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Wednesday 11 April 2007, 12:31 PM
The KISS-off for virtualisation
Roberto Maietta has posted an interesting Talkback outlining what he sees as the pitfalls of virtualisation .
"I look at this in terms of security updates, in fact any kind of updates, and it makes me shudder," he writes. "If you had a citrix farm with 10 servers for 500 clients, who were running a wise terminal, then you only have to patch a small number of devices. This is the benefit of a centralised computing model.
"On the other hand, when you introduce virtual computing, every business department wants to have a host for every application, and you typically end up with a huge number of devices that need to be patched."
But member Arthur B. counters that a Citrix setup, like virtualisation, goes against the guiding principle of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). With workers bringing in PDAs, laptops, etc., it's rare to find such a setup that links to dumb terminals only.
It looks like IT managers are still working out if there are real-world benefits to virtualisation, and another case where mobile working could call for creative thinking.
PreviousComments on this post
Wyse embeds operating systems into each of their thin clients so that when they need to be patched, each of the units has to be "managed".
Symbio Technologies provides stateless thin clients that do not contain operating systems, non-volatile memory, or network addresses. As all software is centralized onto a server (server farm), the operating system that needs patching is patched just once on the server. Every user will enjoy the patch. The thin clients never need to be "managed".
Wyse embeds operating systems into each of their thin clients so that when they need to be patched, each of the units has to be "managed".
Symbio Technologies provides stateless thin clients that do not contain operating systems, non-volatile memory, or network addresses. As all software is centralized onto a server (server farm), the operating system that needs patching is patched just once on the server. Every user will enjoy the patch. The thin clients never need to be "managed".
