The Cost of Being a M$ Shop at Robert Pogson

The Cost of Being a M$ Shop

Published by Robert Pogson August 29th, 2010 in technology. 1 Comment

M$ is flaunting news of a customer migrating from VMware to Hyper-V virtualization on the server. The subject customer is a M$ shop and sees the major reason to switch being cost… If they were not a M$ shop but working for themselves they would see that KVM or VirtualBox would save them more money by far.

M$ charges only about $20 for Hyper-V as long as you pay them $1000+ for 2008 and the damned CALs.

VirtualBox and KVM cost $0 for the server licence and the hypervisor included. Users of GNU/Linux also save a bundle on re-re-reboots that are killing some in large deployments of that other OS.

- Robert Pogson

1 Response to “The Cost of Being a M$ Shop”

Feed for this Entry

1 Richard Chapman Aug 29th, 2010 at 1:26 pm

I recently contacted a Virtual Academy in my area. These are the specifications of the machines that will be, presumably, loaned to students for use at home:

Speed: 1.8 GHz or better
RAM: 2GB (minimum)
Disk space: 80 GB or more
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Monitor: 15-inch flat panel
Audio: 16-bit sound card
Modem: 56 kbps (minimum)
Microphone and speakers
Operating system: Windows XP SP2 including MS Office 2003
Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 7.0
Adobe® Reader®
Macromedia Flash™
Shockwave™
QuickTime®
McAfee® Virus Protection
Real Player®

Anyone with knowledge and a functioning prefrontal cortex would cringe at the time and effort required to keep these machines working. Not to mention the potential exposure to all the nasties on the Web while using school property. I suspect some proprietary learning software is at the heart of this. That and the inability to look beyond the multicolored flag logo.

Archives by Month

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.