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Also, the new VSphere 5.0 explicitly mentions the new ability to virtualize OSX. Here's the technical overview from VMware. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-50-Platform-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf Although it only mentions server 10.6 I wouldn't be surprised if that's update to 10.7 before the official release of 5.0

There are benefits to a native PowerShell module, like discoverability, tab-complete, strong-typing, support for common and preference parameters, session variables (e.g.: "trust this SSH key for this session only"), object-oriented result sets, and a bunch of other things.

The elegant way to support SCP in PowerShell would be to write a PowerShell virtual filesystem provider. This would allow scripts to use all of the built-in PowerShell commands on the remote filesystem as if they were normal mounted drives. For example, dir, copy, and del, would all work. It's much easier writing a PowerShell provider than a full filesystem driver, so even for a complex user-mode protocol like SCP it wouldn't be too difficult. Similarly, the SSH key store could be treated like a virtual drive too, just like the built-in Certificate provider.

Alternatively, the even simpler solution is to do something like what VMware did for copying files onto ESXi servers, like Copy-VMGuestFile, and Copy-DatastoreItem.

SSH wouldn't be as easy to wrap, but I suppose it would be possible to create a set of commands such as Invoke-SSHCommand, Enter-SSHSession, and the like, with analogy to Invoke-Command and Enter-PSSession. The problem is that PowerShell doesn't really have a built-in concept of a non-PowerShell session, so a bit of wheel-reinventing would be needed to get a complete set of commands.

There are benefits to a native PowerShell module, like discoverability, tab-complete, strong-typing, support for common and preference parameters, session variables (e.g.: "trust this SSH key for this session only"), object-oriented result sets, and a bunch of other things.

The elegant way to support SCP in PowerShell would be to write a PowerShell virtual filesystem provider. This would allow scripts to use all of the built-in PowerShell commands on the remote filesystem as if they were normal mounted drives. For example, dir, copy, and del, would all work. It's much easier writing a PowerShell provider than a full filesystem driver, so even for a complex user-mode protocol like SCP it wouldn't be too difficult. Similarly, the SSH key store could be treated like a virtual drive too, just like the built-in Certificate provider.

Alternatively, the even simpler solution is to do something like what VMware did for copying files onto ESXi servers, like Copy-VMGuestFile, and Copy-DatastoreItem.

SSH wouldn't be as easy to wrap, but I suppose it would be possible to create a set of commands such as Invoke-SSHCommand, Enter-SSHSession, and the like, with analogy to Invoke-Command and Enter-PSSession. The problem is that PowerShell doesn't really have a built-in concept of a non-PowerShell session, so a bit of wheel-reinventing would be needed to get a complete set of commands.

I do like Ubuntu as a distro. I haven't tried Linux Mint (but I probably will soon). I've also used Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, RedHat Linux, and Debian Linux. Generally, the biggest difference between all of them is how the Package Manager (Add/Remove Programs or "Programs and Features" equivalent) works to install or remove programs from the system (the same holds true for building your own packages of existing programs).

As long as you have fairly modern hardware, VirtualBox or VMWare are good ways to go to try Linux before you attempt a dual boot. Dual boot is recommended in the sense that you will either be "forced" to learn it or forget about it all together. Using Linux in a VM allows you to have the Linux computer in one window, and still have a web browser in another to research how to actually "use" Linux and the many different ways it can be used. You could then even see what different "Window Managers" exist and what one you like best.

Window Managers are essentially the software that manage the presentation of XWindows as a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Mac OSX is Unix under-the-hood and uses a Window Manager as well. There are many different window managers out there. The 2 biggest Window Manager environments are KDE and Gnome. I personally like Fluxbox as a window manager because it is clean, light-weight and allows lots of apps to become full screen easily.

VMWare is very popular and a full featured virtual machine platform. Probably very well supported too. Personally I use VirtualBox because I find it to be the least CPU intensive of the virtual machine platforms I've tried. Also, it is FREE.

An alternative to running Linux in a Dual Boot or virtual machine environment is to install Linux as the only OS on a spare Pentium class computer. Many of these can be had for cheap AND depending on where you live, a quick dumpster dive could land you a decent system for this task.

I assume this is going to be 99% of the suggestions. If your computer is old or slow, I suggest Xubuntu which I've switched my old P4 to after the regular Ubuntu got a little too GUI intensive. Here's the link to VMWare.

So it's an "emulator" you say? It "simulates" a "hardware device".

Would not another word for this be: "Virtual Machine"? Have they cleared this with Oracle, or did NVIDIA just get caught with their pants down? (stroking their e-peen)

How are you getting around VMWare's patent on saving and restoring a VM state? Clearly you'll want to do that to enable debugging of your soft-hardware. (Even though many VMs could do that long before the patent was applied for -- My old Lisp machine emulator did).

Inquiring minds want to know... specifically, what do I have to do so that the new VM based languages (like Java/Davlik or Lua?!) don't infringe any VM software patents? (Or are you taking the same advice my lawyer gave me? "Ignore the patents, foreknowledge makes infringement penalties greater. If you can stay under the radar by using different terminology long enough to become successful, we can negotiate a (cross) licensing deal.")

Software Patents Bad. Even For Hardware Company.

I use Hyper-V at home . I was going to use ESXi (even bought a 'allowed' network card, and machine that was compatible), but after installing it I discovered that ESXi doesnt support dynamic disk images (ie you need to allocate the entire X Gb of space on physical disk), which makes simple backup tricky.
Switched over to Hyper-V (using my TechNet license), and its worked perfectly for several years. Ive not managed to crash it once, and it supports dynamic disks, AND dynamic memory (ie, you can tell it to always have 50% free ram in machine A and 25% in machine B), which is great.
Its also really nice to be able to RDP in for admin, rather than having to install special software on each client I may use. Of course I can also RDP in from my iPad / iPhone as well.
The only major feature that is missing from Hyper-V (for my home/geek use) is USB support / hardware passthrough, although my adventures with Xen trying to get that happening were fruitless...

Perhaps you should have RTFM first!

A few months ago. VMWare's solution for mobile.

A few months ago, I decided to ditch my landline and move as many calls as I could to my iPhone via SIP. Here's how I did it:

***My Equipment***

• An unlocked iPhone with a prepaid T-Mobile SIM
• A copy of the freeware VoIP app. Siphon
• A used Macmini server I picked-up for $200
• VMware Fusion running on the Macmini server
• The Incredible PBX from Nerd Vittles
• A free ISP connection courtesy of my very cute and extremely generous next door neighbor Christina

The Incredible PBX (I-PBX) runs within VMware and is pre-configured to support free VoIP calls anywhere in the US over Google Voice. The Google Voice service gives me a local phone number (DID), and will route calls to my home-based I-PBX over GTalk. Siphon on the iPhone gives me both in and outbound SIP calling while I'm on WiFi at home. At home, I also have a Cisco VoIP phone I got a few years ago which also handles inbound and outbound calls. When I'm away from home, I can make outbound calls whenever there's a WiFi network available by routing the calls over a VPN connection back to the Macmini server.

Note that there were a couple of caveats with my setup. The biggest problem is that inbound calls via Google Voice and GTalk don't seem to work reliably; the phones ring, but the voice connection never seems to work. I tend to think the problem is in my configuration though, and if I spent a bit more time troubleshooting the issue, I'm sure I could solve the problem. However, I can still use Google Voice to forward inbound calls back to the iPhone phone via the cellular network. I can then get the call, figure out who it is and how long it will take and, if it's going be be more than a couple of minutes, I can call back via VoIP.

There's a short-term window in which this matters, but I would fully expect that in the 5-year timeframe, running virtual machines on your phone will be the standard, and you will be able to select what OS you want on any compliant handset. Except possibly in the U.S., where the public still for some reason permits the carriers a bizarre amount of control of the business model.

Is that laughing I hear? It's already starting.

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html

And look at this. I have never seen a technology so completely dominate the upper right corner of a Gartner quad in years. MS is admirable to be above the horizon in 3-4 short years, but there is no contest, nor will there really ever get to be one.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf

Management? MS will still try and convince you of SCCM and the broken DCM.

Security? IPSec isolation everywhere - which your failover times on the IKE renegotiation!

HyperV is a great, cheap QA and Dev lab solution, because it's free with 4 v-instances on Enterprise SKUs. But if you have to tool dev/test different for deployment that you do production? The savings are a false economy.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf

And look at this. I have never seen a technology so completely dominate the upper right corner of a Gartner quad in years. MS is admirable to be above the horizon in 3-4 short years, but there is no contest, nor will there really ever get to be one.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf

Management? MS will still try and convince you of SCCM and the broken DCM.

Security? IPSec isolation everywhere - which your failover times on the IKE renegotiation!

HyperV is a great, cheap QA and Dev lab solution, because it's free with 4 v-instances on Enterprise SKUs. But if you have to tool dev/test different for deployment that you do production? The savings are a false economy.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf

You don't know of the storage technology in VMware, nor of the value of the cooperative storage ecosystem that SAN and NAS players have invested hundreds of millions into.

This really removes the basis on which you make your further claims.

In short, VMware is successful as the most capable solution of enterprise-scale, exactly because it virtualises not just server hosts, but brings a virtual model to storage - not to mention networking. There is nothing comparable in the MS world, which seeks to leverage existing cluster technology from Server2008 to present a model for VHD storage.

Review VMFS for starters:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmfs/
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/VMware_VMFS

Microsoft has a sad hack to commit memory in a way that shaves a fraction off of the VMware machine density advantage. They are still competing with a 2006-era VMware - they have no clue how to get out of this, aside from dumping a billion dollars into compete marketing efforts.

The massive executive and senior-engineering exodus from MS is a clear sign that -- even in the halls where sacred Kool-Aid is draughted -- the days of leadership are over, almost before they were enjoyed.

How does VMware use personal information?
VMware will use personal information to provide customers and business partners with information and services and to help us better understand your needs and interests. Specifically, we use your information to help you complete a transaction or order, to communicate with you, to deliver products/services to you, to bill you for products/services you purchased, and to provide ongoing service and support. Occasionally we may use your information to contact you to complete surveys that we use for marketing and quality assurance purposes.

In short: They do it for your own good

For a while, large companies have been looking very seriously to the BYOD (bring your own device) model.

It started with laptops, when companies started giving employees a stipend to buy a computer or do whatever you want with the money, but you need to provide your own system. The company would only support a company-maintained VM and it's your responsibility to run it somewhere.

If you leave the company, the encrypted image is disabled and becomes useless.

Now the same trend is coming to cell phones. VMware already announced an agreement with LG to enable multiple personalities on an ARM-based Android device, so you can bring your own phone, apply a company profile to it, and still get to have your own personal stuff completely separate from the corporate image and apps.

Regardless of what one may think about this, it's coming.

Not to mention trying to jam a full heavy Linux DE (which according to some of the links followed through TFA is pretty crippled and unusable as a replacement shell, due to so many core features being broken) into a place it was never meant to be simply to use some KDE apps doesn't make much sense.

After all many of the apps on Linux are cross platform (which is one of the nice things about Linux, so many of the apps will run anywhere) and for the ones that aren't there are a myriad of other choices that don't involve dumping a ton of KDE dependencies into Windows, such as dual booting or one of the several free VMs such as VMWare Player which already has the Kubuntu LTS VM ready to go so all one needs to do is simply download and run this or one of several versions of KDE Linux as easy as downloading and running an app on Windows.

So it just doesn't make any sense to me this late in the game. If it were 2002 when you had so many screaming obscenities over the XP "Fisher Price" GUI I could see it, but the Windows 7 GUI is nice and for those staying on XP there is a really nice replacement shell that is stable as a rock and can make Windows look and behave anyway you desire, and TFA said the really popular apps like Amarok are getting Windows stand alone installers. So why would you want to dump nearly a GB of dependencies (that is how much it was when I ran it a couple of months back) for a few apps with so much of its core being unstable?

Maybe I'm missing something but other than saying "we must because we can" it makes about as much sense to me as trying to rip out the Windows 7 DE to run it in Ubuntu. Wouldn't it simply make more sense to run the DE in the environment it was designed for where it can have full functionality and a level of integration it will simply never be able to have on Windows? it isn't like you can't get KDE for absolutely free in Linux. And with so many show stoppers you certainly wouldn't want this to be a Windows users first experience with KDE.

How can the PHB work on the plane?

VMware View at least allows you to check out virtual machines onto your local machine:

VMware View FAQ

Q. What is View Client with Local Mode?
A. View Client with Local mode allows VMware View virtual desktops to be moved between the datacenter and physical desktop devices with security policies intact. Virtual desktops may be “checked out” onto a physical device such as a laptop enabling users to work when they are not connected to the network. Changes to the desktop are then “checked in” to the datacenter to intelligently synchronize the desktop when the user goes back online. View Client with Local Mode allows users to run their virtual desktop while offline or simply take advantage of local endpoint device resources to ensure the best virtual desktop user experience.

VMs are great abstractions, but they are still tied to the 'plumbing' underneath.

If you pack one or more VMs with an XML wrapper that defines ALL your service levels, from Security and Compliance to DR, to expected I/O performance, you get something called a vApp (standarized with the OVF 1.0 format specification).

Now you defined exactly what does your application need. The next step is to make sure the underlying infrastructure is capable of properly fulfilling that SLA. That is achieved by abstracting the concept of datacenter (virtual datacenter in this case). VMware coded that into their vCloud Director product which will make sure that if you land a vApp, the infrastructure can fulfill the SLA.

All this is not as simple as landing a VM on a hosting provider. You need automation, end-to-end security and above all, you need to "trust" that your infrastructure will take care of your SLA automatically. Otherwise trigger-happy lawyers can get involved.

Disclaimer: I work for VMware.

VMs are great abstractions, but they are still tied to the 'plumbing' underneath.

If you pack one or more VMs with an XML wrapper that defines ALL your service levels, from Security and Compliance to DR, to expected I/O performance, you get something called a vApp (standarized with the OVF 1.0 format specification).

Now you defined exactly what does your application need. The next step is to make sure the underlying infrastructure is capable of properly fulfilling that SLA. That is achieved by abstracting the concept of datacenter (virtual datacenter in this case). VMware coded that into their vCloud Director product which will make sure that if you land a vApp, the infrastructure can fulfill the SLA.

All this is not as simple as landing a VM on a hosting provider. You need automation, end-to-end security and above all, you need to "trust" that your infrastructure will take care of your SLA automatically. Otherwise trigger-happy lawyers can get involved.

Disclaimer: I work for VMware.

No. The term "cloud" may have started as a buzz word but it has taken some serious shape in less than a year. For a serious, comprehensive definition, check a short document posted by NIST.

In short, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction".

It doesn't have to be necessarily hosted on external providers. It may very well be an internal, Private Cloud. And if it's built on top of open standards such as the vCloud API, you may end up with vApps that can be moved from internal to external clouds and back, as well as hybrids.

Apple has not given up the server market, but now you'll just put your instance(s) of OSX Server on VMWare or other hyper-visor with appropriate licensing. Not sure how they'll tackle the OSX on a non-Apple box, but it's probably technically trivial (maybe like the old Logic Pro dongle-thingy).

What are some of the benefits that we could see with it? Well:
-Bare metal hypervisors. Imagine being able to boot up linux and windows side-by-side and not have to worry about setting up any sort of virtual machine. You could switch between the two using a keyboard combo. Or even being able to setup a COW copy of windows so cleaning up your mom's copy of windows is as easy as hitting a few keys and setting it back to a known clean state...

Oh, like ESXi? No, wait, you said no virtual machine... wait, what? Hypervisor = Virtual machine control system.

Your "insta-clean" windows can be accomplished with drive imaging, or "freezing".

-Improved device support. Devices could use a standardised interface on the "bios" level so that windows/linux/osx would just need a simple driver layer to talk to the device. Device manufacturers could provide what basically amounts to a shim to load into the UEFI which provides the mapping between the actual device and the standardised hardware interface. Of course this may run into issues such as non-standard or extended features but this could be taken care of with extensible interfaces.

Are you advocating an OS-independent version of DirectX for bare metal? Or are you describing how BIOS already operates?

In short, either you have no idea what you're talking about, or you're simply unaware that what you're describing is already in existence (and, indeed, is the way it already works).

That might be a solution with 12,500 workstations, but at my (much, much smaller) company it ain't gonna work:

According to VMware, it costs $5,000 to get started with 50 client licenses. And additional licenses are $39.

For those prices, it's more profitable to stick with XP for as long as possible, and then run things in virtualized XP Mode once the hardware catches up with the overhead (in the natural course of attrition and replacement).

It seems like an interesting product. But I don't know where you get $10/client. Their website says their client works only with the suite, which is sold separately. Client is anywhere from $30-$60 and the suite is $6K to $8K for 1-3 year support. http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.105855800

Your best bet is to use something designed from the metal up to work. But that means buying a piece of hardware probably more than you've got, and including pro grade nics.

The compatability guide helps to identify the hardware you'll need (or if your current hardware is compatible.)

I've used VirtualBox, VMware Player, Xen, Qemu ad infinum. ESX is ready for enterprise, and ready for the closet floor underneath the 50cm fan. For the wife/live-in-partner support (if they're not an IT geek) the web console for management is far easier to explain than VirtualBox. The crashes you can experience with other vendors (you do get the same crap with Vmware) are not handled well, and restarting often involves popping up a shell to kill some pids. ESX has fixed most of those sorts of issues since ESX 3.0.2.

Look it up:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCategory=server

To keep the comparison of features a bit more fair, vmWare offers player which is free. It fills a similar role as VirtualBox. I have personally used both. My personal experience puts the vmWare player above virtual box for image manipulation, though I have never run Photoshop under VirtualBox and have never used Lightroom at all.

Its true, but only with the latest VMWare Workstation (7.1), which is not one of their freebie offerings. Its not too expensive though.

http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/new.html

VMware Workstation was the first to support 3D graphics in virtualized environments and is now the first to support Windows Aero in Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines. Run even more 3D applications with support for DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.13D graphics in Windows virtual machines.

I heavily use virtualization both at work and home. I originally had an ESXi 3.5 server at home but my RAID controller was an Areca ARC-1170 which is not on the VMWare Hardware Compatibility Guide so after reviewing the off-the-shelf community help I learned how to roll my own oem.tgz to include the drivers. The system worked for a while but I then started to experience a lot of stability issues so I switch to KVM running on Fedora.

Unfortunately KVM on Fedora has had a lot of issues with the virt-manager being stable. Right now I'm on Fedora 13 and every time I open the console on virt-manager for a specific VM it causes X to crash and reload. If I boot the VM up from scratch with the console open it's less buggy. I actually had this problem originally on Fedora 11 and am still experiencing it with 13 even from a fresh reload. Fortunately it's not really an issue for me because I can just ssh or use XMing to send my X related apps.

The biggest issue with virtualization is that host memory is your most precious resource. To solve this problem, OS drivers can be installed to support memory ballooning. What memory ballooning does is make sure the guest OS frees up memory resources it is not using to the host. If you're running a lot of Microsoft Windows I definitely recommend ESXi since there are no good memory ballooning drivers available in KVM or Xen and really no roadmap for it. If you're running a lot of Linux I highly recommend KVM since current distros already have the kernel features that make memory more efficient. In fact, it is advantageous to run a homogenous distribution (i.e. all distro-X version Y) because the latest kernels have memory deduplication which will cause memory pages that are the same to be only stored once.

> I've often wondered why VMware, citrix or MS didn't introduce a halfway house "desktop" virtualisation like you suggest

VMware did, it's called VMware ThinApp

VMware has a Linux vcenter in beta..... http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcserver_linux

True, ESX is not free, but ESXi (http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/index.html) certainly is. If you have just one box and thus do not need stuff like HA or Vmotion, ESXi works just fine.

Funny... in the VMware whitepaper linked to from the article, even VMware wasn't able to get more than 110% memory over-consolidation from page sharing. I wonder what's so different about KVM's page sharing approach?

It's called Application Virtualization and generic solutions exist for it (at least on Windows), e.g. http://www.vmware.com/go/thinapp

You could write a custom program that would scrape the the data from a website you setup to allow that program to run stand alone or you figure out what the data format is and write a program to convert that.

If you want to recreate the data from scratch then you'd need to set up a website your group would access and enter data. That would be crowd sourcing but you'd probably want something specific to your needs but using easily maintainable code.

As others have stated you could use virtualization. Inside the virtual machine you may even be able to run a LAMP stack and run the DOS program with dosbox running as as an unprivileged user. http://www.dosbox.com/ http://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.vmware.com/.

I would only consider the virtual solution a stop gap until you could get the database translated to something maintainable or recreate the data.

Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice.

While this was true in ESX 2.x (which introduced virtual SMP), this is no longer the case. This limitation was largely removed with the introduction of relaxed coscheduling in ESX 3.x (2006-ish). More information is available in this document.

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/354 "Hownetworks" is pretty cool, but you will still be left with the problem of creating a very sterile environment. If you try teaching somebody by watching live traffic in an office or school network there will be so much noise that it will probably confuse the students. I tried looking for an updated version of the app, but could not find one...

See, I tried at least 6 different flavors.

That's a shame you're having such a hard time with your Linux VM's. Maybe if you went here first and just downloaded Ubuntu or something that's already ready to go, you could get started on the right foot.

I find it interesting that I mirror your problems except in the reverse. I've had very positive experiences with Linux (primarily Debian and Ubuntu) and not so great experiences with Win7 vm's. I first tried 7 in vmware on a machine with an e8400 c2d and 1 GB of RAM allocated to the virtual machine but after a little while, had to just give up. It consistently thrashed the disk, pegged the CPU, and I just couldn't do anything with it. I then tried it in VirtualBox and it did run much better, especially after I turned everything off. The only problem was that while it started programs faster, they just didn't perform nearly as well as they do in my XP vm. This is a serious problem as I use XP primarily for Mappoint which needs a lot of CPU since the last 3 or so iterations. I don't really care a whole lot about the additional security in 7 since I leave the virtual network disconnected from Windows anyway.

I'm a fan of the FOSS movement, because it just feels right. But if it comes to anything mission critical, I have to use Windows. Or at least XP32 emulated on XP64, because x64 never "just worked" either.

There are a lot of people running mission critical stuff on Linux too so, since you at least like the idea of FLOSS, don't give up. Try one of the vm's on the site I linked to and if you break it, just start over. Don't let it beat you. That's how I started in a vm and now several years later, I find Linux to be an absolute joy to use and there is no way I would use anything else on my hardware. Something else too. I run Linux and Windows in virtual machines and on my Ubuntu host, I always find the Linux guests run better than the XP guests. For example, I can move windows on XP and get lots of tearing, not so in the Linux machines. Maybe it's just me but that's my experience.

In our district Freshmen take Earth Science, Sophomores take Bio, Juniors Chemistry and Seniors take Physics. There's also some techy electives such as Intro to Programming, Computer Animation/CAD and an Intro to Computers (teaches the basics of how to use a computer, browsers, word processing, etc...)

Check out the applications that your those that set the curriculum want to use. Some software suites are available for one platform and not another. You can't just say, "We're using OS/2 and that's the way it will be!" As you'll have 10 department heads yelling at you that there aren't any XYZ applications available to it.

Also, who says you have to have 5k PCs each with it's own disk, OS load etc.. Why not look at Virtual Desktops (vmware view with dumb terminals/thin clients in the classrooms? The Unix folks have been doing this for years, but this solution is pretty slick. We've deployed it for all the staff as they only use a dozen or so standardized applications.

Btw, I'm an ex-mainframer and managing 1 mainframe and 5000 dumb 3270 terminals is much easier than 5000 desktops; and speaking from experience managing a couple of large X86 servers and a 100 thin clients is very similar.

That is news to vmware cause they are selling it. Player is free, not workstation.
http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=165311300&resid=S-cN9AoBAkYAAFWtBWkAAAAQ&rests=1274484082312

I bought all those games for real money. Over the past few years sure, but your original comment had no time frame in it. Just deal you were wrong.

What did 11 break? It's broken nothing for me.

SLES 11 HAE is not some proprietary package. It's 100% OSS. It's made up of:
Pacemaker (http://www.clusterlabs.org/)
OpenAIS (http://www.openais.org/doku.php)
DRBD (http://www.drbd.org/)
OCFS2 (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/)

You can get it here: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=jC1wpkedb7A~

VMware tools DO work with the SLES 11 kernel. You can get them here:
http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/4.0latest/sles11/index.html

As for security, it adds selinux availability, TPM support, more locked down defaults and a YaST security module for easier configuration.

While it's anecdotal, I've never had a SLES 11 server lock up whereas due to hardware/driver bugs I've had SLES 10 SP2 lockup on new HP hardware plenty of times until we upgraded the kernel.

We're using SLES 11 on production servers with no problems. We decided to jump straight to 11 after getting burned for being 9.4 too long and nobody in the world supports it any more.

As far as VMware Tools support on SLES 11, according to VMWare's official documentation it is:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/osp_install_guide.pdf start on page 18

From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Player

Installing VMware Player on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Ubuntu 8.10

1. Install required packages build-essential, linux-kernel-headers and linux-kernel-devel

   sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-kernel-headers linux-kernel-devel

2. Download the latest VMware player e.g. VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle (download the bundle version, not the rpm one) and run it as root using gksudo. You'll get a graphical installer that installs VMware player for you.

VMware's Capacity Planner will find all of the computers on your network and tell you what's inside of them. While it won't inventory UPSes, it can help you inventory your servers. http://www.vmware.com/products/capacity-planner/

You can download VMWare Player 3.0 for free. Then go download an Ubuntu 9.10 appliance. Or else, have them download the Ubuntu ISO and install it themselves. You can run VMs off of a thumb drive with no issues-- just make sure that your machines have adequate physical RAM to run both the VM and the base OS. A VM that doesn't know it is swapping is a real performance killer.

I frequently use both VMware and Virtualbox at work and at home. They're both great, but if you work in an enterprise IT shop, the extra features that come with the paid version of VMWare are well worth the cost.

You can download VMWare Player 3.0 for free. Then go download an Ubuntu 9.10 appliance. Or else, have them download the Ubuntu ISO and install it themselves. You can run VMs off of a thumb drive with no issues-- just make sure that your machines have adequate physical RAM to run both the VM and the base OS. A VM that doesn't know it is swapping is a real performance killer.

I frequently use both VMware and Virtualbox at work and at home. They're both great, but if you work in an enterprise IT shop, the extra features that come with the paid version of VMWare are well worth the cost.

vmware virtual applicases(is htat a word?), OS category

You want vmtools installed for performance reasons. any mainstraim distribution will do i think.

vmware player is simple (but not redistributable i think), heavier user can use sun virtual box or vmware server.

VMWare View is what you want.

Right...

Try Citrix PVS, it does exacltly what you want.

It's not cheap so might not be a viable option for a smaller shop, but VMware has been making some very interesting strides in this area.

Check out VMware View, also known as PCoIP (Yes, that is personal computer over internet protocol)

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10083

Put really simply, each real workstation is loaded with a minimal system and the vmware view clients.
When a user goes to login to a computer on your network, after authentication their virtual workstation pops up (Be it windows or ubuntu) and lets them work.

All of the actual 'workstations' being used are virtual machines, thus are the same unified image you are looking for with one set of drivers.

While I have not tested it with a multi-monitor setup, they claim it is supported.

The one main thing you do lose is full accelerated 3D support, and direct support for old eccentric hardware. (Think ISA card support and non-standard PCI interfaces)
I can say USB support is simply amazing in how well it works.

Clients can even play full interactive flash media and video, and it runs well (As well as one would expect it to work in native OS anyway)