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Experiences with Replacing Desktops w/ VMs?
E1ven asks: "After years of dealing with broken machines, HAL incompatibility, and other Windows frustrations, I'd like to investigate moving to an entirely VM-based solution. Essentially, when an employee comes in in the morning, have them log-in, and automatically download their VM from the server. This gives the benefits of network computing, in that they can sit anywhere, if their machine breaks, we can instantly replace it, etc, and the hope is that the VM will run at near-native speeds. We have gigabit to all of the desktops, so I'm not too worried about network bandwidth, if we keep the images small. Has anyone ever tried this on a large scale? How did it work out for you? What complications did you run of that I probably haven't thought of?"
There are a lot of complications using a VM - there's no 3D, no good audio etc.. Plus if your base computer does not fit into the HAL, you can't expect much out of the VM. I am actually surprised at this - a VM will give you the benifit of portability, but if that was your goal you'd be better off giving a laptop to all your employees.
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
thin client be a cheaper and easier solution per seat?
What about staging the images overnight and keeping the backup image on the user's local C drive? If the network's up, use it to update the local cache overnight, as needed. If the network's down, use the cached image. You don't have to refresh the image daily, just when you want to make a change. The beauty is in ease of rollback when someone stuffs up a change on the client.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Exactly!
This is brought to you from a SunRay at home, talking to the server in the garage...
Combined with Tarantella, you can have every Windows application you want. The latest revision of the SunRay server also works on Linux (RedHat I think)!
I run my Windows apps in QEMU, but that is because only my wife and I share the SunRay server...(2.4GHz P4, 3GB RAM). From a users perspective its just perfect! Power-on in the morning, insert your card, login and last nights session is still there. Just upgraded to the latest Open Solaris build so I had to reboot the machine, but before that my machine had reached 317 days of uptime!
In an office environment your mileage will vary, but I have always appreciated the silence of my office working on a SunRay.
Regarding the GP, downloading VM images just doesn't make sense compared to a SunRay, especially if you already have GB ethernet. Make sure the servers have enough RAM and don't let them play Quake!
(and yes, I work for Sun...)
What you forget with your Citrix solution is that you move the problem from the network to the CPU and memory.
When you have an entire office full of modern PCs (say with 512-1024 MB of RAM and a 2-3 GHz class CPU) you are wasting a large amount of real estate when you run ICA Client on all those and make the people work on one or a few Citrix servers where they all have to compete for a few CPUs and a lot less memory.
Citrix is nice, but it is not the answer to everything. When the users run intensive or inefficient applications, it can be a severe performance problem.
The solution he has in mind does not have that problem, because his applications run locally so they utilize the local resources available on the desktop.
People actually use wakeup on lan on desktops?
Yes, we use WOL to wakeup windows workstations in the weekend (or the night, in emergency cases) and install/update software or hotfixes.
So, the user is not bothered with waittime reboots after application installs.