Citrix and VMware have BYOC

I have written before about employee provisined laptops. Well today two articles popped up about Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) programs at VMware and Citrix.

Our "corporate" image is simply a VM that you download off the corporate network and run on your laptop.

It saddens me to report that my employer has been unable to support my desire for an alternate laptop. All sorts of details about FBT and other things that are not really my concern, oh well, welcome to working for a big corporate. Of course, we can't sweat the little things.

There would probably be no problem if I payed for my own device. So I suppose we are more like VMware, although we can't download the SOE as a VM. Nothing a quick P2V would not fix. I like the Citrix plan where there is a budget for you and the conditions of having a support contract and anti-virus are more than reasonable.

I won't give up though. You never know, one day I may have enough money to achieve such things.

Believe it or not

Well this one could not escape my comment.

Check out the story over at IT News about a company choosing Hyper-V versus VMware.

The privately-owned industrial and commercial developer engaged Thomas Duryea Consulting to perform an analysis of the suitability of its environment for virtualisation using VMware technology.

The analysis involved monitoring PacLib’s servers for a month, according to IT manager David Furey.

“They came back with a proposal of about $25,000 in installation costs and another $25,000 in software costs,” Furey told iTnews.

“You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.”

Furey decided instead to look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V, then in beta.

“To us, it looked like we weren’t losing any performance or benefits of virtualisation but we were saving a lot of money,” Furey explained.

“It just didn’t make financial sense to spend all that money [on vmware], when if we want to add more Hyper-Vs, it’s $49 per server.”

Wow, they actually put that in writing. Now I have always considered the guys at Thomas Duryea worthy competiion. The people I know personally there are great people, even if we were/are competitors. It just makes me laugh that they have been named in this farse of a idea to go Hyper-V instead of VMware. If they went with VMware 3i it would be free and give them he same funtionality, well probably better.

Still don't think it will be the first fluff piece we see on the topic. I am sure there is more to the story and its just a good piece of news.

Toys for the next mainstream

Well I have completed the first week of my new job. Looks like there is some really interesting stuff to work on which is great.

Took delivery of some nice networking hardware this week for use at a show. Its a Cisco Nexus 5000 with some sweet Converged Network Adapter (CNA) cards.

What makes this so cool for a VMware geek is that you are looking at where the industry will be in 12 to 18 months time. Currently the networking fabrics in a virtual environment could do with some improvement. We can work with what we have but the VMware admins should not really be the network admin. The network admins don't like the VMware hosts because they all just look like trunk ports to switches, all their usual tools for configuration, monitoring, security and trouble shooting just don't work. An the data center or server admins love the fact that they can save power and space in their data center through consolidation yet they are getting bigger hosts with lots of IO addaptors to support different fabrics.

What is going to make all this look different over the coming year. With the Distribute Virtual Switch (DVS) in VMware 4 combined with Nexus hardware in the data center (such as this Nexus 5000) hooked into Nexus 1000V virtual switch in VMware all running over some nice 10G unified fabric ports we are going to see serious realigment in the big end of town.

Exciting times. Lets hope with the crash of all the financial markets people will have enough money to purchase all of this sweet gear!

Is vCloud the answer to "Does IT Matter"

Whilst I was in the USA for VMworld I purchased all of the books I had added to my Amazon wish list. Shipping costs to Australia are not cheap, compared to within the states anyways.

One of the books I had on the list was "Does IT Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr. It is an interesting book which works through the idea of how much actual competitive advantage IT investment brings to a company.

One of the observations in the book was very relevant to what I was seeing in the VMware vCloud announcement.

What's required for grid computing to take hold on a broader scale is a new layer of software for coordinating all the connected pieces of hardware and a simple interface that hides the network's complexities from users, just as the original Macintosh's graphical interface hid the cumbersome workings of the PC. Many of the major IT vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, are working feverishly to construct the required software, hoping they'll be able to spur the spread of grid computing and ultimately profit from it. Should they succeed, the perfection of the grid would mark the final step in the commoditization of computer hardware, rendering all equipment indistinguishable to users. The physical IT infrastructure would be complete-and largely invisible. (Page 41)

This requirement for the wide spread adoption of grid computing that Carr puts forward certainly aligns with the pitch that VMware is making in regards to VDS-OS. Given what they have already done with data center virtualization its likely that may be able to pull it off. Considering the book was written in 2004 we have come a long way in a few years.

Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs

Well as I am about to start a new job the whole concept of Employee-Provisioned hardware programs is top of mind for me at the moment. Do I want to be shackled by a corporate SOE that's years behind? I am a knowledge worker. Therefore I am attempting to start with a Mac. Thankfully the company I am starting with is open to this.

So an article "Is it time for Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs" over at CIO got me thinking about this and virtualisation.

According to an article Gartner estimate 10 percent of companies have a bring your own notebook program and it can reduce costs by 9 to 44 percent. Yet it has not proved as successful as people might have thought, due to support and compatibility issues.

However I think one comment in the article hits it right.

There are tools for PC virtualization that will allow companies to reach out to noncompany-owned devices with full security. That market is still maturing.

The whole reason why I am confident that I can bring my own device to my organisation without it becoming a time sink for me is virtualisation. As I have been using VMware VDI for my desktop since October 07 for all local and remote business work, I just need access to a network and my VDM broker.

I am planning on getting a MacBook. Running Fusion I will be able to have the best of both worlds. I can run the corporate SOE and the IT department can maintain it. I can launch individual apps like Outlook from the SOE VM and even better with reverse association when I click on a URL in Outlook it opens my Mac browser and not IE in the VM. Could you ask for more than that? Well off-line VDI which VMware have coming real soon means that when I am flying I will be able to take my SOE and do corporate work (although this working with Fusion may be a while away).

So I say the tools are here. I will let you know how I go.