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Will Apple's Lion Roar For Business?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has long had a troubled relationship with IT departments. Any creative professional will testify just how hard it can be to convince IT managers to allow the use of Macs in Windows-dominated environments. And, despite the fact that the Mac OS is now quite a well-behaved client on Windows LANs, Apple sometimes does little to help its own cause. The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources. Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server. There are rumors that Apple will, itself, run a virtualized version of Mac OS under VMware as part of its iCloud product. Allowing OS X to run as a guest on non-Apple servers, and even on the desktop under VDI, would bring enormous administrative benefits to companies using Macs."
The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources. Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server.
before reaching a coclusion, read a better researched article, written by someone who really knows macs firts: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars (warning, 14 pages article)
lion can be burned to a DVD after download, also, in the near future, apple will ofer lion on thumb drives for $69.
the EULA also mentions virtualisation. the hypervisor probably needs to run on a mac OS host, but it is supported as guest, if the EULA is true.
What ? Me, worry ?
First, it's possible to create your own disc or USB stick containing the Lion installer, so that's hardly a problem. Secondly, if you absolutely need some blessed install media, Apple will be selling an official install on a USB drive in a month. This is something that has been discussed on Slashdot so I don't see why glaring inaccuracies like this should get through.
You can just copy the Lion installer to a network share or other disk to move it around as well.
The EULA allows for virtualization of up to two additional instances without the need for more licenses as long as you do it on Mac hardware. http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=lion-eula
I find your comment ironic:
Enterprise IT is different. Computers stay in use until they're depreciated or until they're nonviable.
My four year old Macbook is still viable and in use. Apple hardware tends to be viable for a good long while. Not forever, Leopard finally EOLed the PowerPC generation hardware, and Lion is apparently now EOLing the first generation of Intel processors, but in general it last s a good long while and will run everything released till it EOLs. Unlike Windows upgrades (Windows 7 excepted here, it really is more efficient than Vista, and not much more resource hungry than XPSP3) , new version of MacOS tend to make old Macs run better even. Even on the consumer electronics level, my Dad is using my wife's old iPhone 3G quite happily. Of course Apple would prefer you buy a new computer, phone, and tablet every time they release one, Dell would prefer you buy everything they sell too. It's hardly required though.
IT departments also don't like variation and work hard to buy literally one model of computer for as absolutely long as possible, again, skipping generations of machines until latching on to the next long-term purchase model.
One of the biggest weaknesses people love to cite on Apple hardware for power users is their refresh cycle. A particular line is usually refreshed every 18-24 months. So, for instance, the Air line was just refreshed. That means that for the next year or more, the four options for "MacBook Air" are going to stay more or less the same. It's a pain in the ass when you want a new laptop and you know they're about to do a refresh so you either have to wait or buy hardware that'll be "old" in a couple months when they do a refresh; but it ought to be great for IT according to your theory.
Also, one of the reasons that IT departments do what you say they do is to keep images consistent. Drivers and software support must be maintained by keeping hardware the same. MacOS doesn't have that problem because all the drivers you need are loadable kernel modules that are on every install. I could clone my MacBook to an image file, and put that image on a Mac Pro's drive. The Mac Pro will boot and perform normally. Linux is similar by the way. Most of the distro vendors compile the vast majority of drivers the system is likely to need as loadable modules. Unless you've got some really strange hardware, you can generally image a Linux system, use the image on a completely different system, and be fine.
Apple and Corporate IT don't get along, and for a lot of very good reason (and some bad ones), some of which the article points out. Your reasons though are completely bunk. If anything Apple products are particularly suited to Enterprise IT by the standards you list here. Apple makes it money on consumers, and isn't like to change its policies to accommodate corporate IT. So the irony is that your premise is right, but your reasons aren't.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Macs are, indeed, generally sufficiently supportive of the same standards and quasi-standards that personal Macs can successfully operate on corporate networks, or small business environments can get a small number of them set up. Where things get ugly is if the use-case requires that the institutional IT department provision the Macs in some reasonably large quantity, with standard settings, and automatic access to home directories and SSO and whatnot. At work, we certainly don't get in the way of personal users, and provide general assistance where possible, same for linux clients(one of which is my laptop, so I'd be peeved if our network caused it grief...)
In my own(admittedly limited) experience, supporting the ability of people's personal Macs to connect is no big deal. They are less likely that personal wintels to harbor exciting malware, they do DHCP perfectly normally, more clueful users can do 802.11x/RADIUS by manually configuring their personal local OSX accounts with their domain credentials, we advertise a few printers with Avahi for their convenience, no problem. DFS doesn't work, and browsing for windows-shared printers can be a bit flaky; but the location of the home directory shares isn't exactly a secret, and abuse isn't much of an issue so we can leave some IPP printing options open.
If it's our hardware, and expected to work automagically, though, the Macs are a comparatively massive pain in the ass, per unit. Because of the 802.11x authentication differences, AD authenticated logins on wireless need some bodging to get working(since the Macs have no native concept analogous to "machine authentication", though some script-fu can fake it, and you can't exactly authenticate against the server unless you have a connection), DFS is a no-go, any sort of user-account configuration either has to be baked into the image by modifying the home directory template or has to be handled by adding an Apple server to the mix, or involves more script-fu. Same with automatic software installs, locally cached updates, etc, etc.
There are also the tedious(but unfortunately necessary) 'hardware lifecycle' considerations. We are required to pull all drives and other storage media for physical destruction before a deactivated device leaves the site. Even the products of HP and Dell's ghastliest engineering abortions make that a 10 second job. Apple... varies... sharply in that regard.