Story: Microsoft loosens Vista licence terms
virtualisation - not so great
I look at this in terms of security updates, in fact any kind of updates, and it makes me shudder. The relationship becomes a many-to-one, instead of a citrix farm setup of one-to-many.
What am I talking about? Well, in Citrix, you have a machine that services many clients.
In virtualisation, you potentially have a client that gets served by many machines.
Its this inverse relationship that really gets my hackles up. If you had a citrix farm with 10 servers for 500 clients, who were running a wise terminal, then you only have to patch a small number of devices. This is the benefit of a centralised computing model.
On the other hand, when you introduce virtual computing, every business department wants to have a host for every application, and you typically end up with a huge number of devices that need to be patched.
And patching them when they arent spun up has yet to be achieved in any enterprise sense.
So we come to that oft-heard, and frequently mis-used term, of total cost of ownership.
The effort that large companies go to to ensure a robust and uptodate environment is nothing short of incredible. And I cant help but think that better design up front would have prevented much of this. And now we have this virtualisation coming, and it seems to me to be a disaster in the making.
Not a fan.
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