Is is just me, or does all the arm-wrestling between VMware and a certain software giant in the great Northwest look like a replay of the fighting that went on between the aforementioned software giant and a little company called Citrix way back in the salad days of 1997?
As I recall…
Citrix’s WinView was a game-changing, watershed moment in the delivery of DOS and Win 3.1 apps, particularly over low-bandwidth links.
So Microsoft, who invested $1M of its own money keeping Citrix afloat, licensed the source for Windows NT to Citrix, who transmogrified it into a multi-user server product called WinFrame. Which in its own right was a game-changing, watershed moment that single-handedly made server-centric remote computing the single hottest thing since sliced bread with jam and butter on it all the way back in 1995.
Almost as soon as the candle on their rocketship was lit, it all came plummeting back to Earth. In 1997, Microsoft took its toys and went home by pulling Citrix’ license to NT 4.0. MS planned to forge their own multi-user computing solution. Which they did. And which ran like crap, frankly.
So, they decided they wanted to license some of Citrix’ key technology. Which Citrix could either agree to, or basically go out of business.
Lo and behold, Windows Terminal Server Edition was born.
For their part, Citrix was allowed to continue to sell their software as an extension of MS’ Terminal Server, but not as a direct compete.
So with virtualization emerging as…
The greatest thing since sliced bread with butter and jam
A game-changing, watershed moment in the delivery of nearly every aspect of computing infrastructure
An area in which MS has not only expressed interest, but is also taking steps to assure their dominance
It stands to reason that mothership would be playing some hardball, right?
Now, I’m not sure it’s an apple-to-apples comparison when looking at Citrix v. MS and VMware v. MS, for one simple reason…
VMware has an insane amount of support from the open source community
That, in and of itself, gives VMware a certain amount of legitimacy, no matter what kind of cockamamie support restrictions MS wants to put on 3rd-party virtualization solutions.
And quite frankly…
As bad as official MS support has been getting, I’m not so sure the lack of official support is a liability.
It will give you a brief glimpse into the size of the check your achingly beautiful design is writing that your budget might not be able to cash.
But it might also show you how a copy of Enterprise Edition, with its included rights to run up to 4 virtual instances on a single machine, might just be hellaciously cheaper than going with Standard Edition right off the bat.
And beware the realities of support for virtual environments, which I’ll be talking about a little later today.
From day one in business, Black Warrior Technology’s own systems have run as a virtualized core.
As an early one year anniversary present, the robot horde’s making preparations to move BWT’s virtual core on up to a real piece of underlying hardware.
And might I say, the hardware we chose is sweet sweet candy.
Check this out…
3 GB of RAM
2.0 Ghz Quad-core Xeon
146 GB RAID5 SAS
DVD-RW
GigE
With plenty of room to add RAM, drives, and an additional processor
Better yet…
No cut hands!
But what really put the value in this upgrade?
The planning and foresight that went into a move to virtual in the first place, so many many moons ago.
Once the running configuration is divorced from physical hardware…
Sky = Limit
Which is an important important thing for you to think about for your customers. That’s one of those technical decisions that isn’t really a technical decision…it’s a business decision.
A couple of weeks ago, Running Antelope happened to be talking on the phone with one of the actresses from a TV show you might have heard a little bit about…
Shoutout to everyone who came by the September IPSA meeting for my talk on Mobile 2.0 this afternoon. Special holla to all my Alabama SMB peeps who showed. That’d be Greg, James & Ginger. Word.
And speaking of Ginger…
Extra special thanks to her for smacking some sense back into the podium.
Appreciate everyone’s patience with my total clown college routine with the presenter mouse. I really need to practice more with that thing. I keep nudging all the wrong buttons.
Hope the talk about Mobile 2.0 & why it’s so important was of help to you.
