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The reason that you would see increased reliability (if any at all) is not because you're running Windows on Linux via VMWare. It's because you'd be creating a consistent platform. Ie, you only have to manage and protect one platform (image, whatever...you get it) from virii, etc etc. Since you're already a MS centric shop, (get ready for blasphemy) I'd recommend creating a Terminal Server with Windows Server 2000 or 2003. By doing this, you get the following benefits:
1. No matter what OS people are running, they can always RDP into this one machine and access the software that they need.
2. I've gotten really REALLY poor performance through VMWare player and server on decent (non-server class) hardware. I see doing something of that sort being more of a headache than it's worth.
3. You can use local group policies on the on Terminal Server to better protect it from users, malware, etc etc.
I wouldn't recommend using Ubuntu to run VMs unless you plan on eventually migrating your servers (and probably clients since you mentioned MS Office) to a Linux based solution. Ubuntu + VMWare player/server, in my opinion, is not a good long term solution. Too much overhead, not enough performance.
On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Greg Helledy < gregsonh@gra-inc.com> wrote:
I work in a small (15 employees) firm that's dependent on MS
Windows/Office. We do not have a full-time IT person--the guy who does
our PC support is a programmer and has his own work to do. We are on XP
and don't use domains.
Recently we've had a lot of windows-related issues, some related to
viruses and some not. This has caused the programmer a lot of stress
and the company some inconvenience.
I have played around with VMware player a tiny bit (I have a Debian Etch
image here on my work PC) and it occurred to me that if we could run MS
Office on XP in a VMware image, with a linux host OS we might be able to
increase reliability. I would probably pick the LTS Kubuntu
distribution for ease of support.
My questions are:
*Would we be able to get away with the free VMware player if the VMware
tools are installed?
*Can things be configured in such a way that sharing files between
computers works as it does now, so that the controller and payroll
person can pass excel files back and forth?
*Are there any other things that are going to be significant obstacles
to office work that I'm not thinking of?
Thanks,
Greg
--------------------------
* From: JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>
My very small scale solution to all of this is to run W2KPro in VMware
server under Ubuntu. This works great since I get awesome and complete
cross-platform remote control (VMware fat console), hardware
independence for the picky Windows side (it's a VM), Linux power and
stability for the base platform (Ubuntu LTS), Windows "bare metal
restore" backups (i.e., copy the VM dir!:), and Windows "upgrade"
back-out protection (a VM snapshot). I can't stress enough how happy I
am with this solution, but I only use it for a very small number of
nodes thus far (4) and I doubt it's scalable though I really haven't
given that much thought.
[...]
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:40:53 -0500
> The need to do too many frequent upgrades has been one of my biggest
> beefs with desktop Linux in commercial environments. Even with Ubuntu
> - you really need to upgrade every 6 months, ...
That's what Ubuntu LTS releases are for. While 3 years is a bit less
than the recent MS major release cycle <snicker>, it seems pretty good
to me.
My $0.02,
JP
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