took me a while to find out. On the first login page you need to enter admin/admin and your setup uname and password on the second screen. In the mean time I had emailed support and got a response from a human in about 15 minutes (a good sign!) So far so good though..

More good info on containerization
http://sphere3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/S3D_Application_Containerization_SB_v1.0_101515_draft9.pdf

Anyways, I'm in the admin control panel now. So I'm going to test Glassware by uploading a piece of software I wrote. There's only one issue: glassware only likes single file executable installers, and my software's installer has many files. That's fine. I winrared everything into an SFX self-extracting installer archive and set the startup parameters appropriately... Let's see how well this works.

In the mean time I had tested out the pre-installed apps using their Chrome app, GW Connect. I had to update my Java after realizing that it was out of date. Great.

Now it doesn't like the folder I had set the archive to extract to (access is denied). Changed the SFX to extract to temp folder then run setup from there. It works!! This is sweet.

All good to go now. My app is installed and I'm using it from GW Connect on chrome. This is great!... looking forward to testing it from my iPad this evening!

All in all, this is a huge leap. I'm blown away with how simple this all is, relatively speaking. Surpisingly well polished and functional. I envision there will be more features to come as well.

Just noticed, though, that currently I could not get a 16-bit windows application "chip's challenge" to run on the container, nor could I find any trace of this backwards compatability. It appears that the container image is based on 2008 Server. I wonder when they will roll out support for legacy applications. Ah... then you look closely and find "Glassware 2.0 can also run many legacy applications including 16-bit applications written for Windows 3.1. Legacy applications require packaging assistance from Sphere 3D Consulting and Integration Services." - and this is where they get the money!

Just tested on my iPad - works absolutely beautifully. This is truly amazing how seamless it is across devices.

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What the end user sees is not novel, there are tons of implementations that cover some of Glassware+GCloud functionality: Terminal services (RDP), windows RemoteApp, Chrome Remote Desktop, and many other virtualization firms have done something like it. But here we have the whole solution in the form of easily deployable and scalable apps within containers. This is unparalleled and a huge step forward.

All in all, fantastic product, prompt service, and extremely simple implementation make this a no brainer for me. Though I must caution that I have not done rigorous testing on the product nor done an enterprise implementation. But from initial impressions, there is a huge need for this as it can make companies more technologically adaptive.


Disclosure: I am long ANY, make no guarantees to the legitimacy of any of these claims, and provide here only my unbiased observations. The burden of proof is entirely on the reader.