[GRLUG] Amerisure ditches its PCs, goes all virtual

[mikemol at gmail.com]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Ben DeMott <ben.demott at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know at Alticor they use / are testing a combination of
> Thin-Clients, Vmware Application Emulation, and Citrix... basically
> allowing them to use a thin-client and swap-in/out any version of any
> program, while keeping the users profile 'roaming' and valid.
> In concept this sounds like a great idea - but the complexity involved
> to manage and track down bugs... Plus the limitations it imposes on
> the use of software is incredible.

As an aside, there's a whole class of potential bugs that open up in a Microsoft Terminal Services environment. If a software developer uses things like named {mutexes|pipes|events|shared memory|any of a dozen other shared memory objects}, he's exposed to different namespaces based on whether he's looking for system-wide synchronization or session-wide. I don't expect all developers choose the correct namespace based on their software's needs.

In short, don't think of different, concurrently-running user sessions as isolated if you wind up dealing with sporadic complaints about some software package not working correctly.

(I haven't run into these problems, but that's because I'm the guy writing the software, not using it. ;) )

-- 
:wq
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