On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Karen Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> My down-home-country-librarian observation that I always tack on (with
> plenty of disclaimers) is "If virtualization were the answer, we'd see more
> of it by now."
This.
Various vendors have been pushing the "run all your desktops in the
server room and export your I/O over ethernet" solution for a long
time. Heck, X11 does exactly this, and it's as old as the original
Macintosh.
I suspect the problems partly come down to the end-user experience
(performance, customizability, etc) and partly the fact that making an
environment truly truly homogeneous is not completely realistic in
most environments. Once you've gone the "everything will be
virtualized" route, making one desktop setup just a little different
(adding custom hardware, etc) is nearly impossible.
So it winds up making more sense to find a solution that lets you
cost-effectively manage lots of desktops, because that solves your
actual business needs, not what IT wishes your business needs were.
That, and the fact that the parts of desktop hardware that usually
fail tend to be the things people spend time touching with their dirty
fingers and pouring their coffee on. Disks and motherboards do fail,
but if you've done your homework right, you should be able to swap
another one in within minutes -- and thin clients can fail, too. So
virtualizing doesn't get you out of the business of heading out to
replace gear.
And desktop PCs are dead cheap and you can buy them from anyone.
Custom virtual solutions usually want you to source from one vendor.
That said: we do love virtualization for delivering Windows apps to
Macs and Linux clients. Sometimes, there's just no substitute for SPSS
on Windows.
-n
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