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Munich's Move To Linux Exceeds Target
jrepin writes "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
in 2003 steve balmer travelled to munich to convince the city council to keep running windows
Have you ever had someone, just once, alim tsk tsk your bootyassness minute?
First posts to hit new low.
The article says, "Last year, Florian Schießl, a LiMux project director, stated that he and his team had been naïve and had underestimated the extent of minor problems."
"naïve" links to another article on the same site, h-online.com, from March 2010,
* LiMux project management, "We were naïve", http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LiMux-project-management-We-were-naive-958824.html
This one states: On his blog, the IT expert admits that "We were naïve," and confesses to a "miscalculation".
This links to
* http://www.floschi.info/2010/03/quality-over-time-in-munich/
but floschi.info just says "It works". The Internet Archive records only cover up to Feb 2010 (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100501000000*/http://www.floschi.info)
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Anyone have any information on what LiMux looks like? What DE does it come what? Screenshots would be nice... I googled around but couldn't find any information on it.
Interesting move,
I wonder, how much will this save them cost-wise? That's 9,000 less licences they'll need to have, but I recall Microsoft usually gives discounts on bulk licences, and further discounts if they hint someone is considering an alternative. Also, along with what you'd pay for in licence fees, you get support from them. How much will it cost now to get support (and on demand support) for the Linux OSs (including training, re-training, hiring, etc..)
I'm more interested in if the users are satisfied. Or works faster? Or works slower? Or users rate the overall experience as positive? Negative?
A sheer number of workstations migrated is about as useful as a McDonald's "X Billions of Billions Served!" number. Don't tell me how many you served . . . where they eaten . . . ? . . . and how did they taste . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't see why they roll their own distro. This means they have to maintain all sorts of stuff themselves, while there are already so many viable alternatives. If they used, say Ubuntu, support would probably be much better.
As much as it is about German efficiency.
The real amazing thing is that they beat the communists.
Linux uber alles!
At every turn I am faced with more Microsoft lock-in. Most recently has been an inventory tracking database system. They advertised a "web interface" option but were unable to provide a demonstration of it. After the company bought the product anyway, it was revealed that their "web" interface was actually Silverlight. I realize that Microsoft just released an update to Silverlight, but isn't it already slated for extinction? And when I asked the vendor if they have any HTML 5 intentions, they had no answer at all. So here I am facing yet another application which requires Microsoft Windows, MSIE 8 and a proprietary control set which cannot easily exist in any other way. We already have Documentum which is supposed to be able to use Firefox and the like but thanks to Mozilla's insistence on their INSANE version escalation practices, every update is an X.0 update meaning Documentum thinks it can't support it.
Frustration all around. Thank you Microsoft for shoving your crap through developers and vendors. Thank you vendors for buying into their crap only to find yourselves having to re-write your software AGAIN as Microsoft drops support for the platforms you built your apps on. Thank you Firefox for making the task of trying to migrate to your client all the more difficult. Thanks go around pretty evenly.
Continue playing with your GI Joe toys. You just blurbed two words I never heard here in Germany since I was born in the 70s (in Germany to German parents).
If they can't be bothered to check the "Web Interface" by qualified IT personnel (who would have found out about the Silverlight thing), then the situation you describe appears to be primarily the fault of your employer.
Unfortunately you are not alone with this, I have seen lots of instances of companies buying $hitty software after having been nicely talked to by a seasoned salesman. "Leadership" personnel is quite often extremely sloppy when it comes to software purchasing decisions and they certainly don't even ask for expert advise. They leave it to their experts to attempt a fix of the mess they bought.
The amount of computers I can personally maintain could be as high as thousands or as low as one. All depends on what your requirements are.
For example suppose my job is to do nothing but maintain the systems in working order. I don't help users with problems at all, I just make sure the computers and software works properly. I'm allowed total control, all systems are one make and model and are under warranty at all times, they are replaced when they fall out. They all run a single, unified, set of software, none of it custom. Users have no admin access, all data is stored on a highly reliable, supported, central server.
Well hell in that situation, I can maintain a virtually unlimited number of systems myself. Only real limit is in terms of how often hardware fails and I have to diagnose it and call in warranty support (who will do the actual repairs). Highly reliable central equipment that is supported by the company combined with management software like Ghost mean that I'll do things once and replicate it everywhere.
Now on the other end of the scale, suppose I am expected to provide extremely hands on support. Each and every computer is custom built to the user's wishes, both hardware and software. They get it setup however they want. They also have full and complete admin access. Plus, I am expected to handle any questions or training they have. In that case, I'm not going to be able to handle many systems. 15 might well be too many. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time per system helping people, fixing their fuckups, and so on. I'll hit my limit at a low number of systems.
So it is all in what you want. The more service you want, the more staff you need. We go through that with the Dean at work all the time. He wants us to make faculty happy, which means lots of handholding and support for special research projects, but he doesn't want to spend a lot and hire a lot of staff. We have to keep explaining that you can't have it both ways.
Now they may well have had some inefficiency as well, but part of it can just be a very extensive amount of support. If your support team has a lot of jobs, they need a lot of people.
So what? They installed Linux on a bunch of computers. The real test here is measuring productiveness of people using those computers. Are they still doing their jobs just as well as they were with Windows. That's the real reason why desktop Linux deployments fail. Anyone can install a Linux distro but not everyone can use it.
Does the German coast guard have any offices in Munich?
Somebody needs to retake geography 101. Munich is about as far as one can get away from the German coast and still be in the country.
TCAP-Abort
Well, it is unlikely that the German coast guard have many offices in Munich. However, thanks to advances in military computing, the army can now order submarine parts in Munich, if they feel like it.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
In some companies, programming and that kind of thing is IT as well. They need a custom app that does X, so they have an in house programming division that does that kind of thing, and they are called "IT" as well.
I'm not saying any one model is right, just saying these are ways that you can have lots of IT. A company can well decide it wants tons of computer support and development, and thus have a really large IT staff. It is all in what kind of service you want.
IT'S OVER 9000!
Just info for younger people on /.
In terms of large agencies that tried moving to Linux there were 3 main groups of companies
1) Companies that never had developed a Windows culture. Generally they were Unix shops (Sun, Sco primarily) and they were able to move to Linux easily.
2) Companies that were highly motivated tech companies: IBM, Oracle, Sun that all had a Windows culture. They had embarrassing failures in moving to Windows.
3) Companies that were not particularly technological and wanted to save money. The bag was mixed here but in general the costs got out of control and they threw in the towel.
Munich represents the one place where despite going way over time and budget they have kept plowing away. Demonstrating what it is actually going to take to move a large enterprise with a Windows culture over to Linux.
So 9000 copies of Windows not bought. Let's say that save you $50 per machine (perhaps less) at OEM pricing. tha'ts $450,000. Now how many linux techs did they hire to maintain this? Id assume at least 1 for every 100 machines and what is their annual salary? Compared to windows techs, linux techs get more money.
It is true that Linux admins cost more money but you need fewer Linux admins for the same number of workstations so there is an overall savings.
And 9000 Windows machines don't need no support? You should at least have posted a link to MS's "research" on how Linux TCO is HUEG and everyone should buy Windows instead.
First, I don't think we know what percentage of the city workers the 15,000 number is. Maybe 15,000 is only half of the employees? Maybe there are only 10,000 people with machines on their desktops, and the other 5,000 are shared between 15,000 other workers?
There are a lot of things that are easy to do without computers when the scale is small. If you have a 15 man operation, it's easy to do timesheets on paper. When you have thousands of employees, it becomes way easier to computerize. Once computers become ubiquitous, it becomes even easier to add more things to the "stuff we do on the computer instead of paper" list. The IT to computer ratio seems high, but that number might include a lot of tasks that office staff don't have to do. IE, the guy who makes sure there is a box of paper next to the printers and makes sure the toner cartridges are full might count as IT. In a large enough office building, that simple task can be a full-time job. But the efficiency it adds might very well pay for itself, eliminating the need for office drones to have to do it themselves and focusing on their work instead of wandering down to the supply room.
The 1 to 100 machines ratio is only valid for Windows machines and 1 to 20 for Windows Server w/ Microsoft platforms like Exchange, MSSQL. I personally manage 60 Linux and Mac machines, 10 Windows machines and 10 Linux/Solaris servers. The Windows machines is where I spend most of my time (cleaning up crap others do like inadvertently installing spyware or viruses even though we have antivirus, even with Windows 7 certain software requires Admin privileges) and the rest of the day I can play video games. Beyond updates and permission updates I don't need to touch the Linux servers or workstations. Mac machines are a bit more involved in updates because they don't have a central software repository and because people can muck up their preferences. The Solaris systems literally have several hundred days of uptime and require hardly an update.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
HA! Well done. Shouldn't it be Vuuuuusch though?
If Windows is so easy to configure then why is it misconfigured so horribly?
Because most IT people are cowboy admins. The idea of seeking out and reading Best Practices documentation is completely beyond them.
I rather suspect Linux is easier to manage, if you know what you're doing. I certainly believe Linux is easier to fix when it's broken. And there's the whole not-beholden-to-any-one-company thing, which is a big selling point for me. But the fact remains, the number of IT people who just don't get it is high.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Does Microsoft still not ship their OS with an ssh client out of the box?
They do not ship an SSH client. However, they have shipped with Remote Desktop since XP. SSH isn't much use for Microsoft's GUI-centric world. Now, you can argue about the advantages of the command line, and I'd agree with you, but Microsoft doesn't agree, and they do provide an equivalent for their mindset. So that's not a terribly good example.
(A better complaint is why they introduced this WinRM crap. *That's* RSH/SSH all over again, just NIH. Idiots.)
Windows does have a rather large set of tools for administration automation, even remote admin automation, but it suffers from (1) being poorly documented, (2) being as confusing as the Unix toolset, complete with convoluted syntax and arcane command names, and (3) Microsoft keeps changing the damn thing.
So I agree with your conclusions, but your supporting evidence is a bit iffy.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What about the server side? That's where most of your licensing costs are. Does anyone know their plans or current setup there? Are they using Exchange, Sharepoint, Terminal Services/Citrix, etc? If they're using any Windows technologies on the server side, are there any migration plans?
I guess it depends on what you count as admins. I figure at my company we have an admin ratio of about 300-500:1 for Linux desktop workstations and laptops. But do you count the helpdesk people who answer any question for any OS including email, and mobile phone access to corp resources? What about the user storage admins? They make the NFS/CIFS and backups work.
I guess I don't know how that compares to the number of windows and MacOS admins we have, or the number of deployed machines.
As a city you should not think in business and macro-economic terms, you have to look on it from a macro-economic viewpoint.
Should the first "macro-economic" be "micro-economic"?
I consider all of IT as a group which helps end-users. If an IT group can't manage a 100:1 ratio then you're either extremely bad or you got extremely incompetent end-users.
I do include in my figure (me) doing all the servers (e-mail, web, database, ...), managing web content, creating disk images, managing 2 SANs doing about 100TB of storage and backups and most of my machines being shared among 250 users (it's a research lab), I receive all the phone calls for everything from 'install this program' and 'my x doesn't work' to 'I have this new gadget, help me' and 'so I have this idea to transfer data to another site, how do I do that'.
The only thing that's really outsourced for us is our Internet connection, web design and the actual construction of the network (running the wires and drilling holes in the walls).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I reject this blatant lie. Google runs on Linux because it's cost effective, but also because it's more secure, flexible and performant.
Same with the others - especially the supercomputers. Cost effectiveness is only part of the answer.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i.e run your apps on remote app servers, or group the desktops as app servers so they serve specific groups of apps. They will load faster; the libraries and code are already in RAM, will run faster, the CPU cache hit rate is higher and you can run more copies per server with copy on write RAM management.
For example, you run open office on 200 desktops, you need 200 * 200Mb RAM; 40Gb. You run 200 instances of open office on a central server, you need 200Mb + 20Mb*200 instances; 4.2Gb.
It's just a matter of utilisation. With a job scheduler (aka grid), you can get up to the high 80% easily. Without, your utilisation will average single digit %.
Deleted
100 to 1 if you run Linux the EXACT same way you run Windows.
If you PXE boot a custom distro and run ALL software on a few DNS Round robin X servers you can get ALL your desktop computers managed by ONE dude. So that is one spart guy for 10,000 to 1. match that Microsoft, no matter how much software you buy it will still take more than one guy to do that.
Not to mention the coward was talking about multi-billion dollar corps. Corps that size having to hire an army of coders to write custom apps, or paying a couple of hundred guys to convert files? Wouldn't even make line 23 of the budget proposal. When you are talking THAT level of business frankly short terms costs are rarely considered which is the exact opposite of most businesses or even small governments.
As we have seen several times on /. those that simply looked at Linux as "free as in beer" and didn't figure in migration costs ended up running back to Windows because the initial switch will cost you MORE than simply staying with what you have. This is simply common sense, a major arch or OS switch will always be more expensive than sticking with what you have, especially when MSFT sells site licenses. You have all those gotchas that nobody has figured in, like incompatible hardware, data conversion costs, having to have written a FOSS version of some proprietary app that simply won't run in Wine or paying the Wine guys to add support, etc.
Change is ALWAYS more expensive that staying where you are, which is why as you say you costs is only a small part and as I say you should change for the RIGHT reasons and not simply the bottom line.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
[citation needed]
Here you go: http://www.rfgonline.com/subsforum/LinuxTCO.pdf
What Google uses might have used Linux as the starting point but what they actually use now is something entirely different. From their standpoint Linux was the most cost effective starting point on which to build their technology on. To them Linux was just a basically free and stable OS code base to start with. We are talking about a company that have their own proprietary processors designed and manufactured for their exclusive use. They never release any of their proprietary changes back to the community. Just like you will not see Big Table source code released either. You will never see any details regarding thier web server architectures. Their technology gives them an edge and they are not about to release anything that might benefit any of their competitors. Describing Google as an Open Source friendly company is ridiculous in the extreme. Other companies using Linux also tend to keep their changes to themselves instead of releasing the source code. Only after the changes become basically obsolete do you see these companies throw the open source community a bone.
Per my subject-line above -> http://news.softpedia.com/news/10-000-Windows-7-Seats-in-a-Single-Migration-136403.shtml
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"On March 2nd, 2010, the software giant revealed that the Shop Direct Group, a U.K. retailer, had upgraded over 10,000 computers to Windows 7."
APK
P.S.=> You MAY also be interested in this, per what you stated (as to people being able to use a system productively), because in the link below? Well:
I listed 33 MAJOR COMPANIES &/or GOVERNMENTS using Windows in "enterprise class" capacities & they're VERY "productive" (to say the least) here -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2579758&cid=38419228
... apk
1. You didn't even suggest, hardly demonstrate,that Linux techs get 450k more than windows techs, and
2. The 450k does not go out of the country to Microsoft Bill. That 450k goes to people who are employed in Munich, who pay taxes in Munich, and patronize businesses in Munich.
How is this related to my post?
Several of those companies are nowhere near "very productive". They just can't get things done, and when they purport to have something done, it's so often done wrong. To be honest, these companies would likely be just as UNPRODUCTIVE and INCOMPETENT even if they were using Linux. In these cases it isn't about the OS at all. What should be of grave concern, however, is the metrics of performance involved. If it comes out with all these companies being "very" productive, then the measurement itself is seriously flawed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Imagine you want to check how many people in your intranet have a particular application installed. You do
A) Write a shell script which determines that
B) Write a shell script which will call the script of A) on the 765 computers of your intranet using SSH
Any other admin task (and not just the things Microsoft can think of in Active Directory) can be automated this way. A single admin can do quite complex operations this way on a large number of computers in very little time (couple of hours). If that activity is not part of a pre-thought task in AD (or the other colorful GUI tools of MS and partners), the admin has to log into 765 (or more) computers via Remote Desktop (or similar tools like Teamviewer) to perform the same task 765 times. Two weeks later the windows admin will be done. You get the idea ? That's a major reason why Google and Facebook are using Linux in their backends and it is a major reason why Linux intranets can be much cheaper to operate, IF you have skilled admins on your team. Microsoft appears to acknowledge the power of the command line with their new server products, by the way. So even MS concedes the GUI is a bad idea when it comes to administration.
I guess ignorance is bliss, probably why you posted as an AC. the above has always been easy even with Microsoft products. It has been made many times easier over the past 7 or 8 years through the adoption of powershell, but even before that it was a relatively simple task to achieve through scripts. Only a moron would think you have to logon to 765 computers to find out that information. So that task I could do in about 5 mins on windows, back before powershell it might have taken me 15 mins - hour to figure out the scripting for it, but was still an easy task.
Google runs on Linux b'cos when they started, Linux was already mature enough to host what they needed. There was no migration of apps from Windows, the way there is w/ all these government agencies in Europe. So starting w/ a clean slate, it was relatively easy to make the choice.
Incidentally, does Google use a Debian or RedHat or other based distro for its servers (I'm not asking about Android, which I know is Gentoo based)? Did they ever do an analysis of that vs any of the BSDs?
Thanks! That reflects our experience. Our system is java based and most of the machines are linux. I write the software and manager the linux boxes. For the few Windows boxes we have we have another admin who manages those. Essentially the time needed to manage 10 Windows PCs is significantly higher than the time needed to manage 100+ linux boxes.
Compared to windows techs, linux techs get more money
Not sure where that came from but Windows techs need more schooling to keep up with the MS products required to do their job. The Linux admin can usually deal with most network and admin issues due to the more straightforward approach Linux has. I believe freebsd is even easier to maintain than linux.
"Terminal Velocity" is a great concept - you don't need to reach such great heights to achieve the full effect.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
See, you're completely ignoring the point of my question to crow about how good you are at supporting 250 users all by your lonesome.
At a 10,000 employee company you don't have a single support person. Do you count the internal portal developer's time spent debugging a firefox on linux issue with a vendor provided app? Do you count them as well spending time fixing IE on windows? Or is that just part of the job of supporting the vendor provided app. When your're talking about accounting "desktop support" in a large network there are many non-obvious or partial admin tasks.
Even in your tiny research lab I'm sure there are a dozen people who are self sufficient in some way and possibly even help other people in their group. Do you count them?