[GRLUG] Amerisure ditches its PCs, goes all virtual

[Ben DeMott]

Nice Mike -> it's good to be on the programming end huh (thats why I
got out of Systems Engineering) - I would rather CREATE the problems
:)

I think I should point something out... which most of us forget.
If you step back from the all of these 'solutions' the problem they
are really trying to solve is "hacking a path to circumvent the
limitations of Windows".
None of these solutions in any way integrate tightly with Windows- by
definition they are all contrived and hacked - and break at the
slightest internal change to Windows, especially some of the VMWare
Technologies because they consume registry settings.

It's amazing Microsoft has spawned a whole industry by the inability
for their 'platform' to have portable configurations and user
environments.
You may not look at it that way - but most of what is attractive about
thin-clients has already been mentioned (Viruses, OS Corruption, Disk
Corruption, Portability)

In our old environment the biggest 'fear' of computer downtown was
lost productivity.
Roaming profiles, Shared Storage, and base images solved most of those
problems.
There was always the license or application that had to be installed
MANUALLY though, we just couldn't get away from it - or was based on a
Mac address or something that required manual setup of the program
'each time'.

Even with shared storage (SAMBA) -> Has Microsoft provided a way to
'router' a samba share, so multiple servers can serve the same files -
I imagine this is incredibly expensive or requires a 3rd party (once
again 'Hacked') solution.

It's painful to think about how much intellectual property and time is
wasted working around the closed limitations of Microsofts platform -
with no end in sight.


On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:52 AM,  <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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