Anyone have any dealings with this yet on server or client side?

I am considering moving our offices over to this to simplify backups and licensing tasks but don't have anyone real world to bounce questions off of...

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

<- IBM Architect. I have to constantly fight the virtualization battles with regards to Sharepoint deployments damn near everyday (don't even get me started on virtualized clusters). I can very likely answer your questions. Hit me up in PM and I'll give you my IM infoz, or you can just call or something cause typing is stupid.

I have a number of virtualized Server 2003 servers (using VMWare).

The main issue I've heard about is with virtualized DCs- and that's more of a performance issue rather than a stopgap.

Any server instance that's considered "critical network infrastructure" shouldn't be virtualized. (Domain controllers/DNS, etc) imo.

My company has debated making our product a virtual machine infrastructure, but we depend too much on bonded network interfaces for that to be realistic.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Well, My users currently open up a terminal services connection that I have set up to automatically launch our main app. e-mail, office apps and the like are located on their machines locally. This localization becomes a an issue when drives or machines die. They lose all their settings, emails etc...

I would be running a local DNS/DC/print server, so that shouldn't be an issue.

From what I have read the user would come to a log in prompt at the same place they would normally log into their workstation and the V-Server would give them a desktop from which they would launch applications.

Is this the way it goes?

If so, does the user notice a pronounced delay when running apps like in a TS environment or is it faster?

Can you assign user specific or departmental drives easily through a login script or do you have to go to each machine and map drives?

How responsive are the apps when a lot of users are logged on (assume fairly robust box with Dual QC Xeon 55XX and 64GB RAM with External SAS storage system.)

Can you multi-home a Virtual Server vs Multiple GB Connections bridged?

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Define "a lot of users".

NT

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

50-75 profiles, but usually around 35-40 logged in at once.

Is there any kind of trial on VMWare or a way to get it for an evaluation. I don't want to spend thousands on something that wont fly with our management app, that would cut into my bonus!

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

vmware server is free.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

It almost sounds like you'd rather run Citrix.

I'd agree. You're better off with Citrix for what you're describing here. It's also far more cost effective than a XenApp type solution, which is prohibitively expensive for small business.

<-- VCP
We have a very large vmware ESX environment, we have over 500 guests running, we run everything from SQL, DNS, DHCP, Citrix, Share point, etc and all flavors of OS's Linux, Novell, Windows (you name the version).

We have had no performance issues with the new versions of ESX prior to 3.5 there were issues with Java, Citrix and high disk utilization.

I have also implemented ESXi (free version) at another clients site and with the exception of there backup server they are 100% vmware running.

Windows Hyper-V is not at the level that vmware ESX is yet, but what it sounds like to me your looking for is xenApp as well.

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

ESXi makes my face hurt.

I don't really like it either, I am a command line junkie, there are so many things that work easyer at the command line.

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

well, you can always f-out of it and do "unsupported" for command line access. It's still just a terrible product. I do like ESX however.

yep

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.