Archives for October 2008

Is The Future VDI + Employee Owned Laptops?

October 8, 2008 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I was casually talking with one of my enterprise clients about VDI. This client has a few VDI enabled desktops in their enterprise primarily for users who demand high powered systems for computationally intense work (it was cheaper for the company to invest in a small VDI infrastructure with powerful servers for these users than buying true high end desktops…especially since this customer makes the powerful servers themselves). My client mentioned how maybe he’ll just buy a MacBook Pro himself (a laptop he hasn’t been able to convince his employer to buy for him) and run his desktop as another VDI instance.

This is where I shot the conversation off on a tangent to talk about a friend of mine who was interviewing at a startup that expected him to buy his own laptop. The surprising thing about the startup was that they just expected him to already own a laptop that he would be willing to use for work purposes. I commented on how the future may be allowing employees to use what ever laptop they want for the work computer and the employer will just provide everyone a VDI desktop for use as their “corporate desktop”. This definitely eases the administration, security, and hardware refresh burden for the company. One would just expect some sort of stipend for the employee to go toward a personal laptop computer. (I’m purposely leaving the hardware support issue out of the conversation, but with Apple Stores proliferating this could be the outsourced hardware support for my MacBook craving client.)

So I was surprise this week when I received my latest copy of CIO magazine and found an article asking Is It Time For Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs? Some analysts are saying that this is the next logical step in consumerization of IT, especially when you see how many non-approved smart phones, or laptops are already finding their way into corporate workplace (I’ve done this myself with my previous employeer…but that’s another story). Why fight the trend? With VDI, IT Executives can make their end users happy by letting them use whatever hardware they like, install any applications they want on the hardware (they own it, and there is only one application on the hardware that IT cares about…the VDI client). They can make their finance people happy by reducing the endless cycle of desktop hardware refreshes by using VDI to run the desktops on server hardware and use VDI to scale user’s CPU and Memory “power” as needed by the users business workload. They can also keep the security people happy by providing a locked down environment that lives in the data center.

I can see this being a total desktop solution that more and more companies will start implementing in the near future.

Let’s just hope that the hardware stipends are reasonable…

Best Analysis Yet of Financial Crisis

October 4, 2008 Leave a Comment

This morning I was listening to This American Life which aired one of the best layman’s analysis’ I have heard yet of the current financial crisis. Back in May I mentioned their Global Pools of Money and Sub-Prime Crisis show. Today’s show, Another Frightening Show About the Economy, was a continuation of that program but focusing on the current Financial Crisis and the Bailout Package.

Every person in America needs to list to today’s show! (the link seems to be getting a lot of traffic, so be patient…it’s worth it.)

The net-net that I took away from the show was that we are where we are today because of too much borrowing and greed of exotic financial creations that didn’t create any real value but were just gambling. This show talks about the credit market for businesses and how it’s freezing up over the past two weeks has raised awareness of this crisis. Those credit markets are linked to the large financial institutions that we all know by heart now. And how these financial institutions (and others that we may not have heard of, yet) were writing Credit Default Swaps (CDOs) to show greater profit on paper without any knowledge of what other CDOs where out there. Essentially creating a financial house of cards all based on bets.

Now this financial bail out package that the government has been debating over is the government spending our money to fix a problem that they helped create. The issue is that the bailout package that we have all been hearing about is the US Tax Payer giving these financial institutions money to buy their worthless debt that has created the freezing of the credit markets (we are left holding the bill with the greatest risk of never seeing any of our (borrowed) money again). This is the same package that most economists in the country publicly got together to say was a bad idea. What I found surprising from the show is that apparently there was some subtle language added at the last minute by someone that gives the option of not just buying the debt but of making the US Taxpayer stock holders in the companies that we take the the debt over from with front priority of getting our money back. Just because this option exists, doesn’t mean that it will be exercised; but I am much more hopeful that someone somewhere is pulling the right strings behind the scenes and that Tax Payer might not get as screwed in all this when the look back at this 1, 3, or 10 years from now. (and the last 7 years will be talked about for the next 70…)

Personally, I believe that we are in for more rocky times ahead and that things will get worse before they better. That being said, now more than ever each person needs to education themselves on the financial markets that shape their everyday lives (even more so considering the elections coming up). On that token, I regularly browse the Planet Money blog on NPR and Investor Insights blog. I also read John Mauldin’s Outside The Box financial newsletter (goes into some hairy details, but also good for just picking up the hot topics).

Educate yourself on how this stuff works so that you can call shenanigans on the rhetoric that is getting tossed out there on both sides.

Building a Low Cost ESX Server

October 2, 2008 Leave a Comment

About a month ago I had a friend contact me asking about some issues he had while buidling a low cost ESX server for his home lab. He was having difficulty with regards to one small piece of hardware, and he didn’t know about the hardware compatibility list for ESX. While it’s a bit late for my friend Dave, here is some great instructions on how to build a $500 ESX Server. Also check out the VM Help site for an unofficial whitebox HCL list; this is not hardware offially supported by VMware but apparently tested by the internet VMware community…your milage may vary.