Robert Pogson

When I was a kid we used to play a game which I have forgotten but one had to ask politely to make your play. I am reminded of this ancient game from an article published recently in Eweek.

Of course, M$ wants to suppress any technology that would lessen the number of fat clients running that other OS. What strikes me as outrageously funny are the lame arguments made:

• “company officials said Microsoft VDI might be suitable for implementations of up to 100 seats, but no more. Microsoft does partner with Citrix Systems for large-scale implementations that also include VDI.“
• “One of the key messages from the workshop: Virtual desktop infrastructure is an expensive proposition unsuited to large implementations.”

That’s like Canute commanding the sea to roll back. HAHAHAHA! <gasp> At least Canute used the commandment as a lesson. M$ thinks people will take its advice seriously.

From experience, we know:

• even for one seat virtualization can be useful by keeping heat and noise and bulk out of the workplace, and
• virtualization is an excellent way to keep a server working hard, earning its cost, and
• virtualization scales very well for desktops because humans are rather slow peripherals, and few of us number-crunch. If we do, it is likely to be on a server or cluster somewhere anyway. Servers are better number-crunchers because they can have more power/RAM/CPU/storage.

An extreme example of scaling well is the GNU/Linux terminal server, even an old 32-bit server can run 30 users typing and clicking. A modern 64-bit job with many processors and multiple gigabit/s links can run a lot of users. In fact, if you match the size of the server to the number of users well, the cost of the server per user can be of the order of $25 dollars. That is scaling.

A couple of years ago, I had some dual-core terminal servers. Whether I had 20 or 40 users running on them they rarely got above 20% CPU usage and were never stressed. The terminal servers cost us about $1200 for hardware and ran Ubuntu so we paid about $40 per seat on the server. With today’s prices, $25 per seat is easily reached. We rarely had enough simultaneous users to try 60 users per server but it probably would have worked. Now we can have servers with 8 quad-core sockets and many gigabit/s links. Servers or clusters of servers for every conceivable workload exist. With shared memory, any ‘NIX can do a fine job of this, but M$ without shared memory tops out quickly.

It is interesting to hear M$ promoting GNU/Linux. Way to go, guys.