Technet Virtualisation Event
Today I was at Microsoft Reading attending a Technet Event about virtualisation. I wasn’t convincied that it would be benifitial for the company as we don’t really use virtualisation, but I was curious and I like to learn from other people when possible. Again, being a one man show I am fairly isolated and I find I can learn so much more, much more quickly from other people than I can trawling through books and web pages.
As it turns out I was right. To get hold of the technologies offered by MS I would need to spend a considerable amount of my non existant IT budget on desktop licences with software assurance (no seriously, I don’t have a budget. I have to build a business case for anything more than a replacement desktop, and even then most ‘non essential’ purchases are left for ‘later consideration’).
Buying new licences to replace our perfectly good OEM licences isn’t something I can justify. I inherited the practice of purchasing cheap and cheerful Fujitsu Siemens business PC’s with bundled OEM OS licences. I can’t fault it as it is very cost effective and the PC’s are fairly reliable.
Some of the things we are mssing out include application virtualisation (which is very cool and would save a lot of messing around when reinstalling desktop apps) and an add on for Active Directory that allows you to apply AD changes ‘off-line’ to see if they work as expected and to roll back any undesireable changes. Something that you can’t currently do with AD. I’ve long thought that AD is a bit basic. Not in what it can do, because the policys are updated with each new release and you can do pretty much most things you would want to, but in the way the AD is administered. Its just a bit basic. It probably doesn’t help that our main server is still running Server 2000 (2003 is much nicer). But the add on I saw today allows you to do proper change control over AD modifications. Even to the extent of having changes made by minor admins, approved by the main administrator before they are applied to the AD for real.
When I asked (with genuine surprise I might add) why it was an add on, I was told it was a commercial decision. Perhaps the commercial guys at Microsoft should be made to serve as system admins with older, standard versions of windows before they are allowed to dictate what essential features are released as add ons to those lucky enough to have software assurance with OS products…